Punjabi poet Lal Singh Dil's 'Sutlej di Hawa' in translation: A Breeze from Sutlej

                                                                Photo by Amarjit Chandan

A POEM BY LAL SINGH DIL

The poem posted here is a translation (at present a tentative one) of Lal Singh Dil’s  Sutlej di Hawa, the first poem in his first collection of poetry published in 1971under the same name, and written in the first flush of the Naxalite movement in Punjab. The movement was a failure, but the issues raised by the movement remained unresolved, and now the Naxalite movement in its new avatar has come back to haunt the Indian state and people with far greater force.

This poem, a trifle sentimental, is a delicate mix  of  the revolutionary urge and a feeling for the Lahore martyrs, Bhagat Singh and his associates, Rajguru and Sukhdev; and of sadness and romance intertwined with a revolutionary hope that reminds one of Faiz (though without his marvelous sophistication and classic control).  

I don’t know how the erstwhile Naxalites who were part of the movement in Punjab would now react to the poem about a movement that failed to sustain itself and left its scars. But it still sounds an authentic youthful voice full of a hope resting on wobbly foundations, which is often the case with movements in which the young in every generation invest their life and blood, tragically.  

It is here for your perusal, comments.

THE BREEZE FROM SUTLEJ

            (Sutlej Di Hawa)

                       I

When I saw you wafting through

The reed-grass fields 

I fell in love  with you

I found you in my breath, and in my arms.

The stink exhaled from the Raj  Bhawans

Could not touch your pure soul

Because you rise from the currents

That enclosed in their wounded heart

The martyrs hanged in Lahore.

Here, each morn

Each night, each day, each evening

Is mournful.

Songs arise here

And  the grazier boys

Riding  upon their cattle’s backs

Wade through the  waters.

I see you lost in sadness

Your wafting currents

Become my sails

Towards islands of hope

I saw you in the trees

In the sadness of the wheat fields

In the fragrance of Kikar trees.

You can see

Right up to Kaveri

Lands being grabbed

The wheat crops being insulted  

The smiling paddy being burnt

You can see

Extending far and wide the Raj Bhawans

That still hold the white man’s noose.

                           II

This sadness of yours won my heart

And I saw you in the shape of a beloved

I came away

Leaving the delicate valley of letters

In your hands.

One day the people fragrant with toil

Came to me

Riding on bullock carts

Those beautiful men

To discuss the complexities of politics

And then

One day when the sun rose

Your colourless smile

Turned  red all over.

You said:

‘Think of me as a flame.’

I shall never lose heart

Even if the darkness thickens.

Your smiles

My words

Have become the light

Of my soul

I remember the day

When you  danced

Upon my shoulders

Even today I feel

As if there’s a gun upon my shoulders

 My eyes are intoxicated and

All the trees appear like warriors

Riding their horses

Their heads camouflaged with leaves

No, I’m not sad

Burma and France are astir

Slogans echo in the enemy camp

The land of India speaks out

Only one voice is heard from the jungles:

Forget love. Come and see

How the enemy goes up in flames.

---

Also see my previous posts for more on Lal Singh Dil.

A poem by Khalil Gibran

Read this very interesting prose poem by Khalil Gibran.
It seems to set up a fascinating contrast between sanity and insanity, conformity and dissent, submission and rebellion, and belonging and alienation. 

"THE PERFECT WORLD" 

                                      From: the Madman 

God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods, hear me: 
Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear me: 
I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect. 
I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst finished worlds -- peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions are enrolled and registered. 
Their virtues, O God, are measured, their sins are weighed, and even the countless things that pass in the dim twilight of neither sin nor virtue are recorded and catalogued. 
Here days and nights are divided into seasons of conduct and governed by rules of blameless accuracy. 
To eat, to drink, to sleep, to cover one's nudity, and then to be weary in due time. 
To work, to play, to sing, to dance, and then to lie still when the clock strikes the hour. 
To think thus, to feel thus much, and then to cease thinking and feeling when a certain star rises above yonder horizon. 
To rob a neighbour with a smile, to bestow gifts with a graceful wave of the hand, to praise prudently, to blame cautiously, to destroy a soul with a word, to burn a body with a breath, and then to wash the hands when the day's work is done. 
To love according to an established order, to entertain one's best self in a pre-conceived manner, to worship the gods becomingly, to intrigue the devils artfully -- and then to forget all as though memory were dead. 
To fancy with a motive, to contemplate with consideration, to be happy sweetly, to suffer nobly -- and then to empty the cup so that tomorrow may fill it again. 
All these things, O God, are conceived with forethought, born with determination, nursed with exactness, governed by rules, directed by reason, and then slain and buried after a prescribed method. And even their silent graves that lie within the human soul are marked and numbered. 
It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God's garden, the master-thought of the universe. 
But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet? 
Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods? 

