Poems :: Babusha Kohli
Translated by Rituparna Sengupta
Advice to Self
Have compassion for the writer of bad poems
for poetry is always a sign of vitality,
Think of it this way:
Even in these bleak times, someone wants to keep living
Don’t laugh at the person
whose knowledge of directions is limited
to the four corners of his phone’s screen:
For actually, he suggests the prospect of life
even on planets without water
Thank the man who had pushed you:
You could have fallen flat on your face
But instead of your being flung to the ground,
the sky today resounds with the flutter of your wings
Spend your time with he who waits for you:
Some day you will realise that except for him
no one else on this earth needs you
No matter how stained,
before baring your body to your lover, bare your soul
Behold the world with a child’s gaze
Don’t close your eyes in sleep alone
Meet the rivers like a musician
Before confronting the army of intellectuals
don the armour of silence
Go to the wise with questions
Go to the foolish with love
Walk to the Buddha in your sleep
And when Death arrives, face him awake
Crowds throng the bazaar
Devices for glossy living are on sale:
Swords safes spoons
Silver sandalwood silk
Threads of so many hues
And stolen trifles too
But dammit! Not a needle to be found
to pierce the soul’s flesh:
Tears are the blood of the unseen;
The whole world is stricken with drought
Since the needle is lost
one last word of advice:
Don’t go searching the bazaar
for the needle lost in the room
A Few Verbs
Biting: of Hide
Given to protecting the soft, pink soles of the feet
from thorns and gravel,
Why do shoes one day suddenly bite into feet?
Only new shoes indulge in this deed,
Is what most researchers have always believed
The illustrious history of shoes
sways around Ibn Batuta 1 and marches forward
On the shelf of art, shoes lie neatly displayed:
from Van Gogh to Galsworthy;
This is the third appearance of shoes for me as well
(After two other poems in the years past)
Regarding these important objects of daily use
we still don’t quite understand:
That for all its defence against the stones and gravel of the world,
What makes hide bite into hide?
This puzzle of shoes and soles could be solved perhaps
by closely observing a love story:
Although blisters cause some people to opt for shoes of a different size,
they cause some others to walk their whole lives barefoot
(A reference to the popular Hindi children’s rhyme ‘Batuta ka joota’—’The Shoe of Batuta’—composed by the poet Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena)
Hiding: In Memory
Frisky waves hide away in their play
names etched on sand, in the seabed
You search the shore for washed out letters
or those two dots drawn below the name, to the right
Your existence finds anchor in some philosophy:
How one day everything gets wiped out
Had you seen the hoofprints of a hippopotamus in water,
you would have known:
That nothing is ever erased from the earth’s memory
The body too is an earth
Sand lost in the depths of waters
often surfaces in your eyes—
So dry and scorching,
it could blister the soles of your dreams
If by mistake sleep ever gets drenched
Then that very name spills onto the pillow
which some frisky waves in their play
had hidden away in the seabedA Few Verbs
Disappearing: Of veins
The guy at the pathology lab tells me:
‘Your vein’s nowhere to be found!’
What can I say?
In the book of life, there are many places
I have bookmarked with my veins
If those pages could be read
even without the needle’s prick,
Then the probe might succeed
The Fourth Man
(for Kahlil Gibran)
The Fourth Man
for Kahlil Gibran
There were four men.
The first—full of words:
Not from his mouth alone
but even his eyes-nose-ears
words would always drip.
On a mound of words he stood;
He knew the Gita by heart,
but of Krishna he had no clue.
The second—full of meaning:
Forever inventing definitions
and holding forth on
politics-geography-meteorology-astronomy-
-heaven-hell-love-art-mystery;
Relentlessly searching meaning, his gaze
would assess my swells and curves.
The third—full of silence:
Forehead gleaming with sandalwood paste
Countless crowds thronged his silence
and worshipped him
From his taut face it seemed
like he was strangling his tongue
Barring his tongue
all the rest of his body spoke;
His silence was a din.
And then there was a fourth man—
full of emptiness:
Kneeling down
he would gaze at the sky
His empty eyes brimming
and alluring—
like the moon
draws lunatics—
I was drawn to him
Into his emptiness
I plunged
One within the other
yet we were two
Our snug skin soon transformed into
such a fine silken sheet
That the winds flew through it
Rains made it their destination
And even between our snug skin
we left that empty space empty
And now in this empty space:
Squirrels hop about
Cuckoos come to sing
Butterflies get their colours
The moon’s phases stop by to rest
Here wine is ever flowing
And springs are bursting forth,
While a dervish holds up the sky with one hand
with another balances the earth
And on his own axis
keeps spinning
round and round…
Baabusha Kohli is a Hindi poet and writer. Her published books include three poetry collections, one prose-poetry collection, two creative non-fiction collections, and one novel. She received the Navlekhan Award for emerging writers from Bharatiya Jnanpith for her poetry collection, Prem Gilahri Dil Akhrot in 2015. The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan of Madhya Pradesh also conferred upon her the Vaagishwari Award for her prose-poetry collection, Baavan Chitthiyaan in 2018. Her writing has been translated into multiple languages. She also has two short films to her credit as writer and director. She teaches English in Kendriya Vidyalaya, Jabalpur.
Rituparna Sengupta is a literary translator, writer, teacher, and scholar. She has translated select poetry and short fiction by Amrita Pritam, Gauhar Raza, Mirza Azim Beg Chugtai, Rashid Jahan, Sumana Roy, Adnan Kafeel ‘Darwesh’, and Baabusha Kohli between Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi and English. Previously, her translations of Baabusha Kohli’s poems have appeared in Hakara and Modern Poetry in Translation. She teaches at O P Jindal Global University
