Original work: Smt Banaja Devi
Translator: Uday Kanungo [Guest contributor]
KAJALAPATI
Your black-beautied body grips the champa boughs
And sometimes, perched alone, you gaze, so entranced and spellbound;
You sit hidden amid a tangle of leaves, akin to a flower
Which the sky, extending a curling fist, seeks as if to pluck.
Your flight causes a crease in the air, on the water a shadow is thrown
That shadow someone, somewhere harbours, with a fervent love;
Your dulcet sounds, your languid hoverings, inking some silhouette
In the open, blue stage, as if a mellow concert of Jal Tarang flows.
O companion of my sight, how limitless your friendship
Never asks, never leans, never stabs with a demand;
Small is your body, but you possess none of my pettiness
Of charming beauty, of melodic sweetness, you, Great Bird, the symbol!
Hey, Kajalapati, when you settle on the window sill
The child inside me bursts out dancing in the greatest of joys.
SHANKHACHEEL
How I left you behind, amidst the Palmyra groves of my distant village
In the charming dusks of my sinless childhood, and adolescence;
And how this quicksand of time has cloaked you since
And yet, my faraway friend, I’m unable to forget you!
No more is seen your white throat in the polluted skies
Elated, brimming with impulsive joy, groups of boys used to cry;
“Shankhacheel, namaskar! Namaskar!” ; no more are heard their cries
There only circles a vulture, searching for scraps of decayed corpses.
Forlorn is the heart! It cannot endure another soul immersed in itself
Birds, and nature, today to him, are images, replicas, objects of guile;
In the depths of your heart, parched of love – was it in pride, or insulted
That you took your leave, sank into the backdrop, in self-exile?
You – once the messenger of dreams, the symbol of purity – Shankhacheel!
Today, merely in museums conserved, moulded from earth, a facsimile.
[Translator’s note: : Smt. Banaja Debi is an acclaimed Odiya poet, novelist and short story writer who has consistently written and published her fiction for five decades. A veteran Odiya author, she won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award in 2003 and the coveted Sarala Award for her contributions to the literature of Odisha. She lives with her family in Bhubaneswar, Odisha and continues to write as prolifically as when she started as a young teenager.]
onubaad 