Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Mokshdhara* by Sudhir Ranjan Singh

1

Late night I got off the train and began pacing towards the crossover-bridge. Arriving in this Mokshdhara was my opportunity to discover the ultimate meaning of the bridge. In another world the Bridge which reassures that life itself can be traversed through. It is a special crossover. To carry their fathers across Hell people from so many places come to climb this Bridge then descend it with great haste. As if rehearsing to cross the Vaitarani.

On second thoughts—
Betaal is clinging
onto Vikramaditya’s shoulders

narrating some city gossip
Contended by the King’s response
he shall fly off in a jiffy or two

Many horses’
hooves are clattering
Rainwater is dripping…

The sky is trickling
Hell is trickling

Yamaraj’s army is marching past…

Neither do I believe in the Afterlife nor do I gauge Life any less than Death. Walking on this crossover-bridge I can experience that life itself is no less of an apparition.

 

2

As I climbed down the stairs
who knew how many people were lying on the turf
hither and thither among strolling travelers
Some were dozing while sitting
A woman slept so tight with her man
as if for the creation of the world
anything could have happened malapropos

A body touches another body. Mere witnessing this is the experience of touching the other body. An experience like getting drenched in the rain, like getting scorched in the fire, like getting lost in the cosmos. The Body is an experience and being enfranchised of that experience is impossible even after the body has attained nirvana.

Fathers
In our bodies
are bodiless experiences
In our bodies
are bodiless bodies

The train whistled sharply
Jammed bodies inside coaches began writhing

This is how—
Experiences were writhing
inside jammed bodies
inside jammed suitcases

Experiences were writhing in jammed bodies. Bodies were writhing in jammed bodies. Like the experience of poetry. The truth is that in the Body’s birth and its oblivion lies latent the openness of poetry and the alliance with its verses.

 

3

The light was dim outside the station
The wail was faint outside the station

My acquaintance to this town is old
Electricity arrives riding on an elephant here
and elopes at the speed of a horse

Upon returning to a familiar place if nothing appears to have been changed is like experiencing living two lives in one. Ajaatshatru Hotel was situated right in front of the station. Ajaatshatru Hotel is situated right in front of the station. I stayed in one of its rooms once. Even today I am staying in one of its rooms. I had touched a woman once in that room. Now I am touching that touch.

In memory’s game
Tonight
The town blossoming

Night is like an elephant on which I kept riding touring the town. When the light at the horizon clambered its head scraggy noises began pricking my neck like hooks.

The town is senile
It stutters while moving
It slouches while walking
It runs on drains and ditches
on Phalgu’s sand
following Vishnu’s footsteps

At the centre of the town there is a field dented like a beggar’s stomach named after
Gandhi ji. Biggish. Not big, but biggish. Its boundaries dumped with garbage. People have littered all around. What happened with Gandhi in this country, the same has happened with this field.

The shuddering noises of rickshaws
saying                   No interventions

This town must live
like this
always
forever

This is Mokshdhara
without its own moksha

Furthermore, I hear nothing and I remember nothing. As if memories got locked away and their key was dropped somewhere. As if I have attained moksha being alive. Moksha lies in the liberation from memory.

 

4

More than the town
I found the town’s carcass
Death loaded on their backs
I found slithering travellers

Moss-muddled
I found ponds and pools
For the sake of their fathers’ salvation
I found shoals of Pandits

Gradually
the town kept turning old
and older

I experienced
I am drifting through
the svelte streets of my own body

The sun remains set in Panchmehla. Perhaps, the sun has only half-risen. Strangers are ambling around. The wives of Pandits are peeping. Children shouting “Your Honor—Your Honor” as they enter indoors. Death is a useful thing, the air reeks of it. I am not dead but will die someday. The strength in this rhetoric is keeping the walls of this place from crumbling down.

My destination
is veiled in these walls

The destination
is not a place
but a story
A strange chamber
of the heart

I am walking
by measuring others’ feet

This is the town
by the name of that Gayasura
whose touch fated
men to Heaven

A senile bull sat fixedly on a lane. Fatigued from pleasure, finally. Free from fear. Nowhere to run! It was rather I who escaped him just narrowly. This was moksha, embodied.

Body means
pleasure
escape
fear

As I turned a tad jaunty of my fear the laughing began. Man begins to sing as soon as fear flutters away from him. The absence of fear entrusts the Body with many beautiful tasks. But sometimes the very absence energizes the Body with the Spirit of a Demon.

From these two meanings
of absent fear—
the story became—
the demon who had been liberated was

Gayasura
He too had sat fixedly
on the lane like that bull

Kolahal peak was situated to the town’s south. After deep penance on that summit Gayasura received the boon that whosoever encountered him would receive a direct entry to Heaven. Whomever Gayasura met Gayasura touched, then embraced them. Hell started emptying. The emptying of Hell was detrimental to the ruling of the Gods. In lieu of his yagna, Brahma asked for Gayasura’s pristine body. A huge stone was loaded atop his body. Then put into a fire pit.

The fire
crackled-and-popped
Gayasura’s body kept
quivering
The universe was
shivering

Vishnu stamped his feet upon the stone near the navel. The body that never suffered from fear had gasped its last.

The weight of three worlds
on top of the navel
For no graver
sentence
has a ruling been passed
yet

Damn, the Heavens!
Damn, the Afterlife!

