धनगढी से तीन कवितायें

The River

The river beds,
That barely diverges much
But can never converge
Watching haplessly at each other
Facing the wrath of the flood every year,
Torn apart yet silent
Disappointed yet content
Coerced yet complacent

The river beds
That cannot hold the dwellings
That cannot bear the trees
The cremation of bodies, they observe
The decimation of life, they witness
The insanity of summer they withstand
Yet no rewards
Yet no protests.

The crabs in the river bed
That envy the life of the fishes
No liberty to venture to the oceans
No opportunity to taste new waters
A life entrenched in the sand
The utter parochialism of passing hours
The piercing monotony of silent nights
The stagnation that is so ubiquitous

The running water,
That has the privilege to move
Move and move for ever
Rearing the fishes
Clearing the nuances
A life that is worthy living
A venture that is worthy taking

Yes, friend!
I wish to live a life of the river
And to die before I am disposed off to the riverbed
And to die before I loose the ability to swim like a fish
And before I transform into a crab.





Life and Death


A child
Her shrill cry
Her innocent laughter
Her bland interests
And that eternal smile

A teenager,
Her naïve ambition
Her high dreams
Her smoky vision
And that never ending curiosity

A youth,
Her sheer enthusiasm,
That confrontation with the real world,
The world that is half bright and half dark
Half friendly and half hostile
And the glass
That is half empty and half full
The wrangling with obstacles
The collisions that yield little

The middle-aged,
Her half-spoken hobbies
Her half-expressed desires
Her half-met dreams
The ambitions that had merged
The desires that had blended
With something that was once beyond imagination
The endless list of compromises
The open list of omissions,

The old woman,
The revelation in hindsight
The lamentation for lost moments
The mourning for lost companions
The days lost forever
The nights that will come again and again
The frustration at the world
That fails to follow the ‘usual’ dictum
The changes
That come down unanticipated
The agonizing impotency
At inability to restart the life from childhood
Absence of chances to correct the wrongs of the past


Lack of chance to complete the incomplete tasks
And realization of that undesired yet ultimate truth
The perception of being
Incessantly dragged to the door of life’
Death, the ultimate truth.



A Child Imagines


The cloud in the horizon, before dusk
Changing color every other minute
Soothing a crying child
With the magic of her ever-changing shape:
Once a horse that he so direly wished to ride
Again his father
Who has gone missing for years in foreign land
Then like a monkey holding a hill atop his head.

With increasing darkness
The increasingly clear images appear
The more vivid imaginations wander through the small brain
That ingratiate the innocent desires
even though transiently,
And a beautiful world gets birth,
A world with no nights, no unhappiness
No grievances, no squabbles.
Only peace and harmony

Only beauty and happiness.
A world away from the humdrum of mortal life
A world free from wretched creatures
And the flowers that bloom in absence of thorns

Eventually the night sets in
And the cloud hides itself beyond the mountain
The stars twinkle in the dark sky
A lamp throws the faint light in the hut
A cacophony ensues:
How hard they have to work, how little they earn
How futile the life is, how dull the routine is.
And the child submerges as usual,
In the ocean of grief and frustration
And watches haplessly,
How his beautiful world vanishes
Like that beautiful cloud did beyond the mountains.