Two Poems
by Hemant Divate
life begins when you enter this room…
From a distance, winking hoardings
gaze at me, intently.
For which of these
am I the target audience?
Or am I one, at all?
And yet, because of them, I am never lonely.
They rekindle
all kinds of memories,
as if I am back in Shillong
strolling among the pines
or jaywalking down the heavenly streets of Pattaya
where every street walker calls out to me with respect
or sipping coffee in Florence, when the darkness
that surrounds my companions reaches my eyes.
Once, every morning these palms,
sentinels of the garden, would wake and stretch.
Flowers, thrown up like someone has regurgitated eggs
and, clearly visible, in the dense shade of the trees
shiny dollops of pigeon shit on a park bench.
Some old, some new blotches.
Meanwhile, near the diving end of a swimming pool
the lifeguard twiddles his thumbs,
ants march down his briefs
in single file, while behind him,
pigeons bugger each other relentlessly.
Do pigeons have fixed partners?
Or is it like in Bangkok or in Pattaya– raat gayi, baat gayi.
life begins when you enter this room…
The layer of dust spread evenly across my television
establishes the fact of my life.
With its sharpened gaze, the dust experiences me
26/11, night and day.
Beside the dining table, a cockroach lies on its back.
For all this time, it fights for me
but once this last cigarette is over, I will join it.
With 26/11 becoming every waking day and sleepless night
what is to be done, in the end?
Tomorrow, if the maid is still alive
she will open the door with her set of keys.
She can’t abide my presence,
with these countless cockroaches
living the 26/11 life.
Sweet release
can only happen in this room.
In the other room, I struggle helplessly
like a cockroach flat on its back
but no one even notices me.
life begins when you enter this room…
Sometimes, from this room, the ocean
looks like the hapless cockroach,
the imperial hands of the firmament
keep tickling it, a boat
in the shape of my mind
sails over its belly
and in a feverish attempt to save itself and me
it has nearly collapsed, half-dead.
life begins when you enter this room…
A society divorced from language
casts long, deep shadows.
I throw handfuls of abir-gulaal over them all,
while over the new flyover of language
cows, buffaloes, goats, cats, dogs, people and kids
run, as if for their lives.
Language stays itself with a stick
on the edges of the gutter
taking a measure occasionally.
The corpse of language, as she is spoke
finds itself stuck in the garbage of Dharavi.
I make every effort to untangle it, but
the guy behind pushes me into the gutter
as if to free me from this life
while I fight to live
by keeping my textual face on.
life begins when you enter this room…
The many suns, stars, moonshine, comets and the like
don’t really make this room better.
I get the impression they aren’t interested in this internal sky.
In the right corner, Sattarbhai from the mutton-chop-shop
cuts up the remaining goats by the numbers
while in the left corner, the putrid smell of flesh
like oil-soaked, marinated brinjal spreads in the room,
like a single potato being boiled with three or four eggs,
bubbling away. The smells
fill this room with their intensity.
Zakir Husain plays teentaal — tinak, tinak dha dha!
he takes his neck and his hands to such extremes
that the rhythm get lodged in my mind.
Here’s the sound of the clock falling silent
at exactly 10:10 when my mutations shall stop
and I become the mute on my remote.
In spite of this, furniture in the room moves by itself.
Chairs, tables, books, notebooks, papers and pens too,
while cockroaches play double-decker, double-decker.
As for me, I remain stiff, while every stair in here
and outside slides up and down, down and up;
my junked ego also slides up and down, down and up.
Sattarbhai will cut the remaining goats like brinjals
while the eggs with the single potato bubble over-
26/11 will transform to 7/11,
and 7/11 to 26/11.
As long as this remote remains, I remain mute.
life begins when you enter this room…
I switch on a massive electric furnace,
wait for the arc to simmer red.
One by one, I line up religions
on a conveyor belt
and switch it on.
Like turds, religions drop into the furnace,
I watch then turn to ash, one by one,
then surreptitiously, I smear some one
with a cupful of ash,
throw the rest into the gutter,
take a relaxing shower
and I am free.
Once again, I call together
all the troubled masses,
explain to them the path of liberation.
They all nod, willingly,
quietly sit on the conveyor highway
and shut their eyes.
I switch it on and give them their liberation,
take a bath
and achieve Buddha-hood.
It had become easy, after all,
all these religions suffered from Alzheimer’s
and dyslexia, had become deaf, dumb and blind,
debilitated while copiously vomiting blood
and waiting for death.
But even their acolytes
(those who brought down several Darwins)
found it hard to give them release.
I call together all the purveyors of religion,
give them a sermon on togetherness.
