Dibyendu Nandi
Department of Physics,
Phone: (406) 994 4470, Fax: (406) 994 4452
Leaving
And I will say my farewell in borrowed words, for I
have none left of my own tonight. Those words will be from a poem that has
pulled me homewards every time I have read it, and each time I have wanted to
go back, even more. So here it is for anybody who cares to read it.
“Diwali”
by Vikram Seth
Three years of neurotic
Guy Fawkes
Days—I recall
That lonely hankering—
But I am home after all.
Home. These walls, this sky
Splintered with wakes of
light
These mud-lamps beaded round
The eaves, this festive
night,
These streets, these
voices... yet
The old insensate dread,
Abeyant as that love,
Once more shifts in my head.
Five? Six? generations
ago
Somewhere in the
My father's family, farmers,
Perhaps had a small shop
And two generations later
Could send a son to a school
To gain the conqueror's
Authoritarian seal:
English! Six-armed god,
Key to a job, to power,
Snobbery, the good life,
This
separateness, this fear.
English: beloved language
Of Johnson, Wordsworth's
tongue—
These my "meridian
names"
Whose
grooves I crawl along.
The Moghuls
fought and ruled
And
settled. Even while
They hungered for musk-melon,
Rose, peach, nightingale,
The land assumed their love.
At sixty they could not
Retire westwards. The British
Made us the
Orient.
How could an Englishman say
About the divan-e-khas
“If there is heaven on
earth
It is this; it is this; it is
this.”?
Macaulay the prophet of
learning
Chewed at his pen: one taste
Of Western wisdom
“surpasses
All the books of the
East,”
And Kalidas,
Shankaracharya,
Panini, Bhaskara, Kabir,
Surdas sank, and we welcomed
The reign
of Shakespeare.
The undigested Hobbes,
The Mill who later ground
(Through talk of liberty)
The Raj
out of the land...
O happy breed of Babus,
I march on with your purpose;
We will have railways, common
law
And a good postal
service—
And I twist along
Those grooves from image to
image,
Violet, elm-tree, swan,
Pork-pie, gable, scrimmage
And we title our memoirs
“Roses in
December”
Though we all know that here
Roses *grow* in December
And we import songs
Composed in the
For
Our local horrors grip us)
And as, over gin at the Club,
I note that egregious member
Strut just imperceptibly more
When with a foreigner,
I know that the whole world
Means exile of our breed
Who are not home at home
And are abroad abroad,
Huddled in towns, while
around:
“He died last week. My
boys
Are
starving. Daily we dig
The ground
for sweet potatoes.”
“The landlord's
hirelings broke
My husband's ribs—and I
Grow blind in the smoke of
the hearth.”
“Who will take care of me
When I am old? No-one
Is
left.” So it goes on,
The cyclic shadow-play
Under the sinister sun;
That sun that, were there
water,
Could bless the dispirited
land,
Coaxing three crops a year
From this
same yieldless ground.
Yet would these parched wraiths
still
Starve in their ruins, while
“Silkworms around them
grow
Into fat cocoons”?, Sad soil,
This may as well be my home.
Because no other nation
Moves me thus? What of that?
Cause for congratulation?
This could well be my home;
I am too used to the flavor
Of tenuous fixity;
I have been brought to savour
Its phases: the winter wheat—
The flowers of Har-ki-Doon—
The sal
forests—the hills
Inflamed with rhododendron—
The first smell of the Rains
On the baked earth—the
peaks
Snow-drowned in permanence—
The single
mountain lakes.
What if my tongue is warped?
I need no words to gaze
At
Or at the tomb of Mumtaz;
And when an alap of Marwa
Swims on slow flute-notes
over
The neighbors' roofs at
sunset
Wordlessly like a lover
It holds me—till the
strain
Of exile, here or there,
Subverts the trance, the fear
Of fear found everywhere.
“But freedom?”
the notes would sing...
Parole is enough. Tonight
Below the fire-crossed sky
Of the
Festival of Light.
Give your soul leave to feel
What distilled peace it can;
In lieu of joy, at least
This
lapsing anodyne.
“The world is a bridge.
Pass over it,
Building no
house upon it.”
Acceptance may come with
time;
Rest, then,
disquieted heart.
And so there it is and I take my leave…..
Dibyendu.
November 24th, 2008.
Montana Diary – A Collection of Pictures
Tomorrow
will open again, the sky wide as the mouth of a wild girl, friable
clouds you lose yourself to. You are lost in miles of land without people,
without
one fear of being found, in the dash of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams.
"Driving