A city person,
I was strangely disoriented
in the midst of nature.
In the bus queue
it looked as though
a roadside tree
had come and joined in too.
I was right behind it,
the last in line.
Now I'm an educated man.
When the bus arrived
I waited for the tree to get on first
when it struck me that trees
do not board buses.
And I who am a city dweller,
was separated from nature
in such a way that leaving the tree behind
I took my seat on the bus.
Once seated, my only wish
was to see trees on either side of the road
all the way back.
In my room I've hung a picture
of a whole forest.
(1976)
A dry river
was dry again the following year.
Deep below,
it would've been drier.
Below dry rivers
are channels of more dry rivers.
In a village
along one such river
its oldest man,
the last one alive,
will eventually find
buried in the sediment
a transparent rock
in which are fossils
of river vegetation,
river fish,
organisms, and snails,
and also locked inside,
one drop of water
millions of years old.
Preserved in the soul of the oldest man
is a single seed of rice.
I'm at the place
where it was decided I'll be
and from where I've always
been observing
those who go by.
This is where we'll gather,
though come to think of it
we could've gathered
at any place and there's no place
where we couldn't have gathered.
No matter where we meet,
we invariably meet at the place
meant for gathering.
With birth is born its twin, death —
it's a double birth.
Wherever I go, I carry this inborn death with me.
I'll save it
for as long as I live.
But after death, somewhere in the piggy bank,
you'll find that life's been saved.
I walk around as though I were the treasurer of piggy banks,
even of their piggy banks.
The Chhattisgarh to Bilaspur
on which I was traveling
would stop unwontedly.
Suddenly, at Gondia,
everyone disembarked
and rushed towards the Calcutta train
that had arrived.
Getting off, a passenger,
he was older than me, said,
You better get off too,
or you'll be waiting until your next life
for this one to reach its destination.
In no great hurry,
I was happy to be sitting where I was,
I was only going up to Rajnandgaon,
a few stations away,
where I was born.
_________________________
Vinod Kumar Shukla
Treasurer of Piggy Banks
translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Circumference Books, 2024
