Angelo Caroselli: Allegory of youth and old age. Wikimedia commons
Malashri Lal
‘
Dreaming of Ma by the Sea
YOU live somewhere between the black night and the bright star,
Free of body and its temporal limits.
In green leaves turning to red in a mellow autumn
I catch a glimpse of the saree pallav on that day
You knew life was short and might become shorter.
In the shimmer of an unsteady wave on the lake
I recall your tremulous smile when you whispered trying a hopeless cure,
In the rough hewn rocks that line the harbour,
I remember your will to fight an uneven battle with the rouge cells.
Here, on shores unknown to you and me,
We meet again.
When the dark sky rests on the sparkle of stars,
Living and dying are no longer apart.
(October 2018)
**
Geriatric Paradise
Wheelchairs in orderly circle frame
The words of past ardour
Running offices and corporations
Now forgotten by those
Outside the wheeled circle.
Pages of NYT and the Guardian
Seem stuffed into the slack mouth
Poor eyesight makes them peer at the newsprint
The rustling paper being read or just a cover for the dozing face
Resting after a modest, low cost meal.
The mellow sun warms her feet and back
While she imagines
Grandchildren
Speaking in accents strange
Young ones she has hardly seen except in photos.
Waiting to go
Wanting to live,
Alone among many others
Equally faced with global trends
Of ageing, slowly ageing
Neither bedridden, nor active,
Neither poor, nor rich
Neither forsaken, nor claimed,
They flock to this
Geriatric paradise
For some hours of bliss.
**
In Gandhi’s Shadow
(For Geeta Chandran)
The dancer’s taut body
Bent to the bullets
Of hate embedded in the history
Of my country,
Her body curved into the grace
Of supple Satyagraha
Pangs of hunger
Self induced silence
Never retaliating when violated
By lathi charge, insults, destruction.
The scavengers bent double
To scoop up human waste
While others blocked their nose
And eyes and ears to the wretched poor.
Gandhi watched alone
Stricken to the core by the
Assaults on human dignity.
The dancer’s hands wove subtle ropes
On the invisible charkha
The warp and weft of
India’s Independence
That even today drives us together
And also apart
While Bapu sighs ‘He Ram’.
(28 Nov 2019)
********
Malashri Lal, Professor in the English Department (retd), University of Delhi, has authored and edited sixteen books including the most recent, co-authored with Namita Gokhale, Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (2020). She continues to serve on juries for book awards. Malashri Lal is currently Member, English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi. Her poems and stories have been published in Indian Literature, Confluence, UK, and in anthologies. Her specialization is in literature, women and gender studies.
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