Poems by Devi Prasad Mishra
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Lone Man Sleeping
Bone-tired one day as I stood facing a decrepit hotel’s reception I felt as if the entire hotel building was on the verge of collapse. The receptionist said that the room I would occupy was on the first floor. I casually asked her if there was also a third or a fourth floor in the building. She didn’t reply. I wanted to talk to her but it was not easy to figure out what she wanted. The bell-boy had carried my luggage upstairs. He was relieved to see someone come by and stop over at the hotel. Going up the wooden stairs I felt as if I could hear the voices of my being which I hadn’t heard until then. I wasn’t very familiar with my voices— or with their echoes and gloom. They were of a man who couldn’t be with anyone and whom nobody gave company. Although mopped and sprayed with air freshener the room reeked of its earlier occasional occupants. A tacky blanket over me in a tacky hotel, I lay still. Suddenly I sensed someone else breathing inside my blanket. Then I smelt the stink of someone else’s sweat. Then I saw someone else’s strands of hair stuck to the blanket. It seemed someone else was lying next to me. I could feel the foul smell of despair trapped inside the blanket. A confluence. A yearning. A lamentation. Fatigue. I felt as though someone was either resting before embarking on an odyssey or not in the mood to get up after completing one. I felt as though I cared more about his sleep than my own. Translated from the Hindi by Sarabjeet Garcha The Man and the Tree When I heard a knock at my door I thought it was the wind. I opened the door for the wind. But through the door I’d opened for the wind I could see light coming in and an old man standing at the threshold. He stooped. Maybe his head touched the jamb above and when the door opened he almost tripped. Steadying himself he said he had assumed that the door wouldn’t open. I thought it was the wind at the door, I said. I’ve always wanted to be the wind, he said. I had often seen that old man. One day I found him sitting under a neem tree. He gave me such a look that I stood up looking back at him. As if delivering breaking news, he told me that the complex had twenty-three children. I found this pursuit of his interesting. Some other day when word broke that India had successfully tested its nuclear missile he said that the twenty-three children in the complex had agreed to count the leaves of a single jamun tree. I wondered how he could be so original. When I ran into him another day he said he was busy accumulating life. When I stared at him he said he didn’t mean he was thinking about death or how many people would turn up at his funeral. He used to wear loose clothes and walk very slowly. One evening he wanted to know how the fear of crossing a road in Delhi had surpassed the doubt of crossing the globe. One night as I was watching children play cricket in the park under the light of a halogen lamp he emerged from the darkness and said he could never hit a sixer all his life. Whenever he tried he was caught out. Why? he asked and then answered the question himself: I lacked balance, but what does one accomplish with balance? One day he said that it is critical for the ball to be lost during a game. Another day when I opened the door he appeared to be stooping more than before. He said, You play loud music. I couldn’t figure out if he liked it or hated it. I said, What do you want? He said, I don’t know. He came in and sat down, then asked, Is this your whimpering? The music, I mean. Then he asked, Is this your laughter? The music, I mean. I said, I haven’t thought about music in this manner. I thought he would ask for a CD of songs. But he pulled out an ordinary recorder from his pocket. He said he had recorded the wind passing through the jamun tree and birds twittering. The room echoed with the sounds of the wind and the birds. Suddenly a bunch of children gathered at the door and said to the old man, We’ve finished the leaf-counting assignment—the jamun tree has three thousand, three hundred and sixty-five leaves. The old man was overjoyed. As though good news could be heard more than once, he made to the door and said, How many leaves in the jamun tree did you say? Translated from the Hindi by Sarabjeet Garcha |
Devi Prasad Mishra is a poet, storyteller and filmmaker. Jidhar Kuchh Nahin (Where Nothing Is) is his latest collection of poems, and Manushya Hone Ke Sansmaran (Memoirs of Being Human) his first collection of experimental stories. He has received the Bharat Bhushan Smriti Samman, Sharad Billore Samman, and Sanskriti Samman. In 2009, he received the National Award for one of his documentary films on social issues. In 1993, the Illustrated Weekly of India featured him among the 13 Indians who had made a definitive impact on life. His 18-minute film Satat (Continued) was featured at the Cannes Film Festival in the Short Film Corner. Yeh Sab Isliye Ki (All This Becase) is his documentary on the rebellious poet Jyotsana, now no more. He has also made documentaries on Nazeer Akbarabadi, Mahadevi Verma and Devi Shankar Awasthi.
Sarabjeet Garcha is a poet, editor, translator and publisher. His five books of poems include All We Have, A Clock in the Far Past and Lullaby of the Ever-Returning, in addition to a volume each of poems translated from Marathi and prose from Hindi. He has translated several American poets into Hindi, including W.S. Merwin and John Haines, and several Indian poets into English, among them Mangalesh Dabral and Leeladhar Jagoori. He has received the Fellowship for Outstanding Artists from the Government of India, the International Publishing Fellowship from the British Council, and the Godyo Podyo Probondho Award. His poems have been translated into German, Spanish, Russian, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi and Hindi. He is the founder and editorial director of Copper Coin (www.coppercoin.co.in), a multilingual publishing company based in Delhi NCR.
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