                                                     ----

Although Khalil Gibran is a world famous poet, the following brief information might be in place.

Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese-American poet, artist and writer.

Gibran was born to a Maronite Catholic family from the historical town of Bshari in northern Lebnon. He migrated to USA in 1895. And as he grew up, he drew and painted and wrote both in Arabic and English.

Much of Gibran's writings deal with Christianity, especially on the topic of spiritual love. But his mysticism is a convergence of several different influences : Christianity, Islam, Sufism, Hinduism and theosophy. He wrote : "You are my brother and I love you. I love you when you prostrate yourself in your mosque, and kneel in your church and pray in your synagogue. You and I are sons of one faith - the Spirit.”

Gibran's best-known work is The Prophet, which is a book of 26 poetic essays written in English originally published in 1923 . It has been translated into over forty different languages and is one of the best-selling books of all time. Over 100 million copies have been sold since its publication.

The prophet in the book is Al-Mustafa, who has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years and is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses issues of life and the human condition. The book is divided into poetic essays dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

Gibran died in 1931 at the age of forty-eight in a New York hospital of cancer of the liver.

Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

The poem above is from his work "the Madman", a collection of parables, which was illustrated by Gibran himself, and revealed the influence of Nietzsche, Jung and Tagore.

                                                   ---

                                                                   

     

    

Lal Singh Dil's 'Dastaan'

Lal Singh Dils’ Dastaan: An Autobiography of Absences  

Chetna Prakashan, Ludhiana, 1998

World literature is full of autobiographical writings that include regular full-fledged autobiographies and genres such as personal diaries,  journals, and memoirs; for many great, famous and successful men - generals, statesmen,  revolutionaries and politicians, diplomats, business and industry tycoons, victims of personal violence, social or political injustice, sportspersons,  showbiz stars, poets, -   have written their  life histories to narrate their struggles and success stories, along with their failures, the role they have played  in shaping certain historical events in the lives of nations or organizations, for  self expression or self glorification or money or whatever other reasons; and those who can’t write  have engaged ghost writers or commissioned biographers to do it for them. How truthful and honest these are depends on each individual, his character and personality, and his motive.

Where does Lal Singh Dil’s  autobiography, ‘Dastaan’, fit in the rough map of the genre I have drawn? Lal Singh Dil (1943-2007) belongs to none of these categories of intellectually and spiritually, educationally, professionally, financially, politically and socially distinguished people. He was a revolutionary and a poet but never became famous, for he is not known much beyond the confines of Punjabi poetry and there too he has suffered neglect; although he is counted among the four foremost Revolutionary  poets in Punjabi and enjoys some status but no real patronage or great readership. He was also  a revolutionary in the Naxalite mould but never in a position of leadership in the movement, and participated only in one or two minor and unsuccessful Naxalite operations; one of them an attack by a handful of Naxalites on a police station, after which he was arrested, tortured and jailed, and after his release he remained on the run from the police. Like a very large number of Punjabi Naxalites and like the three other foremost poets (Avatar Singh Sandhu Pash, Amarjit Chandan and Sant Ram Udasi) thrown up by the Naxalite movement in Punjab, he too became disillusioned with the movement; at least two of them – Amarjit Chandan and Sant Ram Udasi - renouncing the Marxist ideology altogether, the former claiming to have become a ‘non-ideological’ (Vichardharamukt) poet, and the latter adopting the other extreme, of  Khalistani ideology. Pash  remained faithful to the Marxist ideology, but when he was beginning to  reshape his intellectual position his life was cut short by Khalistani terrorists. Lal Singh Dil did the strangest of twists; he converted to Islam without renouncing his Maoist ideology, and put forward a  strange theory that one had to be a Muslim before one could be a Maoist. He died both a Muslim and a Maoist, but was cremated as a Hindu or a Sikh.

