Here is another ‘Hyderabad’ fragment from K. V. Tirumalesh’s AKSHAYA KAVYA ... he returns to one of his favourite walking haunts, Seetaphal Mandi ...
POET: K. V. Tirumalesh
KANNADA ORIGINAL: first line of the fragment:
ರಿಯಾಲಿಟಿ ರಿಯಾಲಿಟಿ
‘Reality reality’ from AKSHAYA KAVYA (2010)
ENGLISH TRANSLATION: S. Jayasrinivasa Rao
Reality, reality ...
Do you want reality?
The boots that I brought from England
What will I do with them
As soft as fur and as pure but
the street I walk on every day is Seetaphal Mandi
Rotting vegetables flies spittle dust
This is reality
Water from broken sewage pipes puddling everywhere
I leap across all these and as I was feeling triumphant,
the railway-crossing gate had dropped
There eternity makes us sit and wait
Two dogs in the garbage bin
scavenging among eggs, ovaries,
and sanitary pads
All are waiting the beggars too
Saint Thomas Aquinas told me
Nothing happens without a reason
The train from a different era comes in
as if slashing through people’s vision-lines
Shaking the earth belching fire
Shaping the cause-and-effect correlation
For two minutes
Should I look for clean places to walk on
Should I teach my boots the trick of leaping
Should I reveal the natural smells of the earth
and meld it with the land or
Should I send them flying forth
from the balcony across to
The Arabian Sea Mount Ararat
The Sahara desert and the Atlantic Ocean
If only history were just an underwear
We could turn it inside out
We could wash and dry it when dirty
A saint
one who has lost the sense of dirtiness, and
one who is free of it is the ‘supreme-swan’
one who wears no clothes is empty
of all questions and the
only one who stands here every day
sells leafy greens just on a whim
*****
Great one Srini. I loved reading it but the imagery made me feel
ReplyDeletediscomfort too because I know that every imagery is true and at the same time given an option we want to evade. Two dogs in the garbage bin, scavenging among eggs, ovaries and sanitary pads- such reality and the way he put it! I am lost for the right word- what do we call that feeling you get when you know this is real, uncomfortable to think of and you want to escape too! If only history were an underwear- again powerful, uncomfortable but very very real!