I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems

The grass is starved and thin;

  by the gravel path

  the European seasonal flowers

  have lost their bloom and are withered.

  A west wind blows,

  a foreigner in Chaitra’s yard.

  Reluctantly I wrap myself.

  The water shivers in the pond with the paved surround;

  the leaves of the water-lilies tremble;

  the few red fish grow restless.

  The lemon-grass is rampant

  in the rockery.

  From the leafage peeps a figure,

  four-faced, in ochre stone.

  On the far margin of flowing time it lives,

  indifferent, untouched by seasons.

  Art’s language it speaks,

  which has no likeness to what the trees have to say.

  The care that seeps from earth’s inner rooms

  day and night to all branches and leaves –

  that statue there stands outside the limits

  of that vast kinship.

  A long time ago man immured in it

  his own secret speech

  like a spirit-guarded hoard of buried treasure:

  with nature it cannot communicate.

  The clock strikes seven.

  The scattered clouds have gone.

  The sun climbs above the wall:

  tree-shadows shorten.

  Through the back gate

  a girl enters the garden.

  Tasselled plaits swing on her back;

  in her hand is a slender bamboo stick.

  She’s brought a pair of swans

  and their young ones to feed.

  The swans look grave,

  aware of their responsibilities as a pair.

  Even greater is the responsibility of the girl,

  in whose young mother-mind love’s liquid throbs

  to the demands of living creatures.

  I’ve wished to preserve

  this fragment of a morning.

  So easily it came

  and will so easily leave.

  He who sent it

  has paid for it already

  from his own treasury of joy.

  No. 13

  A Baul busker walking along the street

  came and stopped by your front door.

  He sang, ‘Behold! The unfamiliar bird

  comes flying into the cage!’

  Yes, and seeing it, the silly mind thinks –

  Aha! I’ve caught the uncatchable!

  You were standing at the window

  after your bath,

  your damp hair cascading on your back.

  The uncatchable was on the lids

  of your far-away eyes,

  in the loveliness of your rounded

  bangled wrists.

  You sent him alms.

  He went away.

  You didn’t know

  it was you the song spoke about.

  Like a melody you come and go

  on the ektara’s string.

  That instrument is your manifest form’s cage

  swaying in the breeze of spring.

  I roam, hugging it to my breast;

  I colour it, pattern flowers on it,

  just as I please.

  When it sounds, then I forget its form:

  its string vibrates into invisibility.

  Then does the unfamiliar come out to play in the universe,

  rippling right across the forest’s green,

  merging with the dolonchampa’s fragrance.

  You are the unfamiliar bird

  dwelling in the cage of mating,

  that cage with many embellishments,

  where separation’s ache is eternal in bird-wings,

  in flight’s postponement.

  Bird without address,

  flying love-wards to the horizon’s rim

  where all visibles vanish.

  No. 22

  Right from the beginning he’s been hanging on to me,

  that old chap, that antique of a bloke,

  camouflaging himself by blending with me,

  But today I’m letting him know

  that we’re going to part, we are.

  Along the bloodstreams of millions of forefathers

  he has come, bearing the hunger

  of so many ages, and so much thirst;

  all those pains had churned many days and nights

  in a long, continuous past;

  with all that baggage he decided to colonise

  this vessel of new-born life –

  that ancient, that crafty beggar.

  Ethereal messages come from upper worlds:

  he fouls them up by the din he makes.

  I arrange offerings on a ceremonial platter:

  he reaches out his hand and grabs them himself.

  Desires burn him,

  wither him, day in, day out.

  He smothers me with his decrepitude –

  me, who am ageless.

  Minute by minute he has squeezed pity out of me,

  so that when death-throes grip him,

  I’m really frightened, I am –

  I, who am deathless.

  So I’ve decided to part from him today.

  Let him stay outside the door –

  that old, starving wretch.

  Let him beg and enjoy what scraps he gets.

  Let him sit and patch his tattered wrap.

  Let him live precariously on gleanings

  in that little field, earth-ridge-bound,

  between birth and death.

  I shall sit at my window and watch him,

  that long-distance traveller

  who’s been travelling for so long

  along the road-curves of many bodies and minds,

  across the ferries of such various deaths.

  I shall sit upstairs

  and watch his different crazes,

  the see-saws of his hopes and despairs,

  the chiaroscuro of his mirths and sorrows.

