I would like to think of this fragment as a ‘Hyderabad’ fragment from K. V. Tirumalesh’s AKSHAYA KAVYA ... lots of familiar ‘Hyderabad’ sights and sounds and images recur ... the dargah, the neem tree, the train, its sound, lights, the dargah-keeper, the basti, the street sights ... and then, of course, he takes all these somewhere else ...
POET: K. V. Tirumalesh
KANNADA ORIGINAL: first line of the fragment:
ಸ್ವಪ್ನಗಳು ಇನ್ನೂ ಮುಗಿದಿರದ ಗಳಿಗೆ
‘Now, when dreams haven’t ended yet’
from AKSHAYA KAVYA (2010)
ENGLISH TRANSLATION: S. Jayasrinivasa Rao
It is better to get up and go now,
now, when dreams haven’t ended yet
Memories will walk with me
Notice the names of the streets
This is the same path I walked on yesterday too
Only the leaves that fell during the night are different
This is the same dargah where I rested yesterday
What do those letters etched on the walls say,
now faded with fingers feeling them all these years
The white-bearded old man, god’s slave,
gets up to sweep the day’s dust
The neem-tree’s shadow changes
direction twice a day
symbolising a human-being’s life
He too had once played gambling games here,
had roamed around dissolute here
The sun hadn’t reached its peak yet then
I am so tired so soon today
He will eventually have to wait
for tomorrow’s shift
Tomorrow exists solely for those
who have lost their yesterdays,
what remains is the heaven above
Hot rotis in winter cold water in summer
Wells sunk and closed
and opened again
Like doors to heaven
Let everything be open
Look there on the other side
someone has opened his tools-box
A foot with a torn toe-strap is
proffered before long
I sit there nearby
The chisel, the thick needle, the pincers,
the hand and fingers sliding over leather,
focussed mind,
I am as amazed now
as I was the first time
and as I will be every time
He too is my friend
Then the tar-laying people
saunter in chatting in the evening
They are who I encountered
early in the morning
Their faces are now black,
hands are black
Legs swathed in rags
Each leg looks elephant-sized
This one is Uttanapaada
That one is Kalmashapaada
What happened to the other?
There is no place they haven’t stepped on
They have brought mud caked
on their feet from all paths
See how they have spread to the nooks,
hiding in the cracks of the basti,
The sound of the local train running
on open rails can be heard already
dhad dhad dhad
On either side the earth shakes as during a tornado
Cactus blooms suffer miscarriages
Window lights zoom past like serial lights
They pass over a pair of clandestine lovers
like a dark and light strip
Somebody says
I don’t have anything to offer
except love
I have heard this many times
*****
