SOCIETY
A poet, leftists and the Parivar
A poet in Kerala writes a verse, disturbed by the
images she saw on TV. Enter stage right, the Hindu
fanatics. Enter stage left, leftist intellectuals
MADHU T.
 The Mumbra teenager may be a deadly terrorist. Or may be not. She may have wanted to avenge the death of thousands of innocents in Gujarat. Or, she was enchanted with cool cash and the illicit companionship of men from the other side. Or, just as any regular teenager, she wanted to blow up the world and make it a better place. Or she simply could not stand Modi.
That is not the issue. A very good poet in the far-flung corner in Kerala was disturbed by what she saw. She did not wait for the facts and figures. She wrote a wonderful verse, something an inspired writer would do. Then, the Hindu fanatics
(bihari English journalists, who can't get rid of the influence of their good-for-nothing language, can use the term
sangh parivar) appeared. They accused the poet of treason. Of course, the publisher of the poem was a political animal. He is also known to write prose which nobody understand. however, somehow he always manages prestigious awards for those books.
Next was the turn of intellectuals. They denounced the onslaught of Hindu right wing offensive against the freedom of expression. The list of intellectuals includes a person who recently found the warmth of
purdah system. She wants every woman to be enveloped in one. Never mind, she was lucky to have been married to a cultured gentleman who never objected to her illusory or otherwise illicit relationships. He also never objected to her bearing her soul in her English poetry or Malayalam short stories. Another figure among the list is someone who believed the greatest poetry ever written in the world started like this: “they say there is a land called soviet, how lucky I would be if got to see it.”
No, this is also not the point. The point is how irrelevant these groups are. One can easily do without this circus. The only thing that would stay with you after so many years is a line or two written by a talented litterateur. The line would haunt you from time to time. That is the case here also. Read on:
Your turn
By Vijayalakshmi
Disgraced corpse
Spoke to me at night:
Didn’t you see, they placed it next to my hands
No, that gun is certainly not mine
I don’t know any bullets
Except for those hit me
Even those diary entries are not mine,
That hit list, it is all cooked up
Though dead, I am not a fool
So,
I want to see
That diary
With our names in the hit list
Invisible because it was never written
I learnt after I reached there dead,
Decayed, perished, dry
Broken and wounded dead bodies told me,
About guns fastened to their fingers
After their death
How they took their photographs and exhibited
And insulted them
About imaginary diary entries
Made in their names
Dead bodies do not lie
We are the truth
We are the only truth
But, what can dead bodies do?
(Dear reader, I am getting rid of a few lines here because they didn’t make sense to me. They seemed a
mallu writer’s hollow anguish or gibberish. Or, those lines were unwilling to cross the language barrier:
Translator)
Of course, they can
At night,
On untainted mirrors our blood
Will become visible silently
It will press its lips to every woken ear
It will hum till the sunrise
In hushed tone:
“Don’t sleep,
it is your turn
On sunrise”
Ps: This why freedom of expression counts. A poet is not a journalist or a tabulator. He or she has nothing to do with the real world. His or her only duty is to create a new world with his or her imagination and language.
BY MADHU T.
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