INDIEN / MEGHALAYA
My name is Khasi.
Though I teach at a university
and my subject is English,
I read Khasi newspapers,
which you say is yellow journalism;
I write Khasi books,
which you say are biblia abiblia,
books that are not books.
And worse, I speak to Khasis in Khasi,
so common among rustics,
the unschooled and the uncouth.
My compatriots!
Do not scorn me for being regressive;
not fashionable.
That English is our survival
and growth in modern life,
how can I deny?
But what are we,
having lost our mother tongue?
...
‘You going ne em?’
‘You know ei, ngam ju lah decide khlem da think te ei.’
‘Then decide wut wut seh ei, what’s taking you so long ei?’
‘Hooid ei, it’s a very bad habit … tomorrow thik thik mo ei?’
Or this:
‘You know, ei, my mom made tungtap yesterday, so sat!’
...
Are we a complete human being
speaking a complete language?
Mother tongue is
the sound of our life,
the root of our existence.
Let us nourish this root
and build our life upwards;
from here, they must grow,
the trunk and branches
of all other languages.
The worst thing we can do
is to groom the trunk and branches
without watering the root.
Ieit la ka jong, burom ïa kiwei:
love one’s own, respect the others.
How can we be cut off from our people,
their hearts and minds?
When I declined an invitation
for lunch because
I had to mow the grass,
my friends laughed.
‘Are you a mali, then?
Or a cattle rearer, perhaps?’
Mowing the grass,
trimming the trees,
weeding the flower bed,
keeping the body in shape,
filling the mind
with lovely thoughts.
Mowing the grass,
grooming the earth.
Oh, the beauty of mowing the grass!
Little did I know
when caged cities are flattened,
when homes and hospitals,
when schools and churches and camps
teeming with women and children
are bombed out of existence,
and the bodies of thousands
upon thousands
are blown to pieces
for the crime of some
(if fighting for freedom is a crime),
in the language of genociders,
it is merely
mowing the grass.
Oh, the horror of mowing the grass!
What devilish hand or heart
has twisted such lovely words
so devilishly out of shape?
(After Josh Paul)
We are both against occupation
and for it.
We are both against ethnic cleansing
and for it.
We are both against genocide
and for it.
We are both against terrorism
and for it.
We are both against Nazism
and for it.
We are both for freedom
and against it.
This is the language
of terrorist states and superpowers.
When we do evil,
everything is white.
When they do evil,
everything is black.
Let evil be evil;
only then can we hope
to defeat evil.
I keep hearing this line from a song:
‘... be gentle with yourself’.
How can I be gentle with myself?
There’s an irrational fellow inside me,
who quarrels with women and children.
Excitable and unreasonable,
always going off half-cocked:
he’s a pressure cooker with a malfunctioning valve.
Always unstable:
he’s a boulder on the edge of a precipice.
One day he will fall to his doom.
His anger with its thunders and lightnings,
its tree-uprooting winds and whipping rains,
is most despicable.
When it blazes, it scorches,
excoriating like a child abuser’s whip,
with a tongue spiked with words
drawn from the cesspit.
And friends fall away from him
like hailstones from the clouds.
His lust has brought me to the brinks of ruin;
his cowardice has dumped me in the pits of despair;
his insomniac angst has wrecked my health.
I despise this pigheaded fool,
this aggressive, impulsive half-human—
small in body, small in mind,
ugly of face, ugly of heart.
It seems there’s another irrational fellow,
hating the irrational fellow inside me.
How can I be gentle with myself?
Shall I say, thank you for your natural charisma,
which has attracted admirers
and lovers throughout your life?
Thank you for being so active and dynamic:
haven’t you climbed the ladder of life
with its snakes and slippery rungs because
you are strong, and at times, contradictorily,
you are brave and fearless?
A consoler and solver of people’s problems,
thank you for being so generous and caring.
Your love extends beyond this mystical woman,
to birds and bees, to stones and trees.
Thank you for this pantheistic heart.
With such a heart,
will we not try to save the earth?
And thank you for your empathy:
it has given us such creative gifts!
