#1
My dead twentieth-century Refugee,Your letter reached me on the night of1967 –Probably writing from somewhere in North Bengal,Your last letter.
Your initial lines still as unreadable,Final lines just as your self,How your words had graduallyAscendedInto your overwhelming sense ofShame, sorrow, and fire.Each word a burning stone.My fingers burnt.
It took you almost thirty years,After that,To hang yourself
And me to swallow the cindersLeft behind.
Federico,Is shame still a revolutionary sentiment?
On our journey of the twenty-first,We’ve collectively chosenTo distribute ourselves.
#2
Somewhere you wrote: DespedidaIf I die leave the balcony open!
Did you really fall off the train,Federico?And the streetlight took your life.The cannabis in your blood?Probably enough for one lifetime.
Strange that it should rain today,The pond’s unusually green…I received your news,
Sudden,
In the morning.
No one dare utter a wordYet they spoke…You moved away in proud purity.
There is no shame, Federico.No one cries.Whether you smiled or shied away,
I wouldn’t know.I’m only imagining…
It was a fine monsoon eveningThe last timeI talked to your brother –
His poems have been erasedfor lack of space.Will he write anymore?
I hope he refuses to perform the funeral rites…
Dukham, Federico. Smoke fills my eyes.
#3
It’s been a year,almost,since the breaches were somehowresolved.We converged somewhere,and wrote a thousand lines after that,
but, just six lines for each other,or may be seven.
You talked about the villages in Manipur,how are they?
There is a paranoia about povertyin the cities,and our villages always get in the way…
The other day,someone pointed out the differencebetween sentiments and ideologies,if you want to know how I am doing.
While figuring out the gaps between our fingers,and our crisisof time and space,
I still manage to listen to read in between…
#4
If it was 16th or 17th,I’ll never know.And, you talk to me of precision…What of forgetfulness,Federico?What of convenience?
That it was past midnight,and we were singing…You had started writing alreadyas they threatened and left us.
The forces will come down tonight.
That they did.And, it was 2 in the night,early 17th –
Hope Aurobindo remembers our cries.
Violence overpowers,Federico,and my ideas are failing.While focusing so hard on one,I am missing out on so many.
I’ve even thought of dying,just so you know,
The thought of being chasedis so black-and-white.
While I’ll never be able to figure outthe players,I know I’ll be,and one day,
Our poems will stop being enough.
#5
One lakh walked for us today,Federico.It’s been raining ever since.What of fear,I wondered –I have always been scaredto raise slogans –As scared as I’ve beento kill you.
My cousin asked when we’ll walklike thisagain.A procession, he called it,
and he’s schizophrenic too.
You’ve been in Manipur all this while.Has it been the same?
The open skies, the stuffy quarters,I’ve forgotten to write about them.
The one lakh prepared words of change,Federico…Of love and struggleYou once talked of.How you were scared,like me,to cry ‘Azadi!’
Tonight I know I can write to you,end wherever,and care not.
Tonight I know one lakh have cried ‘Azadi!’
#6
In all probability,Federico,this is my final letter to you.About what happened to our colony,I inquired.Rumours have it they killed themselves.
And, our neighbourhood three year oldgirlprobably cried herself to death,
While you and I were abroadsewing a patchwork of bourgeois dreams.
Mass funeral, Federico,and like a festival,they died,
And, we,like wax mannequinsdidn’t quite stand apart from the fire.They burnt together
the night we whispered blowsto commemorate our final goodbye.
I haven’t been to your Manipur in a while…Do they still have curfews at night?
While desperately yearning to bein two places at once,my passport has been burntin the colony fire,
along with my grandmother.
And, you, Federico,are still so quiet…
***
(The italicized lines in #2 do not belong to the poet. They’re from Meena Alexander’s ‘Central Park, Carousel’.)