 

5

I remember my fathers
not in Heaven
They appear to me in prisons, murmuring—

Deaths did not leak

as many from the sky
as many necks were slaughtered
by the knights on earth

We did not die
We were killed
In the name of faith
Drilled

We did not get
our own country

Neither Marx
nor Gandhi…

I think of my fathers
They don’t appear to me as any God
but as Gayasura

 

6

I found life
and did not

I found ways
not the way

I found women
but not a wife

I found friends
never trust

Stamped and stomped under feet which come and go
water is flowing beneath
Phalgu’s sand

Stifled inside the body and the world
I am walking

Phalgu received
its shape of river

but not
abundant water

Phalgu is a river
and an ancient field of sand

Symbols of death
throb in it

Death
is a subtle pulsation
A social spirit

A spirit which can’t be described
Isn’t a spirit which can’t be described

Hence
its moksha is justified

Rama had arrived here to offer the water of libations to the Gods to Dasharatha with Sita and Lakshmana. Brahman Gods were invited. Cows had been brought for sacrifice. Other essentials for the rites were forgotten. Both brothers returned. Just as they had left, the clouds had crackled and Dasharatha’s hands were spotted in the sky. The eagerness to moksha was apparent. He declared the moment auspicious and requested Sita to offer the libations.

Sita
who was a woman
Dasharatha had hoarded his ancestry in her

This was the blazing moment
for women

Milk, jaggery, ghee, sesame, nothing was available. The witnesses comprised of the Brahman, Phalgu, cows and the Banyan Tree when Sita offered the nubbles of sand. The Spirit accepted. But the world turned out to be a routinist. Sita’s way was deemed improper. All the witnesses flipped in front of Rama except the Banyan Tree. Then as if for a moment death hissed Sita. Under the shade of the Tree alike a mother, her consciousness returned. As if her mouth had gone dumb. Though her heart’s throbs didn’t faint.

It wasn’t that the Brahmans wouldn’t receive the donations
but that their hunger won’t be satisfied
The river would remain a river
only that there would be no water
Cows will still be milking
There will be no compromise in honour
Children will starve

So many trees
around
Each one has maintained
the dignity of the earth little by little
but the Banyan Tree is special

Under the scorching sky
A huge umbrella

Sita hailed it as
Akshyavata, the Renewable Tree

From this world
Many things disappeared
Many died in it
Except this
Banyan Tree

From then on upon winning Sita’s heart
the Tree fulfils the wishes
of all

I stand
in front of it
today

I do not know
what to wish

My ‘I’
has vanished
My ‘I’
has died

This ‘I’ of mine has vanished even without dying
This ‘I’ of mine has died even without vanishing

In the end
my ‘I’
is Phalgu

 

7

But. But, I have to wish. The stubbornness of not wishing is like that old man sitting on the porch, who knows he has already lived his life and yet fears aspiring death. Suddenly, if he were to die someone may very well say that while sitting on the porch all he used to wish for is death.

After all—
I have come to the Akshayavata—
I need to wish for something

Kamala Prasad ji
Kamala Prasad ji

Wake up
The Editor of Vasudha

At the hands of Death
life’s journal needs to be edited
On the last page
Editorial needs to be written

Before that
Before that
You are the Editor

Rise
Marxist issue needs to be released

There’s so much darkness
in the hands of clouds but
there are swords of lightning

Well

In Marx’s beard
I have seen the Banyan Tree
In Aruna Shanbaug’s senselessness
I have seen Sita

I see friends who left. I see an unfinished poem. I see farmers’ cries. I see everything. Death is seen nowhere. Because it has no Body only meaning.

To turn
that meaning into
another meaning

To create a new Body
To create a new ‘I’

To ensconce the world
within my rag
walking around homeless

That cannot be contained
in one ‘I’

To create a new Body
To create a new ‘I’

Let us create new fears. New love. New friendships. Let us rage new wars.

Let us not spend Death worthlessly
on this worthless life.

 

8

Crossing pools and altars as I climbed the Brahmayoni peak a familiar fear began troubling me. Labelling it as a new touch I controlled it. I turned towards the south. I stood in front of the Bodhi tree.

Like a chameleon
I want to reside inside a Body
not in any Spirit

Even after the Body
I want a body
like the Body

Like the shade
under this tree

Let us find a place
A form

Let me not attain
the form of this Buddha’s idol
Of course I can live inside the
chimes of these bells

Of course I can live

Like becoming some lost memory of a broken friendship. Like becoming a conversation with a grown-up son. Like becoming the compassion and sadness of the weak. Like, like

becoming the grit of a poet…

Let me not receive an award
by slipping a peg

Let us find a place
A form

Let me find my place
in a pyre
everyday

Let me find
the form of a
fire’s crackle

Let me find Death
without seeing
Death

Let us mime crossing the Vaitarani walking across the crossover-bridge. Let us raise both our hands in our minds and offer libations to our inner emptiness. Time has many directions leading to twice their roads. Both distance and delay are cheap talk. Let us leave.

Everything is a tale, but
beneath Phalgu’s sand
there is water.

 

Note:
*a town legendary for the rites of paternal salvation, in Gaya; literally, ‘The Land of Moksha’.

Vaitarani or Baitarani, as presently known, is a mythological and physical river in India. Believed to lie between the earth and the infernal Naraka (Hell), the realm of Yama or Yamaraja, the Hindu god of death, it is equivalent to the river Styx in Greek mythology.

ji – literally the ‘heart’ or ‘soul’; here used colloquially in Hindi as an honorific suffix.

Pandits – Hindu priests; here also refers to a sect known for cunningly looting  worshippers.

yagna – Vedic ritual in Hinduism, performed in the presence of a sacred fire with mantra chanting.

 

← Sudhir Ranjan Singh