All the good people
with their prayer books and their greed,
their gods and their genocidal deeds,
show them what they are,
show them what you think,
then put them where they belong,
in the garbage pit of memory.
Forget all the pettiness and all the petty people:
the men with their prejudicial awards;
the women with their tyrannical syllabi.
Though they seem like this yellow pollen
sticking everywhere, staining everything,
the first spring rains will wash them away;
you will see them no more.
Like the rains, our blessings have their seasons;
your season is imminent!
Dwell on the youths, overheard in eating places:
‘Because of Funeral Nights, I’m a born again Khasi.’
The young are the moment and the morrow.
As they say, ‘You have written a forever book!’
You belong with them.
...
Will I be able to be gentle with myself,
if I comfort my soul
with many such self-soothing caresses?
In abusing and praising ourselves,
we tend to go too far.
I will at least, forgive myself.
Some zealots are sending me a message:
‘Let us pray for Israel’.
With deep anguish, I think
of our people’s Three Commandments,
especially two:
Live in the knowledge of man and God.
Earn your virtue.
I wonder if praying for Israel
is living in the knowledge of man and God
or earning my virtue.
I will certainly not pray for genocide;
I will certainly not pray for ethnic cleansing;
I will certainly not pray for the evil from hell
unleashed upon the earth.
A great remorse washes over me;
a great abhorrence overwhelms me
that these—my people—
should idolise devilishness for virtue.
You keep asking me,
‘What if you find someone else?’
Am I a tree in the prime of time?
Are blossoms adorning my branches
for the first time?
I’m old and gnarled:
if not despised,
then not admired.
‘Tell me the truth!’
Let’s have another look at the tree.
It’s true, blossoms still come
and fruits, in their season.
It’s true that some
are mesmerised by the blossoms,
tempted by the fruits.
There are lovely faces, too,
peeping at the windows of my heart.
There is even one
with a leg over the windowsill.
They see a goddess
sitting cross-legged
at the centre of the room
in deep meditation.
She is praying for the butchered
children of Gaza,
for peace in the world, knowing
there is peace between us.
The peeping ladies
withdraw in tiptoes.
Smile now.
The genociders
have their evil supervillains;
I have only you.
This is not a book of poems
but a monument, Nameri.
Pain and anguish,
hopelessness and despair,
grievances and tears
have gone into its making.
Listen, and you will hear from them
their songs of lament.
But even if the earth shakes with fury,
unshakable, this monument, Nameri:
I have built it for you, foot by foot,
with the stones of love and longing.
Its labour is joy
and eternal its glow:
I have glazed it
with the lustre of hope,
the sheen of dreams,
the glimmer of visions
and ‘strange apparitions’.
Engraved on it,
our twin souls,
on the edge of a gentle slope,
over a vast, shimmering land.
I have no idea exactly when
‘loving you’ happened.
You and I met on passageways;
chatted on the phone.
Then you became a benefactress,
dropping poems like coins,
which I collected
with the eagerness of a beggarman.
One day, something sprouted in my heart;
I looked closely at it—used a magnifying glass.
I wanted to root it out, but a voice said,
‘It may be a rare plant.’
And then you became Ka Krem Pubon,
the magical dwelling of fairies,
and I lost myself in you again and again.
After a year or so,
the little plant sprouting
from the barren wilderness
became a flowering tree.
But do not give me that look—
the tree in my heart
will never cast a shadow on your life.
You respond to my poems
with a poem.
I yahooed in sheer joy
like Shami Kapoor in his song.
Your poetry has touched me
as mine has touched you.
I see you in peach trees
flowering everywhere.
Oh, Nameri, in you
I have met my other half!
In the deep woods of life,
you are my sheltering hut.
You envisage a volume of poetry
that consecrates to the world your memory,
the essence of what I see.
Your dream is my labour.
Night and day,
I will toil;
amidst sickness and health,
I will toil.
I will take my amorphous words of clay;
I will model them into a sculpture of you,
but such a one that even you
will catch your breath to see.
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is a poet from Meghalaya. He works as a Deputy Director of publications, at North Estern Hill University, Shillong, India.