He also does not  qualify to be included among the great autobiographers because his life is not marked by any great events or personal achievements, if  for the moment one leaves aside his poetry. If anything, it is a life filled with the most pedestrian and common place occurrences in the life of an almost completely marginalized individual, who, for all his aspirations and dreams, remained largely unemployed, or fitfully employed as a daily wager, manual worker, a cook, a watchman in a mango orchard,   a street vendor  of trinkets,  and  could never through out  his life manage to get a sustained meaningful employment; and could not marry, or even cohabit with a woman because no girl or woman who got interested in him was willing to become his companion, so we get the impression. However, as a poet he published  three  collections of poetry,  in addition to his autobiography.  

So why should Dil have written his life story, and why should we read it? There are no great confessions for him to make, no sinful acts to show for which a man should feel remorse and or harbour a sense of guilt, no acts of exemplary, Bhagat Singh like, courage or bravery or defiance, for which a man should feel proud, no great  and original intellectual formulations or ideas of national or international, military or civilian, political or economic or social interest or importance for which a man could be admired and remembered for. 

And from the purely literary point of view too Dastaan has not much to offer. The prose style is not great, the narrative is lose and meandering, and not very distinguished unless I am a very poor judge of Punjabi prose style. The form is anecdotal,  events are  narrated in short spurts and often remain incomplete,  lacking in any sustained and conclusive treatment. There are no dates to pin point important land marks in Dil’s life.

Yet he wrote his life story, though only after being urged upon by his friends, particularly Amarjit Chandan.  I can find only one justification  for Dil to have written it and for us to read it.

As I can see, Dil’s ‘Dastaan’ deserves to be read even by non-Punjabi readers not for what is present in it but what is absent. To put it differently, it is an autobiography of absences. The very things for which someone writes an autobiography are absent in Dil’s Dastaan, and it is these absences that make his autobiography a remarkable reading  and worth reflecting upon. Lal Singh Dil through out his life harboured one dream, one illusion, that  a Maoist revolution will solve all his problems. 

But who was Lal Singh Dil and what were his problems?

Lal Singh Dil was born in a ‘chamar’ (an ‘outcaste’ community of tanners ) family in Ghungrali Sikhan near Samrala a small town in Punjab, a family without money, without land, without property, without education, without any useful traditional skills of the caste to which it belonged (at least this is not reflected anywhere in the Autobiography), in fact,  without any financial, intellectual and even cultural and spiritual resources that could give Lal Singh a kind of start for upward social or economic mobility. The family was fitted to perform only manual and menial agricultural labour,  and Lal Singh’s father almost through out his life worked as an agricultural labourer on someone’s land. Most probably the family formally subscribed to Sikhism but it is no where mentioned in Dastaan. Nowhere in the book do we read about any member of his family going to a Gurudwara, or following any of the prescribed rituals, code or customs in the Sikh religion.  One  of Dil’s friends  refers to an occasion on which Dil’s  father talks of Guru Nanak  as an ‘incomparable person’; and  in Dastaan Dil’s refers to a letter that his uncle wrote to Shiromani Gurdwara Committee threatening that he along with a hundred Sikhs of his caste would convert to Islam if the discrimination against them was not ended. However, after Dil had converted to Islam there are many references to Islam, Allah, the mosque and namaaz and other aspects of Islam. 

