A Poem for The Folded Earth

There was an interesting email recently, on The Folded Earth, from a reader who introduced himself as Ashirbad Raha. He included a poem he had written, in Hindi, which picks up themes and threads from the novel. Inter-language intertextuality!

"...I penned this small piece of poetry (below) this morning dreaming of where Maya lives and with a dream that some day I too would go back to my parents, hills and my small town and write a book... This small poem is dedicated to your writing in The Folded Earth."

ASHIRBAD RAHA

[THE HINDI ORIGINAL FOLLOWS. A ROUGH ENGLISH TRANSLATION IS FURTHER DOWN.]

पडोसी के बरामदे में वो पीली बल्ब..
शाम को पहाड़ी हवा में ऐसे झूमती है..
जैसे, मानो मदहोश हो शाम के इश्क में...

ठीक जब सुबह के 6 बजते हैं
तो आकाशवाणी की आवाज़ खिड़की से झांकती है....
हल वाले पूरण चाचा भी खेत जाते है उस वक़्त...

अंग्रेजो के ज़माने का होगा वो गेस्ट हाउस...
फर्श की दरारों में अपनी उम्र छुपाये...
दीवारों पे सीलन सजाये....

कमरे के कोने में मकड़ों का एक शहर है..
बाहर नर्म घास पे एक गिलहरी आती है हर दोपहर..
एक मोर की टोली भी अक्सर गुजरती है....

दो महीने के लिए आया हूँ यहाँ..
रेशमी सुकून में खोने....

शायद एक किताब भी लिखूं....

TRANSLATION

That yellow bulb in the neighbour's verandah

Dances every evening in the mountain breeze

As if drunk with love for the evening.

At exactly six every morning
The sound of a radio through the window
And Puran Chacha leaves for the fields with his plough.

This guest house must be from British times
Its age hidden in the cracks in its floor
Its decoration the damp on its walls
There is a city of spiders in the corner of the room
A squirrel appears every afternoon on the soft grass
A colony of peacocks walks past.

I am here for two months
Lost in the silken threads of dreaming.

Maybe I will even write a book.

Begum Anees Khan

Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea. Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...

A Tagore in Nainital

Sudakshina, from Chitra Deb's 'Thakurbarir Andarmahal' Earlier this month, I went to Abbotsford , a historic estate in Nainital, for the Himalayan Echoes literary festival, run by Janhavi Prasada. The festival took place on the extensive lawns of the estate, which is now run as an elegant hotel, but originally it was a family home and the place had been acquired from its British owners by Janhavi’s great grandfather Jwala Prasada and his wife, Purnima Devi, in the late 19 th century. Janhavi’s new book, Nainital Through Stories, Memories, History mentions this in its first few pages: From Nainital Through Stories I was intrigued to learn that Purnima Devi was a niece of Rabindranath Tagore. She was born (according to Wikipedia) on 13 May 1884, at No. 6, Dwarkanath Tagore's Lane, Jorasanko, Calcutta, to Hemendranath Tagore (1844–1884) of Jorasanko. Hemendranath was the older brother of Rabindranath Tagore, and son of Debendranath Tagore, founder o...

Painting a Residency

I spent most of May and a part of June at the De Pure Fiction residency in a tiny, isolated hamlet in the Occitanie in France. To write about the place and what it did to my work and to me will take time -- to reflect, to let things settle. Meanwhile, Isabelle Desesquelles, the French novelist who runs the residency, asked me a set of questions before I left, and has posted it on the blog with watercolours I painted while I was there. La Lettre #36 _______________ Anuradha Roy a publié cinq romans. Elle a résidé à la maison De Pure Fiction en ce printemps pour son prochain livre et depuis, les chevreuils, les oiseaux - rouge-gorge familier, huppe fasciée, pivert, coucou - les lézards verts, les libellules bleues, les papillons semblent s’être mis eux aussi à la lecture, la cherchant sous les pétales d’un coquelicot ou au travers du feuillage des oliviers. Peut-être même, tous, envisagent-ils de faire le voyage jusqu’en Inde et l'Himalaya où Anuradha Roy vit, ...

anuradha roy

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