Faith

Sunil Gangopadhyay

The wife of a close friend
Has decked herself up carefully,
But she won’t join us for dinner tonight.
She’s on fast, it’s Neel Shashti today.
When I was young, I used to make

Much flippant fun at times like this.
Now I just give her a hollow smile.
One mustn’t hurt anyone’s faith.

Another friend,

Who first dragged me into Left politics,
Has a new ring with a gemstone.
As he saw me frown, he said weakly,
‘Haven’t been keeping well of late;

So, mom-in-law asked me to wear this,

A moonstone, couldn’t say, “No”.’

I thought it was my personal defeat.

At times I visit the home

Of a revered professor

To listen to his thoughts.

There’s so much to learn even now.

Today, for the first time I saw

A figurine of Ganesha

Fixed on the other side of his door.

I didn’t ask, but he came out on his own,

‘My son has brought it from South India,

It’s a lovely work of art, isn’t it?’

I didn’t question why

A lovely sculpture

Should be on a door instead of in a cabinet.

It would have been frivolous at my age.

I’m getting on in years,

And I am being defeated,

Defeated again and again.

One mustn’t hurt anyone’s faith,

One mustn’t hurt anyone’s faith,

All around there’s so much of faith,

And faith is spreading

Like wildfire.

When a saffron believer

Decides that the blood of an infant

From another religion

Must flow down the road

To be licked by stray dogs,

That too is deep faith.

The flag-bearer of religion who thinks

That people should slash the throat

Of the girl who sings

And she should put on a burqa

Even when she plays tennis,

That too is deep faith.

Those who are marching towards destruction

With bombs strapped to their bodies,

Flexing muscles, smiling toothy smiles,

Trying to put the world under their feet,

They all belong to the league of the faithful.

Everyone is a faithful, faithful, faithful …

At times I feel like shouting out in my broken voice

Wake up, Unfaithful People of the world!

The faithless have-nots of the world, Unite!

Translated on 25 September 2019

[Photo Courtesy Wikipedia © Biswarup Ganguli]

The original poem in Bangla:

আমার ঘনিষ্ঠ বন্ধুর স্ত্রী,
বেশ সেজেগুজে এসেছে
কিন্তু আমাদের সঙ্গে খেতে বসবে না
আজ তার নীলষষ্ঠী
যৌবন বয়সে এই নিয়ে কত না চটুল রঙ্গ করতাম
এখন শুধু একটা পাতলা হাসি
অন্যের বিশ্বাসে আঘাত দিতে নেই।

আর এক বন্ধু,
যে প্রথম আমায় ছাত্র-রাজনীতিতে টেনেছিলো
তার আঙুলে দেখি
একটা নতুন পাথর-বসানো আংটি
আমার কুঞ্চিত ভুরু দেখে
সে দুর্বল গলায় বললো,
শরীরটা ভাল যাচ্ছে না
তাই শাশুড়ি এটা পরতে বললেন,
মুনস্টোন, না বলা যায় না।
আমার মনে হলো,
এ যেন আমার নিজস্ব পরাজয়।

শ্রদ্ধেয় অধ্যাপকের বাড়ি,
মাঝে মাঝে তাঁর আলাপচারী শুনতে যাই
এখনও কত কিছু শেখার আছে,
আজই প্রথম দেখলাম,
তাঁর দরজার পেছন দিকে
গণেশের মূর্তি আটকানো।
প্রশ্ন করিনি, তিনি নিজেই জানালেন,
দক্ষিণ ভারত থেকে ছেলে এনেছে,
কি দারুণ কাজ না?
সুন্দর মূর্তির স্থান
শো-কেসের বদলে দরজার উপরে কেন
বলিনি সে কথা
সেই ফক্কুড়ির বয়স আর নেই
বয়স হয়েছে, তাই হেরে যাচ্ছি
অনবরত হেরে যাচ্ছি।

অন্যের বিশ্বাসে আঘাত দিতে নেই,
অন্যের বিশ্বাসে আঘাত দিতে নেই,
চতুর্দিকে এত বিশ্বাস,
দিনদিন বেড়ে যাচ্ছে
কত রকম বিশ্বাস।

যে গেরুয়াবাদী ঠিক করেছে,
পরধর্মের শিশুর রক্ত গড়াবে মাটিতে,
চাটবে কুকুরে,
সেটাও তার দৃঢ় বিশ্বাস।
ধর্মের যে ধ্বজাধারী মনে করে,
মেয়েরা গান গাইলে
গলার নলী কেটে দেওয়া হবে,
টেনিস খেলতে চাইলেও পরতে হবে বোরখা,
সেটাও তার দৃঢ় বিশ্বাস।

যে পেটে বোমা বেঁধে যাচ্ছে ধ্বংসের দিকে,
যে পেশী ফুলিয়ে, দেঁতো হাসি হেসে
পদানত করতে চাইছে গোটা বিশ্বকে,
এরা সবাই তো বিশ্বাসীর দলা।

সবাই বিশ্বাসী, বিশ্বাসী, বিশ্বাসী....
এক-একবার ভাঙা গলায় বলতে ইচ্ছে করে,
অবিশ্বাসীর দল জাগো
দুনিয়ার সর্বহারা অবিশ্বাসীরা এক হও।

সুনীল গঙ্গোপাধ্যায়

The Golden Treasury

I wouldn’t say Palgrave’s Golden Treasury was a constant companion of my father. But surely it was the book he would read most often after the eight-volume leather-bound set with the expository title Book of Knowledge, and the 28-volume Encyclopedia Americana, which was the biggest investment in his lifetime. (He couldn’t afford to buy The Encyclopaedia Britannica.) His library was an eclectic mix of books of poetry to religious texts to biographies to history to popular science, and quite a few tomes on Gandhi. However, for some reasons, he never touched fiction.

