Let there be a resounding distance, let nobody follow me.

Poems :: Mamta Kalia
Translated from Hindi by Carol Blaizy D’Souza

I Want to be Absent

I want to be absent
from there
where even a cent percent presence
is not sufficient
Let me disappear
like the camphor in a pouch
like the spirit left in a bottle
like lightning, wind or clouds
without a trace of an address, location, reason.
Between these and me
let there be a resounding distance
let nobody follow me.

---

By and by as a Girl Grows Up

By and by as a girl grows up
In her way a wall crops up
Revolutionaries say
break the wall
But the girl is sensible and sensitive
She fixes on the wall
pegs of education and employment
And one day
slowly stepping on them
she reaches
the other side of the wall

---

Would You Call This Living

Would you call this living
that in a room many calendars changed
The clock on the wall
ticked, ticked and breathed its last
Who knows how many times
the stove was lit,
how many rotis rolled,
how many vessels washed, only to be soiled again
Beloved on the bed
was happy many times, many times pouted
The cracks on the feet
bound the body’s springing step
Heart continued to fly kite-like
into eternity, in spring
Summers came, summers went
Winters kept rattling bones
Questions on which truth was told
There was an uproar
For holding tongue
the title of a good woman was bestowed
She knows
that silence and cunning have a deep connection
A woman talking never pleases the house
Let her hands and legs silently work
Let her dictionary have only two words
‘Yes, please’ and ‘please, yes’
Then the kids, elders and mother-in-law stay happy

Let her stay installed in the house as the ideal wife
Let her be dejected by the world outside
Whenever she picks up a book and sits with it at night
she thinks
if her true account will ever be written.

---

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time
holding the endless sky in our arms
we would think
how small even this is to be bound to
Today the bed’s sixty-four inches
have fastened the speed
of our life to a prison
And every moment we weigh time
Get up, break the fatigue of the mind and body.

---

The poems have been selected from the collection Khanti Gharelu Aurat (Vani Prakashan, 2004)


Carol Blaizy D’Souza is a poet, translator and teacher from Bangalore.
A collation of her work can be found at linktr.ee/cblaizd