  I shall watch, as people watch a puppet-show;

  I shall laugh to myself.

  I’m free, I’m translucent, I’m independent;

  I’m eternity’s light;

  I’m the flowing joy of creation’s source;

  a total pauper am I;

  I own absolutely nothing that is walled in

  by ego’s pride.

  No. 27

  Under the cascading stream

  I place my little pitcher

  and sit

  all morning,

  sari-end tucked into waist,

  dangling my legs

  on a mossy slippery stone.

  In an instant the pitcher fills

  and after that it just overflows.

  Curling with foam, the water falls, –

  nothing to do, no hurry at all, –

  the flowing water has its holiday play

  in the light of the sun

  and my own play leaps with it

  from my brimming mind.

  The green-forest-enamelled valley’s

  cup of blue sky.

  Bubbling over its mountain-bordered rim,

  falls the murmuring sound.

  In their dawn sleep

  the village girls hear its call.

  The water’s sound

  crosses the violet-tinted forest’s bounds

  and descends to where the tribal people come

  for their market day,

  leaving the tracks of the Terai villages,

  climbing the curves of the winding uphill path,

  with the ting-a-ling-a-ling

  of the bells of their bullocks

  carrying packs of dry twigs on their backs.

  Thus I while away

  the day’s first part.

  Red’s the colour

  of the morning’s young sunshine;

  then it grows white.

  Herons fly over the mountains

  towards the marshes.


  A white kite flies alone

  within the deep blue,

  like a silent meditative verse

  in the far-away mind

  of the peak with its face upturned.

  Around noon

  they send me word from home.

  They are cross with me and say,

  ‘Why are you late?’

  I say nothing in reply.

  Everyone knows

  that to fill a pitcher it doesn’t take long.

  Wasting time which overflows with no work –

  who can explain to them the strange passion for that?

  No. 29

  Just one day among many days

  had somehow got caught

  in a picture, metre,

  or song.

  Time’s envoy had managed to keep it stranded

  outside the path of traffic’s constant current.

  In the image-immersion rituals of the epoch

  many were the things that sped beyond the ghats.

  No one knew when that one day got stuck

  in a dry bend of the river.

  In the Magh forests

  so many mango blossoms budded,

  so many fell down.

  In Phalgun flowered the polash

  and carpeted the ground.

  Between the Chaitra sun and the full-blown mustard-field

  in sky and earth

  it was a contest between bards.

  But no brush of any season

  left its mark

  on that day of mine that got stuck.

  I was once right in the middle of that day.

  The day was recumbent

  amongst so many things,

  all of which crowded round me, before me.

  I saw them all

  without taking it all in.

  I loved,

  but didn’t really know

  how much.

  So much was wasted,

  absent-mindedly left

  undrunk in the juice-cup.

  That day, as I knew it then,

  has changed its looks.

  So much is dishevelled, so much is topsy-turvy;

  details have vanished.

  She who emerges from it all –

  I see her today against the background of distance:

  a new bride of those days.

  Her body was slim

  and her sari-end, peacock-neck-coloured,

  reached her head just above the hair-coil.

  I couldn’t make time

  to tell her everything.

  Much was said at random now and then,

  but they were trivial things.

  And soon the time was up.

  Today her figure has re-appeared,

  quietly stood

  at the fence between shadow and light.

  She seems to want to say something

  and can’t.

  How I long to go back to her side,

  but there’s no way to return.

  No. 31

  I’m letting the neighbourhood club

  have use of my ground-floor room.

  For that, they’ve praised me in the local paper,

  called a meeting, put a garland round my neck.

  For eight years now

  my home’s stood empty.

  Now when I come back from work, I find

  in a portion of that room

  someone reading a newspaper,

  his legs thrust on a table,

  others playing cards,

  others locked in some furious argument.

  The enclosed air

  gets stuffy with tobacco smoke;

  ashtrays pile

  with ash, matchsticks,

  burnt-out cigarette ends.

  With such turbid conversation’s din

  day after day

  in huge quantities

  I fill the emptiness of my evenings.

  Then after ten p.m. a stretch of time

  like a meal’s left-overs piled on dirty plates

  is vacated for me once more.