For long, I preserved my father’s torn and profusely underlined hardbound volume of The Golden Treasury, but I cannot find it now. However, this morning, I found another copy of the same treasure, a later and fatter edition. The book was gifted to my daughter by her pishidida, that is, my pishi (my dad’s sister).

As I leafed through the book, I found a note written by aunt.

Dear …,

It was perhaps over sixty years ago when we, girls and boys, sat enchanted as some poems were recited in class. Even now I can feel traces of that sense of enchantment.

I am giving the poems for you to read. And I have marked in pencil some of the lines that I loved; I still do.

Hope you will like them.

Affectionately,

Pishidida

If I am not a complete ignoramus, it is primarily because I was born in a family that valued literature in particular and knowledge in general. I have always felt – forgive me if I sound snooty – that those who’ve never read literature haven’t seen perhaps the second most beautiful facet of life after Nature. And also, those who read are somewhat different from those who don’t.

If you are a young man or woman who reads only on the social media, I would request you to read serious literature. You will never look back. Trust me!

How do you know what is serious literature and what isn’t? There’s a simple way not to get cheated. Read any book that was published 50 years ago or earlier and which is still available in the market.

As I secretly bowed to the men and women who kindled in me a love for reading, I flipped through the Golden Treasury and randomly opened a page to find these lines by Percy Bysshe Shelley (To a Skylark) marked on the side in pencil:

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of the saddest thought.

12 September 2019

Pulayathara: It’s all about a home …

Normally, it wouldn’t take me more than two days to read a book running into 200 pages. Since I read Pulayathara, I have been thinking why it took me more than a month. The usual suspect, that is, the language, could not have been the offender here. This translation of the Malayalam novel by Paul Chirakkarode is in a simple, unadorned English that reminds you of the sparkling, unhurried streams of Kerala before they merge into a backwater lake. In fact, as I read the book, I was often captivated by the prose, like in the passage I am quoting below:

“Everyone chewed betel, spat the juice, and left. Night had fallen. Thevan spread a woven-leaf mat on the floor and lay down to sleep, but sleep evaded him. An overpowering loneliness filled his heart. That night Thevan longed for a companion in his life. A month later he got married.” (p6)

Rarely do you come across more articulate sentences with so few words. In fact, after I began writing this, I opened the book randomly and I found these lines:

“Thoma drew near. He had changed. He was no longer the handsome young man he used to be. The time when he had thick curly hair and an ink-black body, when he wore a checked mundu that was not smeared with mud, was gone. He looked wild. His hair would no longer lie neatly, even if patted down. Thin and haggard, his bones protruded. Life had appeared before him in its truest colour.” (p171)

It is a simple tale of the Dalit on the one hand and the ruthless hypocrisy of the upper-caste in the Indian society on the other. As you have seen, in this story, the journey between a young man’s longing for a partner and finding her has been told in two adjoining sentences. This simple tale narrates the simple, uncomplicated mind of the Pulayar, a Dalit caste of Kerala. And it had to be told in the simplest language.

A little digression into the caste dynamics in India may not be out of place here. Modern historians say that the Hindu period and Muslim period of our history are figments of the colonial imagination. The so-called Hindu Period was hardly a religious monolith, India was actually fragmented into many kingdoms that quarrelled and cooperated among themselves. If any stratification has been constant in the Indian society, it has been the caste.

The importance of caste is often not recognised, more so, in these desperate times of looking at everything as the Hindu versus the rest. Recently, I read the Bangla autobiography of a political activist, Santosh Rana (রাজনীতির এক জীবন). He says that in rural Bengal, an upper-caste landless labourer is often stronger than a Dalit land-owner. Romila Thapar said in one of her speeches that two Muslim sects respectively from Gujarat and Kerala were originally the same community in Arabia. But thanks to India’s all-embracing caste system, they no longer inter-marry; they now belong to different “castes”. Well-off Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh like to believe they are of Persian descent, and are at a higher plain than the riff-raff Muslims who had converted from the so-called “lower castes”.

It is no wonder then that Christianity too lost its egalitarian values on the tropical plains and low hills of Kerala. The story of two generations of Pulayars, Thevan and Thoma are almost identical stories of being dominated by Hindu and Christian upper castes. Thoma had converted himself to Christianity, and was baptised with a Biblical name, but he didn’t even get the whole of a “Thomas”. Not that it made any difference to him, but the irony of his deprived existence which extended even to the name he got cannot be missed.

The translator, Catherine Thankamma tells us in an insightful introduction that “thara” in Malayalam can mean various things such as home, platform, foundation, and floor. And pulyathara roughly translates into a Dalit home or just a raised platform covered by a rudimentary shanty made of bamboo slats and woven coconut sheaves. And the human being who starts off for a thara, any thara, ends up in a gloomy unending struggle from that basic burrow.

It is struggle almost without any hope. And this book is as fascinating as it is oppressive. If I took time to read it – I believe the reason was personal – it was for the same reason for which I don’t watch TV or read newspapers these days.

Truth can be suffocating at times.

*

If I may end on a personal note, this wonderful translation (published by Oxford University Press) has been done by Catherine, a good friend of Arundhati and me. Her husband, Joe, a literature aficionado and brilliant wit, was one of my closest friends who passed away much before it was necessary. I wish Joe was there to read this translation.

But I do hope this translation will win the second Crossword Translation Award for Catherine, and maybe, much more.

Tuesday, 03 September 2019