So what is special about Dastaan? A few things. First, through out his life Dil remained an ‘outcaste’. This is how he begins his life story: ‘To keep pushing me into the same fire again and again and yet to keep me unscathed, well it  was no less than a Godly miracle’. What that fire was he illustrates with an example in the next few lines of the  same opening paragraph. While as a small boy of  five or six, out of innocence, he dares to bathe at  a jat farmer’s well. He is immediately  whiplashed thrice, dragged and driven out by the farmer’s son. As   a ‘chamar’ he is not permitted to bathe at the well of an upper caste, in this case a Jat. He is pushed into this fire again and again while at school, at college where he dares to fall in love with an upper caste girl, and even while he becomes a part of the egalitarian Naxalite revolutionary movement and the poetic fraternity; and, of course, by the police who, being mostly upper caste, singled out Dil (and others of lower caste) for ‘special treatment’. Everywhere he is reminded  of his caste. His conversion to Islam later, he says, gave him relief from the heat of this fire, but here too it seems that the  female poet who fell in love with him for his poetry (for so Dil believes) also backs out for reasons Dil does not spell out, or does not want to share with his readers, but they may have something to do with the fact that he was a convert from a low caste, or a mere wage labourer. Finally, by and large neglected though occasionally patronized,  he ended up as a tea vendor  at a bus stop close to his native town, and died  in penury, a sick man and an addict. How far his own temperament and behaviour or ‘flaws’ in his character contributed to this alienation is not recorded, though it is hinted at here and there by some commentators; but never frankly stated or specified by anyone. But I don’t think these so called ‘flaws’ matter at all. But if they matter they do  only to show the petty mindedness of  those who talk of these flaws and make them an excuse for the kind of treatment that was given to Dil by the fellow poets and revolutionaries, leaving aside a few well-wishers.

Another something special about Dil is that a person so completely marginalized, alienated and cast out should have at all pursued the vocation of a poet. His published output is not voluminous – just about 150 short poems, and two long poems – but that he was stung by the bugbear of the Muse is extremely remarkable. If we go  and look out  for a poet who economically perhaps never rose above the level of a wage labourer, we are unlikely to find many anywhere in the world. His training as a poet has many gaps. Yet his poetry is remarkable because  it brings out the nothingness of the lives of people he was familiar with  and lived with because he was one of them—the landless labourers and daily wagers, and street hawkers and nomads of all varieties (bazigars, sikligars, sansis, bawariyas, sepelas…) moving from place to place like animals foraging for food,  men and women toiling in others’ fields for almost nothing, cooking, washing dirty linen and dishes, sweeping floors, collecting animal dung, performing so many tasks reserved  for the ‘menials’ in the Indian socio-economic context; in fact the most ordinary even among the ordinary, the people about whom no one wants to write because there is nothing ‘worthwhile’ to write about them; the people who are called ‘extras’ in the cinema parlance and are hired for a shot for  a pittance to form the anonymous crowd to foreground some great personage or his heroic act. May be even less than them.  Lal Singh calls many of them the ‘naglok’, as opposed to the upper caste ‘aryans’ who usurped their land and country and everything else.

It is this exclusion from everything that civilization provides to its fortunate children that Lal Singh’s story pre-eminently highlights. It showcases what it means to be treated as the last dregs of a society, to be stigmatised, excluded and disinherited from the sweet fruits of civilisation, and possess almost nothing except what nature provides. But Lal Singh faced all this with great dignity, without cringing, with  his head held high. He remained an outcaste, and a rebel. 

All this makes Dastaan worth reading.

                                                       ---    

            

for more on Lal Singh Dil click on:
DIL

Michael Jackson

Here is a poem I wrote on Michael Jackson a few days after his death.


 MJ: Wacko Jacko

The King of Pop

Child prodigy

Songster-Singer-Dancer

The Pied Piper

America’s Orpheus                                                 

Divine voice

Noble lyrics

Mesmeric dance

A wonder all his own

Idolized by millions

750 million albums sold

13 Grammy Awards

Multiple Guinness Records

Record-breaking charities

Then demonized

A black turned white

Surrogate father

Secret love child

Collapsed marriages

Child abuse

Bizarre personal life

Hyperbaric oxygen chamber

Hypochondriac

Physical and mental wreck

A fantasy figure

Bubble the champ his best friend

Owner of 2600-acre Neverland

Forced to live in oblivion

On the verge of bankruptcy

Preparing for a comeback

Suddenly dead!

Poisoned?

Murdered for money?

A medical mistake ?

Overdose of drugs?

The spirit has flown out

The body in a golden coffin

Draped in a cascade of red roses

A plastic face

Prosthetic nose, missing

A stomach
Devoid of food

Saturated with drugs

Painkillers

Sleeping pills

Body punctured with needle marks

Rumours of skin cancer

Ruined lung

Ghost sightings

An image empty of content

Yet

When he came on to the stage

The audience rocked in a trance

Became one with him

There was no MJ

No audience

Nothing but a two-way flow of energy

A seamless chaos

Of frenzy

Of forgetfulness

         --- 

---

M K Gandhi's Relics

On March 6, 2009 five personal articles belonging to Gandhiji were bought by India’s liquor baron V J Mallaya for about 1.8 million dollars at an auction in New York by Antiquorum Auctioneers.