  The noise of passing tram-cars invades the room

  and at such times I sometimes listen to songs

  on the gramophone –

  the few records I have, the same

  over and over again.

  Today none of them are here.

  They’ve all gone off to Howrah Station

  to give an ovation

  to someone who’s just brought

  hand-clappings from across the seas

  clipped to his own name.

  I’ve turned off the lights.

  What’s called ‘current times’ –

  after many days

  that current time, that herald of everyday

  isn’t in my room this evening.

  Rather, I sense a lingering pain

  clinging to everything

  from a touch that was air-dispersed,

  a faint scent of hair

  that was here eight years ago.

  My ears are alert,

  as if to receive a message.

  The old empty seat

  with its floral cover

  seems to have someone’s news.

  An old muchukunda tree

  from my grandfather’s days

  stands in front of the window

  in the black night’s darkness.

  In the scanty sky that there is

  between this tree

  and the house on the road’s other side

  a star shines brilliantly.

  I stand staring at it

  and it begins to ache inside my chest.

  How many evenings had seen that star reflected

  in the flood-tide waters of our life together!

  Amongst so many things

  one tiny incident makes a special come-back.

  That day I’d been too busy

  to read the paper in the morning.

  In the evening I’d at last sat down with it

  in this very room,

  by this window

  and on this armchair.

  She came ever so quietly behind me

  and quickly snatched the paper from my hands.

  We tried to grab it from each other

  with bursts of loud laughter.

  I recovered my plundered property,

  cheekily once more sat down to read it.

  Suddenly she turned off the light.

  That defeat-acknowledging

  darkness of mine that evening

  envelops me totally today

  even as her victorious arms,

  loaded with silent, teasing, mischievous laughter,

  had encircled me

  in that light-turned-off seclusion.

  Suddenly a wind

  rustles the tree’s branches.

  The window creaks.

  The doorway curtain

  flaps restlessly.

  ‘Love,’ I blurt out,

  ‘From death’s kingdom have you

  come back to your very own home today

  with your brown sari on?’

  A breath brushes my body;

  a strange voice speaks,

  ‘To whom can I return?’

  I ask,

  ‘Can you not see me?’

  I hear,

  ‘He whom I knew

  most intimately on this earth,

  that ever-youthful lover of mine

  I no longer find

  in this room.’

  I ask, ‘Is he nowhere?’

  Quietly she says,

  ‘He is precisely where

  I am and nowhere else.’

  An excited hubbub reaches me from the door.

  They’ve come back

  from Howrah Station.

  No. 46

  I was then seven years of age.

  Through the dawn window I would spy

  the upper lid of darkness lifting,

  a soft light streaming out


  like a newly opened kantalichampa flower.

  Leaving my bed, I would rush into the garden

  before the crow’s first cry,

  lest I deprived myself

  of the rising sun’s preliminary rites

  among the trembling coconut branches.

  Each day then was independent, was new.

  The morning that came from the east’s golden ghat,

  bathed in light,

  a dot of red sandal on its forehead,

  came to my life as a new guest,

  smiled to me.

  Not a trace of yesterday would there be on its body’s wrap.

  Then I grew older

  and work weighed me down.

  The days jostled against one another,

  losing the dignity that was unique to each.

  One day’s thinking stretched itself to the next day.

  One day’s job spread its mat on the next day to sit down.

  Time, thus compacted, only expands,

  never renews itself.

  Age just increases without pause,

  doesn’t return

  from time to time to its eternal refrain,

  thus to re-discover itself.

  Today it’s time for me to make the old new.

  I’ve sent for the medicine-man: he’ll rid me of the ghost.

  For the wizard’s letter

  every day I shall sit in this garden.

  A new letter each day

  at my window when I awake.

  Morning will arrive

  to get introduced to me;

  will open its eyes, unblinking, in the sky

  and ask me,

  ‘Who are you?’

  What’s my name today

  won’t be valid tomorrow.

  The commander sees his army,

  not the soldier;

  sees his own needs,

  not the truth;

  doesn’t see each person’s

  unique, creator-shaped form.

  Thus have I seen the creation so far –

  like an army of prisoners

  bound in one chain of need.

  And in that same chain

  I have also bound myself.

  Today I shall free myself.

  Beyond the sea

  I can see the new shore before me.

  I won’t tangle it with

  baggage brought from this shore.