Anantnag
I took pride in your
natural springs,
your navigable river.
Every April we went
to Mattan, offered libations
to the dead: my father's dead
my mother's.
No dead of my own then,
life was eternal.
I could sense it when we
gathered blue lotuses
to lay at a gold plated
doorstep, bronze sun disk:
majestic, bedazzling.
Thirty years journeyed
past us, leaving behind
hoof taps on stone.
Spring and autumn skies
grew old, listening
to night ragas.
Un-chronicled silences
of a very cold moon.
Apple trees you planted
in the backyard are tired
of bearing fruit.
They no longer blossom
in early spring;
their leaves look pensive,
yellowed at the edges.
Whoever opens the front gate
will close it fast in my face,
without asking my name.
Still, my expatriate feet drag me
back to you.
Evening shadows stare at me
with blind eyes. Cool breezes
say: may be, only may be,
we knew you then.
What of that? Now you are
a stranger, an enemy.
Piles of garbage along
the hospital walls, broken bottles,
blood soaked bandages.
Black curtains on windows
tell me to go where I came
from. Children stare with
suspicion. They have learnt
to hate; they are afraid.
Hollow eyed ghosts
walk the streets
beneath a thin moon, muttering
curses, adding up the dead.
The hill looks like a camel's back.
It is haunted.
[© Lalita Pandit, August 7, 1996].
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