Here is a poem I wrote on that occasion. The poem may interest the readers. 

GANDHI’S RELICS

A brass bowl and a plate

A pocket watch

A pair of leather chappals

A pair of spectacles:

The Father of the Nation’s mementos

The Mahatma’s legacy

The essential Gandhi  -

Being put to auction!

How can they do it?

Commercialize Gandhi

Put him on sale 

His simplicity

His non-violence

His message of peace

His sainthood

His quintessential humanity!

But they did it

In spite of our best efforts

But at least

We did not let anyone else

Usurp his legacy

We bought it

And brought it home

Through a playboy liquor baron
Paying two million dollars

Now through these relics

We shall keep

Bapu’s legacy

Embalmed and entombed in glass
Museumized

To be reverenced

To be looked upon with awe

To be shown to our children

To be preserved for posterity

Against time’s corrosion

---

A War Poem

I wrote this poem  a few years ago when India and Pakistan were once again itching to go  for another war, post Kargil. I hope it will interest the readers. 

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST GOING TO WAR

Honestly, do we need a war

To court a man-made death?

There’re so many ways to die

Without going to war!

No, I’m not talking

Of the classy developed-world inventions:

Heart failures, cancers, air crashes

Though we have these too.

Not of the less fancied but equally deadly ones;

Malaria, Tuberculosis, AIDS …

Though we have these too.

Not even of Nature’s periodic visitations:

Floods, earthquakes, cyclones

Though we have these too.

No. I’m talking

Of our own Swadeshi innovations.

There’s the death by fire:

In which your body will melt like plastic

In a kitchen

In a jhuggi cluster

In a fireworks factory

In a cinema hall

In a marriage pandal.

Then, there’s the death on the road:

Your bus can descend into a gorge

Like a surface-to-surface missile, and explode.

It can hurtle on the highway and ram into another

Head on for maximum impact.

It can mow you down like a three-ton lawn mower

While you’re sleeping, waiting or walking on the pavement.

You can die on the rail:

Your train may derail and nosedive from a bridge

To become a spectacular heap of twisted metal and men.

It may telescope into another

To leave as many wounded and dead

As in the month-long Kargil bloodshed.

You can die by water:

Your rescue boat may capsize midstream.

You can die in high spirits

By drinking hooch.

You can die feasting

On infected food.

You can die in a hospital

Of a fake drug or of sheer neglect.

You can die

In a police station

Of mere interrogation.

And you can die for so many causes:

You can be stabbed or hacked

In the name of your caste.

You can be shot through

In the name of your class.

You can be blown into shreds

In the name of your state.

You can be roasted alive

In the name of your faith.

In short, you can achieve martyrization

In the name of any hallucination.

Oh dear,

When there’re so many ways to die here

And everyday

In peaceful times

Do we really need a war?

Do we really need a holocaust?

---

Lal Singh Dil - A Punjabi Revolutionary Poet

                     Lal Singh Dil  photo by Amarjit Chandan 
                                  
Here are eight poems of Lal Singh Dil (1943-2007) , translated from Punjabi by me.

I am planning to translate  a selection of Lal Singh Dil's poetry  into English. As my basic text, I am using 'Naglok' (2007),  published by Chetna Prakashan Ludhiana, its publication made possible with the efforts of Prem Prakash. It was published sometime before Dil's death on 14 August 2007. 'Naglok' seems a collection of almost all of Dil's  poetry. It certainly contains all the three collections of poetry - Setluj Di Hawa (1971), Bahut Saare Suraj (1982) and Satthar (1997) - published by Lal Singh Dil. 


Comments on the poems and my translations are welcome. I have written a small note on Lal Singh Dil in my earlier  blog post (December 2010) on him which contains  one of the most remarkable poems  Dil wrote: The Women of Kudali Village. I have nothing more to add to that note at the moment.

