She: by Udayan Vajpeyi

(These translations have appeared in The Indian Quarterly, Jan–Mar 2018.)



When King Nagnajeet gained victory over the heavens – parlok – Brahma said to him, ‘I can’t send someone who has died back in the same body. But if you make me an image of the person, I will bring it to life.’ Thus, Nagnajeet had a child in his kingdom who had died brought back to life in an image, and came back to earth. These poems, too, are an attempt to bring her back to life – in words. UV



*
She sees me anxiously walking and laughs. Fragments of her laughter scatter like meteors across the Milky Way. I stop walking along the trail. She says, ‘Why is it taking you so long to see that the entire universe is a joke played on you, that there’s no way out of this labyrinth of laughter?’

In the midst of a heavy meteor shower, I bend down by the river and drink a handful of its flowing water.



*
She looks for her lost bracelet in a corner of the universe. I stand on a mountaintop and watch wisps of steam turn into dew. I know her bracelet is still coiled around her wrist. I know that corner of the universe as well. But between me and her is the thick cloud of my being. Between her and me is the light rain of her non-being.

She looks for her bracelet.

I look for her.

This universe, contracting, expanding, turns murky in my tired eyes.



*
She’s drowning in the Milky Way. She’s dissolving in the universe’s immensity. She sits under the shadow of a light pink star and waits for me. Scattered among images of the everyday, almost-drowning in myself, almost-sitting under the shadow of a light yellow solitude, I look for a way to reach her. She gets up. I get up too. The awful universe stretched out between us begins to dissolve somewhere in itself, like smoke. Death smiles, in spite of itself.



*
She looks at me from the distance of my non-being. I look at her from the proximity of her possible-being. She stands in the clear waters of the Milky Way, submerged to her knees. Golden fish come to nibble at her toes. I stand on the body of non-being and knock. She walks the path of possible-being, tires and sits down. There are no angels around her, no apsaras.

From the thread of my sobs she spins her solitude, where shooting stars keep getting caught.



*
Sometimes she whispers from up close. Sometimes she calls from afar. Her voice comes to me sometimes like a tense thread. Sometimes like a slack rope. In the susurrus of the dark night sometimes I get coiled in thread. Sometimes bound in rope. She swims with golden fish in the placid current of the Milky Way. My tears ow sometimes like thread. Sometimes like rope.



*
She arranges stars on the floor of no-where. I look for a way out of the streets of some-where. Her fingerprints on the stars draw the map of my fate, in which who knows how many innocents keep falling, trapped. No matter how I try, I can’t stop this slippage of time. No matter how much she wants, the throbbing of her non-being won’t stop. This interval between me and her, stretched out across the seasons, trembles every now and then.

Every now and then this interval trembles. Across the seasons…