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Karuna
- Sadness
He has gone again tonight,
to that other woman
he’s set up for bitter days
seduced by her kama.
She lives in his dark shadow
ruling him day by day,
caressing his naked body.
Alone, his wife lights the oil-dipped wick
in the brass standing lamp,
adjusts the pear shaped
four stringed Tambura
to hear the sound of the drone—
the notes—Sa-Pa-Sa,
strikes Kanada raga
and sings Alaipayuthey Kanna.
Oh the waves lash, Krishna.
Ghazal for the Widow’s Lament, 1930, India
Had you some enmity with me or an argument with the sun when
you left that day?
My life is dark and is no longer a safe haven after you left
that day.
Did the winds carry you back to the clouds?
For you were the last raindrop I saw, after you left that day.
They said to me, “Don’t come here when the sun rises, for you
are a bad omen.”
My existence in the world was concluded after you left that day.
The color of my saree bleached white and my head was shaven in
the name of austerity.
It’s only your memory that’s still so bright, years after you
left that day.
My eyes are blinded to light and my ears are
deaf to the cuckoo’s song forever, after you left that day.
A few moments of silence, a few moments of timid expressions,
a few moments of yearning lust, how can I forget them, even
after you left that day?
All of a sudden you were gone, without saying a word.
The melody of your footsteps is all I hear, after you left that
day.
It was only an hour of fervent love in your arms
that’s made me live for fifty years thinking of no one but you,
after you left that day.
Even if the picture of you has faded like a dream,
your son’s expressions remind me time and again, after you left
that day.
This pain is torture that I can’t run away from.
I lost the battle of love and life after you left that day.
Will I say this forever, living in your absence,
knowing I too was dead, soon after you left that day?
Ghazal for Mumbai, Dying
on 11th July 2006, bomb blasts went off in7 different
locations in Mumbai
How can I embrace you with
my hands dripping the blood of my brethren?
Bodies crushed to a bag of bones and ashes,
the pursuit of peace has become futile.
Why are you still coming to me with a garden
of roses, wearing a smile, not a tear?
I can’t be impervious to the weeping world, even if you provoke
me.
All I wished for was peace and it has been blown away by
infuriated winds.
The thought of war makes some insurgent.
What had the civilians to do with it?
I am disgraced by the brutality of my own blood.
How I dreamed of peace in this unfit heart!
Now, words of peace are all in pieces.
What makes one brag about it, then?
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