From SETLUJ DI HAWA (1971)

            (The Breeze from the Setluj)

1. THE UNEMPLOYED 

You have learnt to hide the worn-out edges of your shirt sleeves

And the skill to walk in beggarly shoes

You have trained your tongue to say sweet things

Learnt to smile through eyes hiding corpses under the eyelids …

But your dress and skin are transparent like glass

And I can see your blood coursing through your body

Because we have met so often

In third class compartments

At the tea dhabas and kabaadi shops

I too have gathered together so often

My papers the babu at the employment exchange

Tossed out through the barred window.

          ---

2. NADEEN    

I have fallen in love

With this flower smelling of the earth

With the colour of this trowel

With its handle’s smoothness

That has come through a repeated clasp of the hand:

It is more beautiful than any work of art.

The hand that remained

The trowel’s friend through the rainy season

Looks like a warrior’s brow furrowed with lines.

And this warm and stale smell

Rising from the fading flowers!

I feel like bursting into song

For these fading colours.

Even though the sun has shone for them

The great rains have washed

The winds have kissed their faces

What if the trowel worked against the sun

Insulted the winds

Rebuked the soft heart of the rain!

I may be a wheat stalk

Or this flower that grows between the water channels

I would love the sharp sweep of the trowel.

And all the pain within these flowers,

Expressing which this heartless trowel too

Is crying with these weeping colours.

Don’t let its tears fall to the ground

The girl’s back will break with their weight.

---

3. MY COUNTRY

My country has yet another name

I have yet another kinship

Where ever there is even one hamlet

Half hungry

Half asleep

Wherever drudgery

Counts the stars

To comfort its aching limbs

Away from my country

Wherever it is

It is my own country, my brotherhood.

Whenever I pick up my sitar

To play a tune for this fraternity

Hordes flock towards me from across the seas.

But who’s there to welcome them?

Who are they that shed rivers of blood

Across these boundaries every year?

My country has yet another name

I have yet another kinship.

---

 4.  CIVILIZATION

What are you?

Why have you covered your face?

Why do you walk, so disguised?

Why are you hiding your claws?

But who are you?

Just watch that man

Who day and night

Pulls a heavy chariot

He is wearing Manu’s leaden rings in his ears

His body is striped with

The rulers’ whiplashes -

He will surely recognize you.

Sometimes, when during the nights,

He lets out sighs

As big as the skies

The stars drop their heads.

He says: ‘This earth is my first love.’

And casually adds: ‘It is I

Who have bejewelled the sky with these stars.’

He has travelled through Jesus lands

He has travelled through Gautam lands

Wearing Manu’s leaden rings in his ears.

---

5. THE WORD

The word has been spoken

Much before us

And even after us

You may cut off our tongues

If you can

But the word has been broadcast

---

6. THE  FOOTPRINTS

Can't you see!

Each tree is dancing

The dust on the pathways is breathing

The water from the wells is spilling out

The waves in the canal are agitated

The peasants have come out

And the pathways are stamped

With the fighters' footprints

The moon is no longer on the wane

   ---

From  BAHUT SARE SURAJ (1982)

           (So Many Suns)

7. PUNJAB  

It’s Punjab everywhere

Everywhere

Villages besieged by trees

Dresses camouflaged

Under the bundles of grass

The dirty towel

The unkempt beard

The shirt blackened with sweat and dust

Bare legs

Cracked heels

Whether in Bengal

Or in Kerala

Herdsmen driving their cattle,

Covered in the dust they kick up

Look like Punjabis

On the way

The peepal trees

The date palms

The clouds

It’s Machchiwada on all sides.

---

from    SATTHAR (1997)

            ( A Harvest of Sorrow) ?

8. TEA SHOP

The glasses are out from their cases

Early in the morning

Two and a half dozen glasses

They drive me mad the whole day

‘No sugar…chillis in tea leaves…the milk you use?

You do not know how to run a tea shop.’

Occasionally a lawyer reels out a calculation:

‘You can make one thousand cups of tea from ten kilos of milk.’

This awakens the memories of the pub

And the eyes fill up with inebriation.

‘Adjust this against the rent.’

‘For this I have already paid.’

‘For yesterday, you owed me that much.’

Even then some one pays up

The rich guy’s counterfeit coin

Looks sweet

To an untrusting man like me.

The glasses return to their cases,

Like the pigeons to their pigeon holes

A few of them have been pinched by some for their drink

The pub…the intoxication rises in my eyes again

What is this, friends,

If one can’t earn enough

For a drink?

---