Mounjiba, it was the month of Ashadh

And it had rained ceaseless for days

And the swollen Poorna would not allow you

To cross over to the fields

And take care of the calf newly born to Kashi.

Not that you would not trust Lakkhan;

But in the dead night,

And in such a countryside downpour,

Ghosts of the past become alive

And weave in our scare-swift imaginations

Wild weird designs.

Oftentimes hunger would take a beastly shape

And like cruel destiny

Steal into the cattle-shed.

You remembered

Long ago, maybe forty years ago,

You had made a smoky fire

And thrown in it black gram and dry red chillies

To drive away the pale phantom

That had walked into the frightened pen

When in the dark it was raining so.

The shade had picked up again,

You told us later,

Its really not shuffled scarlet coil;

It had strayed there with all its tigrish desire.

You even suspected Bhimya

Yet vaguely drifting in the dreaded gorge,

He trying to poach upon Kapila.

She was then just a heifer

Most darling to you

And, you said, doing proud to the gods.

She was conceived at Gaodevi

And her birth had brought prosperity to us,

In many ways,

As if the green hours of life had ripened

Into a fruit of rounded perfection.

In it you had grown,

Grown to see beyond the sugarcane fields,

Beyond the group of these ten villages,

Even beyond this double ring of mountains

From where every week you used to fetch firewood.

What seemed until now inaccessible,

Or else magical and occult,

Assumed an updated sharper sense.

You saw Nature in nature,

As a primal force that gives character to us,

A personality,

A poised dignity to master

Events, and such torrential rains.

The mute paths in the jungle

Suddenly led you to newer hillsides.

About the sleeping seeds in ploughed fields,

And the animals, and the birds,—

The spirit’s secrets you learnt from quieter voices.

Surely you live in such confidence,—

Yet you wonder if Lakkhan

Would light a smoky fire in the cowpen.

But then Kashi’s calf has reassured your faith

In the efficacy of the season

And your instinct acquired another strength,—

That life was not born to be haunted,

But to deliver in time

Another calf in the pasture

Around the ancient Gaodevi temple.

 

 

RY Deshpande

9 June 1996

Mounjiba had joined our large village-household about a hundred years ago when he was hardly a ten-year old boy, and lived with us whole of the rest of his life of about sixty; he died in the lap of my grandmother. Mounjiba saw the ups and downs of the family, and laughed and wept in the naturalness of its members. As a kid I’d heard from him any number of bed-time stories and fables which the books later told me were from Aesop. Who knows? I do not know wherefrom he had picked them up, nor the art of cattle-breeding and care. An occult master with small twinkling eyes, he seemed to know things immediately, a knowledge that comes from identification with what one is associated. Once he had to carry an errand to an acquaintance in the neighbouring village. On reaching the place the host asked him, “Mounjiba, you have come without wearing a shirt.” Mounjiba replied, “But Aai did not tell me to wear a shirt.” Now that generation lives no more.