Poems by Praveen Prasad 

The Song That Used to Be in My Pocket 
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With the man in the pocket
singing Tamil songs
I went to town.
 
In the traffic’s rap music,
the sweet “melancholy” of
a crushed man.
 
The threads of the Tamil lyrics
kept breaking till
the song could hardly be heard.
 
When I looked,
I found Ilayaraja*
returning along the Palakkad Pass**
striking a harmony with
the rumble of the highway
plastered on a lorry tyre and
rotating with it.
 
 
*The legendary composer of Tamil film songs.
 
**The Palakkad Pass connects Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It is the major gap in the Western Ghats through which different cultures have been exchanged since time immemorial, especially Tamil culture. It was through this pass that Tamil songs entered Kerala.
 
 
Translated from the Malayalam by Ra Sh
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Praveen Prasad is an upcoming and much appreciated poet from Palakkad, Kerala. He often uses Palakkad slang in his poems, which appear online and in print. He is currently pursuing postgraduation in English at Sree Sankara University of Sanskrit, Kalady.

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​Ra Sh (Ravi Shanker N.) is a poet and translator based in Palakkad, Kerala. He has published four collections of poetry, including Architecture of Flesh and Bullet Train and Other Loaded Poems, and a chapbook, In the Mirror, Our Graves, written jointly  with Ritamvara Bhattacharya. He has also published a play titled Blind Men Write. He has translated several Malayalam poems into English and anthologised them in How to Translate an Earthworm.

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