Editor’s Choice
D. Vinayachandran ( Malayalam Poet)
The Studio
She is nude
if you call the flower freshly blossomed nude.
She,
soft as a rose apple.
Round her
is a yellow snake.
Its head
touching the right of the belly button,
moves up between the breasts,
round the shoulder
and down back from around
the right shoulder,
now round the right breast,
now round the left breast,
and then up from behind
five times loosely around the neck,
once tight round the trunk above the breasts,
covering the nipples,
and then up back from the forehead,
and again down back
eight times round the buttock
to disappear
down beneath
the navel.
She is awake.
Her lower half is termite-infested.
On her right thigh,
in the part clear of termite cover,
is a blood spot.
Snake slough in the left leg.
Blood-stained sheaths
between the parted thighs.
She has the .eyes of a snake.
Her head is the garuda
that bites at a thousand hoods.
The left palm a blooming triangle
with fingers turning into boughs
that partly cover the sun.
The fingers of the right palm’
brushing the stars gently
as on the strings of alyre.
She is awake
in the canvas that fills the room.
On the canvas
a distant forest stream down left,
an idle monkey sitting on a tree stump on the bank
and an angel with outstretched wings on the tree.
The gaze quickly slips off .
The frightening whirlwind
in the sea of her navel.
She is awake.
In front of the canvas a women of fifteen , asleep
in the room
Littered with things.
She is Naked
A spider walks gently
across her back.
She is sleeping
and sleep,
is sweating.
Another corner of the room,
he, his back against all this
drawing this picture
of a mother suckling her baby.
The flitter of heavenly love in the mother’s eves
and the baby’s ecstasy.
he has copied it all.
Near him are a few coffee mugs
with the coffee undrunk,
gone cold.
A cat comes,
licks at the heels
of the sleeping woman,
meows,
ignores the world-lost artist,
and wags its tail
to see the big paining
of the snake-entwined woman.
The wind knocks down
the flower-vase on the sill
and the cat leaps out
The garuda’s head,
the snake’s eye,
and the whirl windy sea
are all awake
in the canvas
filling the room.
On the floor
the woman asleep
bends her right leg,
presses her right palm
against her right breast.
She is asleep
in a pool of sweat.
He has started painting,
the right breast of the mother
for the suckling baby
to rest his left hand on.
Outside loiters
the daylight of a Sunday
that has not declared a holiday for itself.
Translated from (he Malayalam by P.P. Raveendran )
ADVENT
A desert
Grows slowly into our midst.
Those who listen to the song of the moonshine
Don’t hear the gentle sigh beneath the soil.
They don’t realise that
Singed by it children cry out all on a sudden
Leaving aside their toys with numbers and figures.
It’s true
Swinging their legs splashing
In the water of the river,
The male and the female
Share the permeating fragrance
Of the lone lotus
Beyond the seven skies.
The mountain
Climbing
Up and up
Opening the star-threshold
Becomes a wing
To the other shore of darkness .
But we
Get into Jalaluddin’s car
Split a pill in two and give one portion
To Gradpa Augusthy
Meeraben’s pigeons disappear
In the billowing smoke from the factory.
On the bitter gourd
Little worms and pesticides.
Thus
Unaware of the advent of its warriors
The sarod, the clock and the Sindhu scripts
Climb aboard the ship on expedition
To Atlantis.
As one drinks the water kept in the fridge
Together with the novelty of infatuation
The festive flags of the oncoming
Big festival of the desert
Has already been hoisted.
Yet poets
Seek the message of deliverance
Putting their ears to their Sweethearts’ bellies
In the midst of the storm of suppressed ire
A nestling ventures out on a flight lesson.
The tears of
The lone traveller sitting in the cemetery
Prays ‘0 Universe
Give me too a wave to ride on
To escape drowning in your ocean.’
But the shadows that bade farewell
To the trees
Push the gate open with the wheel-barrow
Of the coffin-maker
The desert has already made
A strategic advance into our minds
Without any warning.
Curfew for love
The rocket of the extremist
Into the Holy Eucharist
Chemical and biological warfare
In amorous unions
Guard of honour
For the celebrity guest
With the wounds sustained
By those remained.
The body doesn’t get wet
Even after dipping in the river.
Pilgrims animal-chariots
Tree-priests blazing moonbeams
Pretty little handbells
The so-called globe-trotting youths!
And the crazy Thoma whose gospel
From the rubbish-heap proclaims himself
As the anti-Christ
All become the sirens presaging catastrophe.
The several layers of the desert sands and deconstruction
Like an election notification
The heir to several million graves
Is the lord of the earth.
Again
From among the skulls scattered aroud
A sunrise
The seven leaves
That seek the branch of a tree
The stream of milk that seek
The nipple of love.
Every week
Good Friday3 devoid of sleep.
Translated from Malayalam by AJ Thomas
References
1. ‘Ulakam Chuttunna Valiban’ is the original line. Ulakam Suttrnm Valiban is the name of a blockbuster Tamil HIm starring the legendary MGR, who, even though in his late fiHties, played the role of the hero in his early twenties, provoking the Malayalee genius to cynical witticisms, calling any youth-aspiring, ageing fop, ‘Ulakam Chuttum Valiban’-literally, a youth who is a globe-trotter.
2. ‘Thoma’ is a derogratory diminutive of “Thomas’. Sometimes it is indicative of condescending familiarity and often a pet form of address.
3. The Malayalam equivalent of Good Friday is Dukha Velliyazhcha, or Grief’s Friday, obviously referring sensibly to the day Christ died a horrible death.
Dusk
o does the sun fade, does the dusk
fall all of a sudden? I have not
yet started washing my soiled clothes;
my thought flies somewhere looking for
ears of com and today not even a single
chempaka flower did I to put
On your lovely dark hair, nor was I able
to sing the song that I had scribbled
in the heart of my heart for you,
my smelly sweat has not dried yet;
then why did you come uninvited
o dusk fuming grief?
Psychokinesis
The pig, myopic in the sun,
felt its way sniffing
and rubbed its snout
against the legs
of the lady typist.
Gaurishankar and I
engaged in repairing the clock
went to the shop selling
watermelons under the poomarulhu’.
Over there above the dense foliage
unknown migratory birds
fluttered restlessly.
chempaka- a flowering, shady tree.
Two girls who came
riding a scooter enquired,
while drinking the melon juice,
about the ayah, the known
abortionist.
When we returned to the office
Helen Mathews spoke about
the new researches into ESP.
Do you believe that the mind
is made of invisible molecules?
Oommen Varghese stood
leaning against her and asked.
Out in the grove
the growl and commotion
of cats mating.
I am the sea that went on fire
before the darkness was on,
and would continue to be on fire
even when the darkness has ended.
Requests for leave
from the souls not present
ejaculations in sleep,
the formless spirits
so long on a journey
from dead stars
shaking one from sleep.
A revenue stamp for
twenty paise, fast-food,
STD, a TV serial
in thirteen episodes, the papanasini
everything cirumambulates.
Still
seeing the armpits of
Jawharunnisa raising
her arms for books,
my hand writes goblin
in my pants-pocket.
D. Vinayachandran ( 13 May 1946 – 11 February 2013)
was one of the most influential modern poets writing in Malayalam today. He has published six volumes of poems, one collection of short stories and a play and has won many prestigious literary awards. He teaches Malayalam language and literature at the the School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam.