BIRTHDAY

Why must one live for one hundred years?  
Bereft of the poison-tooth, defenceless,  
and unable to lift one's own bow,  
must one still live?  

Why must one play host to one hundred autumns year after year  
opening and closing and reopening and bolting again  
the doors and windows?  
Must one go on playing the same game for eternity,  
keep on doing the same sum till infinity?  

Who will be my witness:  
the snippets of Vietnamese valour  
from the pitiful daily newspaper  
in between sips of milk-powdered tea,  
that act like vitamins?  
The old guileless photograph of the well-dressed  
young man smiling with his bride,  
preserved inside the glass cupboard,  
that warms up one's strained nerves?  
Or the "farewell-message"  
presented with garlands of now-faded camphor  
by the office-staff  
on one occasion of a transfer from Bhadrak to Koraput,  
displayed on the wall?  
   

Thereafter the same formulae of multiplication  
from one to twenty and from twenty to one,  
framed photographs hung on dusty dark walls:  
the eldest daughter donning the black gown and hood  
and holding her diplomas,  
the younger one doing her Odissi number.  
And the picture, framed from a newspaper cutting,  
of my dear lovabale son, unemployed,  
arrested under MISA,  
standing inside the police-cordon.  
I can hear the bids of my daughters  
trying their luck  
in the matrimonial auction of the bridegroom-market.  

What do they signify—
these basic ingredients of my world?  
What do they stand for :  
my tattered lungi and dirty vest and office-shirt?  
A cake of soap is too costly, costlier is food;  
it is only life that gets devalued day by day.  

I do not want a boxful of birthdays, I don't.  
One inch of life is all I ask for,  
the inch-long life of a matchstick.  

I feel I have all, yet nothing at all,  
for the spark that ignites  
is missing.  

My wintry breath buries the cold sun  
in the snow of slumber.  
Still comes the heat wave,  
and people die in Bihar  
and people die in the north.  
And people die of suicide in villages,  
and they die without food.  

But no one dies for the living.  
No one waves his tattered shirt  
soaked red in blood.  
No one knows where food lies  
except the rats and the intelligent ants  
who dismiss humans as fools.  

I begin my day with the steam  
of the flavourless tea in the morning;  
I retire at midnight with hollow dreams  
in the much-mended mattress of silk.  
Nightlong the lamp-post mocks at me.  
In my courtyard blossoms the kadamba tree  
from where my bicycle had been stolen  
on a moonlit night.  

Meanwhile I grow a day older  
and wane a month upstream,  
and then I drift through awakened slumber  
towards the next birthday.  

Why must one be so kind  
to live for one hundred years?  
And what does a birthday stand for :  
to be or not to be  
or non-being?  
   

Translation :
Rajendra Kishore Panda  

SEASHORE FAITH

The seashore of faith  
is swept away  
by the seven waves;  
a speck of dust  
is better than a vast void—  
let the sand castle crumble  
or its three shingle steps  
be swept away,  
the centre holds  
life's magical flower,  
faith's secret self.  

Men may come  
and then may go  
but the primal truth  
is left in footprints.  

A sign  
means a form  
and also the formless,  
the source  
of soul and self  
and the all-pervasive.  
   

Translation :
Jayashree Mohanraj