KRISHNA PRASAI

Poet, Author, Translator, Zen Master of Nepal

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My Father in Reverie

Connived by a stranger some seven decades back

My father reportedly sneaked into a foreign land to hunt for pelf;

He saw town before anyone in his village did

Sold from the hand of his own villager at a spot in Ghum Pahad

He set for Dehradun, Kashmir, Malaya and beyond

With a gun set in hand by a foreigner,

Dropped his middle name ‘Prasad’ and adopted ‘Bahadur’

And only then, he started comprehending what a foreign land was.

With father’s name, I am contemplating

The antique age of the hill

Where, there was a path but no boots

There were things, but no strength

There were stacks of home-grown crops

Fruits, vegetables and cereals grew prodigally

Doomed to rot on ridges and farms before being fetched to the marketplace

Or got cooked as cattle-porridge in a pig-iron caldron.

What to talk of the present time!

When the digital air has intruded into the village

Even the dung-pile is sold away in town via e-mail

The village is upset; not even in talking-terms with Father

And has stopped caring for his olden ways—

At times, it stares as though it would maul him

Taking Father’s thoughts as out-of-place.

Like a bugle, blown by war all of a sudden,

Facebook, Skype and Viber in succession

Have claimed all the progenies of Father;

The new intruders have, in no time,

Extended their grips!

Enduring through all these recent inventions,

Father brings back in reveries his own olden times,

Alas, that terrible Second World War,

Macabre Burma, deluged by a downpour of mortared cloud

Airawati River, laced with human blood everywhere

The charge of the Japanese soldiers in the dense forest

Innumerable corpses from both the ends

The ooze from falling friends gathered into a pool,

The gruesome death-scene of a friend recruited same day as him

Now dying writhing, pegged by a sharp lance,

The stale food—a share of the dead friend—and the stinking daal

Retrieved from under the clotted blood for saving life

The English beauty, who served him in Dhaka’s Maina Moti Hospital where he lay injured,

The promotion to the post of Subedar he earned

For polishing shoes into shining black

A different brass medal for slaying dozens of foes,

The tin-tank carried along on six-month leave to Hang-Pang, Seven years later

The half-year time a thread-bound letter with

Death-news took to reach the village;

Doomed to be torn by the marty’s own wife

As though it belonged to this second wife

The black-and-white pictures with the white air-hostess in a skirt

And fair like a freshly washed carrot.

Recalling every episode of the past, Father wakes up time and again

Seeking himself in the transformed moments.

Wrinkling a forehead that bears scars of grenades and bullets, Like his backbone and shoulders,

My father, ninety-four years old now

Is reading the fresh newspaper in this own language

Out of the press just today.

***

To All Mothers

Mother often said,

“The cash and rice

Your brothers collected from deusi

Were used to manage

The cost of your name-giving ritual.”

The same daan for the festival of Tihar

Too was used to help her recuperate

From weakness coming with childbirth.

I remember the image of Mother

helping my sister—her first foetus

to pick and throw lice off her hair

And the caves along the terraces and ridges

Of wrinkles on her forehead

That never got any weeding

Before it was too late.

I also recall the gashes on her heels

Apparently like the cracks on a famine-struck field

Left unlevelled by a farmhand

And recall the colour of the dreams

My mother had, even as she stood

Covered in innumerable seasons.

At such moments

Everything to me appears like a flower.

I know not which flower I should choose

to name my mother.

Which flower on earth is the one

That never withers?

There always was a battle at the fireplace

And fire always got vanquished at Mother’s hand

Rest, for Mother, was a thing

As remote as the sun

Yet, the winter of fatigue could never crush

My mother’s sky.

As I grew older

I saw my mother again in similar images

And learnt, with that, to play

With the multiple scarcities of life

Which, at the touch of Mother’s beautiful sweats

Learnt to open up and bloom out.

To you, who are mothers

or, have mothers if you are not yourself one

Are poetry to me

As was my own mother.

These days,

Mother and poetry appear alike to me.

***

Grandmother

The word ‘grandmother’ brings to my memory

The vision of my own granny

Who stands in chhit^[1] gunyu^[2],

In the balcony

With hair all grey with aging

With her golden nose-ring

Talking in the warm winter sun

As far as my memory supports,

She had in her, aspects of Ubhauli, Udhauli^[3]!

And she trusted Shime-Bhume^[4]!

A pitcher full of honor,

Justice filled in a thousand decanters,

And innumerable deities

To whom she had made thousands of divine promises

My grandmother had,

An ocean of motherly affection in her

Wherein I first learnt to swim.

At times, I contemplate:

Being a grandmother connotes

Ghee and kurauni^[5] too!

Being a grandmother denotes

The pride of dharni and bisouli^[6] too!

Being a grandmother also means

a sky of blessings too.

At present, when misfortunes befall

I remember the same grandmother,

On whose cozy laps, I could peacefully recline.

Today too, when restless I grow

I bring to my memory, the same granny

Whose piggy bags could offer

Untold joys to my childhood peers.

Having walked half our time together

When I had to part with my grandmother suddenly

I can see these days—

My grandmother is staring

From the old-age centre near a temple

At the gods she raised

With food set aside from her own share

Who act not to have seen her

Right in front of their eyes too

And are constantly slighting

Her innumerable blessings.

***

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^[1]. chhit : a colourful home-spun Nepali cloth for women

^[2]. gunyu: a typical Nepali loin for women, wrapped around the region under the pelvis, upto the toes

^[3]. Ubhauli, Udhauli:  Kirat festivals, the first celebrated in the full moon day in the Nepali month of Baisakh  (April) the other celebrated on the full moon day in the Nepali month of Mangsir (November).

^[4]. Shime-bhume: spirits, worshipped by people in Eastern Nepal

^[5]. kurauni : condensed milk

^[6]. dharni : two kilogram and a half, a standard unit for measurement in Nepal. Bbisouli is half a dharni