They are not inclined to listen.
So I force them to watch
meaningless programmes from superficial TV channels
and slowly, imperceptibly they become malleable.
slowly they sag like beanbags,
slowly they become uncomplaining watchers,
slowly they forget their differences,
slowly they get covered with fungus,
slowly they turn into onions, potatoes and brinjals,
slowly they put away their differences,
become consumers.
Then I can parade them on the backs of donkeys.
Because there are not enough donkeys
I summon brand managers–
they know how humans think, more than God does.
They supply ideas, and so
I parade humans on the backs of humans.
life begins when you enter this room…
When you enter the room you are accosted
by the miasma of a moaning Mona Lisa.
O compassion, when did you leave Mona Lisa behind?
A dark blue sound is smeared over this wall.
It’s not you, but the white light of your keening
is spread bright.
The wall goes round and round with the earth
and in this light all religions are seen, pale, anaemic.
Look! Observe these insentient things,
who knows how much faith you have stuffed into them.
Many hues– saffron, verdure, yellow, purple,
parrot-green, black, white, tan, azure
force themselves out from these objects
and daub themselves into this room.
Tathagata, when will you take
the Buddha’s message
to these material things,
the call that comes from afar
like lengthening shadows.
life begins when you enter this room…
Each time you feel bad entering this room
notice the hole compassion has formed;
everyone in it chants its name.
It’s only in here that they can take a free breath.
The time it takes to reach here is the time
it takes to destroy a language–
you must navigate poetry, tales, novels and thought,
you must cross the vast forest of grammar
to find the shining path
and do much, much more.
Imagine this, you need to lay low
an entire language universe.
I rage, rage at my inability to be cruel,
the teen-taal rhythm of the Buddha’s suffering
does not let me live.
I never expected you to be so obsessed with things
that you would not even spare love.
Without your knowledge, I enter this room
and try to recover the Buddha
from the keening screams of objects.
Buddha himself shows me a secret rhythm
flowing through my bones.
Very frankly, I am utterly bored of this.
Beyond objects, this room has a rhythm of its own
that no one other than the Buddha can make you hear,
the rhythm that lies embedded in this poem.
life begins when you enter this room…
Outside of this room there is a multiplex.
Double-decker cockroaches hidden in the shadows
intently watch a salacious movie,
while the cinema villain looks back at them.
The scattered chairs
stretch out like languorous divas.
The one scene not in the movie
is the one taking place in the shadow of these chairs.
In pleasure-seeking, the world is sought to be stopped.
There is a long line of ants walking single file
intent on not allowing this pleasure to be got for free.
When this scene is over, the cockroaches too
will slowly fade to black, like the film
and, amidst the putrid stink of leftover snacks
keep blossoming over this discordance.
Even before the flailing feminine furniture
reaches me, I will have fallen out of this life.
Does the sound of a man dying even reach you
from the wide, 70mm Galapagos rainforest of the afterlife?
life begins when you enter this room…
Mail Address
I reach into the innards
of a Pentium 4 processor, and log on,
chat with a friend
beyond the seven seas.
He knows of my former life,
of the riots in Malegaon,
of the Shiv Sena’s Dashera rally,
of all the prizes Asha Bhosale has won, and so on.
I know how his wife was hurt yesterday–
his son ran his tricycle
over the little toe of her left leg;
how his yellow shirt
got burnt while ironing it;
how his son misses my own,
whom he met just last month.
I informed him
that I did nothing special this Dashera,
that my blood pressure is OK, and so on.
Last night, a lot of loud noises
were heard from our neighbour D’souza’s flat.
This morning, his front door opened
with a bang
but being civil and all, I did not know
just how to ask D’souza what happened.
I had not run into him for several days now
and I don’t even know his e-mail ID.
Translated from Marathi by Mustansir Dalvi. You can read the poems in Marathi here.
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Hemant Divate is an acclaimed Marathi poet, editor, publisher and translator. He has six poetry collections in Marathi and eight books in translations. Poetrywala has recently published his Selected Poems 1990–2015 in English translation and as Reloaded in Marathi original.
He is the founder-editor of the prestigious Marathi little magazine Abhidhanantar, which saw uninterrupted publication for 15 years. Abhidhanantar has been credited for giving a solid platform to new poets and for enriching the post-nineties Marathi literary scene with amazing talent and great poetry. His publishing house, Paperwall Media & Publishing, has published under its Poetrywala imprint more than 90 poetry collections. Hemant lives and works in Mumbai.
Mustansir Dalvi was born in Bombay. He teaches architecture in Mumbai. Brouhahas of Cocks is his first book of poems in English, published by Poetrywala in 2013.