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Hemant Divate
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Pedru Uncle Pedru Uncle Every one of your extremities had begun to resist Your wooden armchair The ashtray for stubbing your beedis Your commode The fluttering pages of your frayed Bible And the one surviving framed icon of Christ Even now, I can see you Pulling uneasily on your beedis Coughing and keening in your armchair What life was left was hard to take But even in your piteous state, you could not but Mope all over your room No word seemed to leave Your shaky lips Even the nicotine exhalations from your mouth Seemed paralyzed, like you Prayers babbled in your head There, in front of the framed Christ Your whole body burbled A last psalm for yourself, and for us, perhaps You used to ask everyone What’s up with you? At the time, I did nothing But poetry You used to say You are mad But you loved to read my poems With great interest You used to say When I was in college I used to write poems But that was because of madness Poetry makes you weak, my son The day I left writing I left worrying about others And I became the strongest man All your life, you found no one to be with you All your life, you remained orphaned No one loved you And now, The words of the Bible, hardly legible In the light of a zero watt bulb You too have faded away In the thoughts of almost everyone Beyond the rusted bars of your window You could probably see Day turn into night Probably make out what time it was There was no one you could wait for And if you did, it would only be to realize The seasons had changed Beyond the rusted bars of your window And when, shedding like a leaf You found yourself In your last moments All alone, Could you then burble The last psalm to Jesus In your head? Uncle You, who belonged to nobody Who would you be thinking of? And if you looked back at your own life What part of it was worth remembering? Now When I think of you I feel It could be my time to keel over too But I’m still hanging on Because I’m mad, uncle I still write poems I’m mad. What happened to language? What happened to the language? of the boy sucking on a sugarcane stick. What happened to his language, this vagabond, rolling an old tyre all over his village? What happened to the everyday tongue of this little boy, playing thabu and marbles? What happened to the language of the child who loved surparambya, gilli-danda, lagori, tops, mummy-daddy, doctor-doctor? What happened to this free bird who lustily blew his whistle during the jatra? This brawling boy, who played appa-rappi and cricket with a ball of rags? What happened? The same boy, who spoke with his own friends later, self-conscious of his obviously ghati tongue. What happened to his language? Kaay zhaala? |
Hemant Divate is a poet, editor, publisher and translator. He is the founder-editor of the Marathi little magazine Abhidhanantar, which was published uninterruptedly for 18 years. Abhidhanantar has been credited for providing a solid platform to new poets and for enriching the post-nineties Marathi literary scene. Divate is credited with changing the Marathi literary scene through Abhidhanantar and the Indian English poetry scene through his imprint Poetrywala. He is the author of six poetry collections in Marathi. Divate’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Slovak, Japanese, Persian, Maltese, Serbian, Turkish, Slovenian, Greek, Galician, Hindi and many Indian languages. In translation, he has a book each in Spanish, Irish, Arabic, German and Estonian apart from four in English. His poems figure in numerous anthologies in Marathi and English. Divate has participated in numerous international poetry and literature festivals across the globe. His publishing house, Paperwall Media & Publishing, has published (under its imprint Poetrywala) more than 100 poetry collections. Hemant lives and works in Mumbai.
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