Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
As Devdutt Pattanaik tells it in Jaya, Pandu, who has just experienced a premonition of his death, tells his sons – the Pandavas – a secret. In return for all the years he has spent as a celibate in meditation, explains Pandu, he has been rewarded with great knowledge. “After my passing,” he says, “you must consume my flesh. All my knowledge will be transferred to you. Treat this as your inheritance.”
Following Pandu’s death, the Pandavas cremate his body. Eating their father’s flesh seems unthinkable – at least as far as Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna and Nakula are concerned. But Sahadeva, the youngest of the brothers, later known to have shaped the occult sciences, notices an army of ants carrying a tiny piece of their father’s body. He puts that piece in his mouth and is filled instantly with knowledge of the past and the future.
Could have passed for a poet,
this boy who was no warrior
but saw the smallest of things –
even the ant in the cremation ground,
holding, in its tight pincer hug,
a piece of his father’s flesh.
They have marched ahead, my brothers,
eager to shake pyre smoke
off their clothes,
their minds already on the business of the day.
You are a fake kshatriya Sahadeva, they tease,
might as well give up that bow of yours!
A seeker of pauses white spaces on a page.
Birds. Wind rustle. Ants. That which grows under the earth. What matters.
Slowly I coax it out of ant-grip,
place it on the tip of my tongue.
What new heaviness is this …
Stagger under the weight of knowing in certain ways.
Why did I call this darkness down on myself?
Eyes on the ground,
studying once more the shape of each fallen leaf,
the maps charted by red beetles and grasshoppers,
listening for the sound of each twig breaking underfoot,
the roar of knowing recedes.
Birds. Wind rustle. Ants. That which grows under the earth. What matters.