Hemang Ashwinkumar
Prayag
On board a superfast train to Prayag
You cross your left thigh over the right
-a civil posture to hide your uncivil hard-on-
And look out quickly
For a distraction that comes
As fast, a platform tart
In a faded green choli and
-its first and the last hooks are snapped-
An evening-sky sari with frangipani print.
The daughter of black fertile soil.
Symmetry of a potter’s hands, her endowments,
A thousand suns dripping from her stray hair-ends,
She looks a bit too seasoned for her age
But one you can’t keep your eyes off
Too long, for that innocent face.
With don’t-give-a-damn regality
She swaggers, a beheaded peanut-oil tin in hand
Towards the destination she’s on her mind,
An open-for-everybody oasis of water
On the burning platform desert,
Tarred with the same brush,
A holy confluence of
Ganga, Euphrates and Nile
A global site for purification rites,
Where she would perform,
Like a veritable Persephone,
Eleusinian Mysteries
Or a Friday-Noon-Prayer
With face in the direction of Mecca,
Like a true Musalmani,
Or a dohyo-ri
Scattering a handful of human salt
-the remains of her week-old dried sweat-
At the wolfish world around,
Like a massive yokozuna
Ready for shikiri-naoshi.
Contrary to your expectations,
She decides to bathe
Without a stitch on.
Filling her tin with hot water,
Taking off her sari she squats frog-style,
Relaxing her well-constricted base-holes.
Slips the side-knot of her ghaghra,
Pulls it on right upto her pigeon neck
And tightens the noose
To look like
A big-winged yellow butterfly
Seeking to merge with a mossy wall.
A puppeteer adept at working fingers
Behind the wavy curtain,
She unhooks her choli,
Leaving the rest to your lurid fantasy.
A tumbler with broken handle,
Her busy bodying stage-manager,
Sneaks in and out of the curtain,
Pins the routes of three major rivulets
Sloshing over planes and plateaus
Slopes and pits, hills and vales,
Meeting at last into a fertile delta
Where afflicted souls would take a hearty dip
For not less than a week,
Wash out their innermost filth
And work out their salvation.
A flicker in your eyes, a creeping shadow in bone,
But the train has moved on
And your hard-on too has gone.
Clockwork
of late
my mind has morphed
into an alarm clock.
i shudder as i think of darna mana hai
that hindi flick in which
people become apple as they eat one.
you stand mid-road in a litter
of apples, finally it’s your turn.
every morning the mind-clock rings
way before the time I set every night
in wind-up clock, the ascetic by my bedside.
what’s worse, the time-out
-in which i turn sides,
stare at the ceiling and
yawn tear-drawing yawns-
is increasing dawn in, dawn out.
day and night,
the tick tock goes on,
– in train, at home,
during hurried meals, shady deals,
as i smoke, talk, do different rites-
tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.
like the beats of teen taal
that went on in my guru’s mind
continuously, till he died.
you start chatting on a beat
then count within, while
he would talk of trifles, current affairs,
however, to give you the right beat
just as you cut him in to see if…
be talba yourself if you’re serious
about the craft, he’d say.
do all have such clocks ticking within?
or am i the chosen one, the natural selection?
or am i getting old?
or is this a hereditary gift from granny?
she too had a time machine in head.
tell her to wake you up at three or four in morn
or ten minutes past ten
she’d be right in time, human alarm spot-on.
am i becoming like her?
but i hated her all these years.
friends say, i’m keyed up, a bit too much.
should think less, relax,
shouldn’t overreact, need to key down,
should key in with others around,
should mingle, be social and relenting,
should do pranayama, some jogging,
should drink my first piss every morning,
should croon a song for the time being
and i sing,
jitni chabi bhari ram ne
utna chale khilona*
my eyes are living volcanos,
rhizome of veins, throbbing pipes of pain.
my throat is a forest of pricking babul.
there is an invisible hole in my neck;
the water I have, immediately flows through.
during intercourse i cannot last long enough.
i breathe out more, breathing in is bloody tough.
i yawn like mad, my hairline is on the ebb.
the strength of soaring seas,
the fortitude of unblinking rock face,
seem to seep from holes in me,
i can’t plug with ten fingers.
right size minute-corks
in the multiples of thousand
might serve the purpose.
the clock ticks away, meanwhile,
hammering in honeycomb cells
of awareness, a familiar countdown
and i count,
seven,
six,
five,
four,
three….
* Popular Hindi Film Song from the movie Andha Kanoon (1983)
******
Hemang Ashwinkumar (1978-) is a bi-lingual poet and translator working in Gujarati and English. His poetry and translations have appeared in places like World Literature Today, Indian Literature, New Quest Cerebration, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Marg, The Four Quarters Magazine, Danse Macabre, Museindia etc. and read in literary festivals like HLF, SIWE, Piccolo Museo della Poesia etc. His book-length English translations include Poetic Refractions (2012), anthology of contemporary Gujarati poetry and Thirsty Fish and other Stories (2013), anthology of select stories by eminent Gujarati writer ‘Sundaram’. His Gujarati translations of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) and Sarpa Satra (2004) have been published recently to critical acclaim. His collection of Gujarati poems titled Metroma, English translations of Dalit writer Dalpat Chauhan’s short stories titled Fear and Other Stories and scholarly monograph on Translation Studies titled Translating the Translated… may come out next year. He can be reached at hemangde@gmail.com
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