Night descends grudgingly Over my town. In smoky July, The breeze is a rustling Scrape of sand paper Rubbing against the face of A barren sky.
Like bored coquettes, Stars lean against the walls of night Faking a smile on their made up faces And whispering light.
The evasive clouds Drift away sheepishly Beyond the distant cliffs, I don't know why -- But clouds have turned here Strangely reclusive This July.
They say that the warm ocean-currents Have sucked them dry, Leaving them ineffectual, hollow, So, the clouds now sail languidly Across a grey July sky --
Declaring their presence In impotent rumbles, stray gusts, In spiralling dust columns, And scarce drops that become vapour Against my window pane Before the clouds slinked by!
I know not why But the clouds seem to Elude my town this July!!
AT LAST THE RAINS CAME
At last the rains came on a July midday In mild currents first, And then in angry torrents, Washing the paan stains And the blotchy paints off the walls,
Filling the potholes on the Bruised streets, Overflowing the gutters, Cleansing polythene and plastics It cluttered on the sidewalks.
The rain came finally, Carrying the smell of rotten garbage Dead leaves, sodden earth, and Soaked paper boats in Stale puddles.
At last, the rain spilled from a leaden sky In tiny spikes of molten warmth Pricking the skin, travelling Into my blood, like a coaxing reptile, Looping my parched desires And my desiccated dreams.
At last the July clouds broke over The row of bald hills, And rain came down to my thirsting window In driving grey spills.
*paan -- betel leaf
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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Look not for me in the sunlit path. Look for me In a honey-hued forest Where I gather the pieces of my soul Fallen apart under clouds Hanging from an ash-painted sky, Where the chill flutters and flits On the dead wings of a butterfly.
Look not for me in the Glimmering morning meadow But by the crumpled ribbon Of a starlit river That has lost its way to the sea, Where the wind like a wayward spirit Whispers to the tired trees.
I do not move in the sunlit path Circling the castle coated in ancient clime, I saunter along its crooked corridors Where the echo of a strangled melody Settles firm on the walls of old time.
Look not for me by a pleasant door Opening to the sunlit lane, I am a misbegotten shadow, Waiting to crawl into the purple twilight On the cracked window pane.
From Public Domain
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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The Chaitra koel's routine visit to the Lone mango tree in the compound Of a lonelier house, Where life rests in a shadow of silence, Is delayed this time. Has it forgotten the tree That stands shrunken, pale And waits patiently to gather The silk whisper of spring colours In its brittle arms and Coax music out of it?
*
What is keeping the bird back, The tree wonders. And the answer comes in A startling cacophony That loops and rolls in angry surges Across the neighbouring vacant lot Where the mid-spring sun slants , Warm and oily, on the Massive drilling rigs, Excavators, concrete mixers, Behemoths from some alien world Filling the empty hours With too much life, Hurling ugly sermons of urbanity At its placid apathy.
The clangs, the clatters and the grinding; Stones gritting, metals rattling, Smell of smouldering tobacco and toxicity Hang over the mounds of red earth Like a crumpled canopy Of noisy ash.
Will the koel return to the Chaitra tree With its gentle silky lilts Drowning the tumults, The tree wonders, but waits Shaking dust and doubt Off its welcoming fragrant boughs Throbbing, trembling in the heavy vibrating breeze And gathering itself back Steadfast in its hope and trust.
*Chaitra: March
From Public Domain
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Pongal Pot. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
On the 15th of January 2026, while much of the modern world was busy checking notifications, updating calendars, and worrying about quarterly outcomes, traditional Tamil households across the globe were doing something far more radical, watching milk boil. “Pongal”, the harvest festival, is one of those ancient cultural practices that stubbornly refuses to modernise. It does not arrive as an app update, cannot be streamed, and has no subscription model.
Milk is poured into a pot, heated patiently, and allowed, indeed encouraged, to overflow. This overflow is not considered inefficiency or waste, but it is the very point. It signifies abundance, wellbeing, and prosperity not merely for humans but for the entire ecosystem that made the meal possible, the sun, the rain, the soil, the cow, and the quiet, unseen labour of nature itself. Rice, lentils, jaggery, nuts, legumes, and raisins follow, and the resulting sweet dish is shared freely among family and friends, because prosperity that is not shared is considered incomplete.
This is an economy based not on accumulation but on circulation, not on profit but on participation. Something I believe is deeply unsettling to modern sensibilities.
Into this defiantly non-consumerist ritual wandered a chickpea with an extraordinarily well travelled past. This was no humble backyard legume, nor had it been picked up at the nearest market. It had sprouted in Mexico, been packed in Lebanon, purchased in Sierra Leone, and generously gifted by my wife Greeja’s friend, Saras, and her husband Pieter, a Belgian whose kindness, like the chickpea itself, clearly knows no borders. The chickpea’s journey to Malaysia, where, after crossing more continents than most humans manage in a lifetime, it finally fulfilled its destiny, being cooked into a traditional Tamil Pongal.
By then this chickpea had crossed more borders than most people ever will, navigated more currencies than a multinational executive, and yet arrived without a single stamp of self-importance. If globalization were ever to seek a spokesperson, it would do well to choose this chickpea, which achieved in silence what conferences and treaties have struggled to explain. The chickpea does not attend Davos, does not publish white papers, does not tweet about resilience or sustainability, and yet it embodies globalisation with a calm confidence that makes economists look unnecessarily stressed.
We often speak of globalisation as though it were invented sometime in the late twentieth century by economists with impressive haircuts and Power Point skills. But the chickpea, unimpressed by timelines, has been global for at least nine thousand years. Its origins lie in the “Fertile Crescent”, that much abused cradle of early civilisations covering modern day Turkey and Syria, where early cultivation was recorded between 7500 and 6800 BCE. The wild ancestor, “cicer reticulatum”, still grows in southeastern Turkey, quietly ignoring the fact that humans have spent millennia fighting over the land around it. From this region, chickpeas spread naturally to the Middle East, the Mediterranean basin, and India by around 3000 to 2000 BCE, becoming a staple across cultures, religions, and cuisines. This was globalisation without shipping containers, trade sanctions, or consultants, just humans carrying seeds because hunger is wonderfully non-ideological.
India, once it encountered the chickpea, embraced it with characteristic enthusiasm and then proceeded to dominate its production. Today, India accounts for more than 70 percent of global chickpea output, a statistic that has made the chickpea an unlikely participant in modern trade wars. Protectionist policies, tariffs, reciprocal duties, and import bans imposed by major players such as India, the United States, and Mexico have transformed this humble legume into a politically sensitive commodity. It turns out that even the simplest food becomes controversial once spreadsheets get involved.
Thiruvalluvar (an ancient philosopher), writing two thousand years ago, anticipated this uncomfortable truth with brutal clarity:
“Only those who live by agriculture truly live; all others merely follow and feed upon them.” - Kural 1033
The verse throws stylish shade at modern life, while we sip lattes under perfect air conditioning and call it “work”, farmers are out there negotiating with the sun, rain, and stubborn soil to keep humanity fed. Our sleek jobs, fancy titles, and glowing screens? Well, they are merely luxury addons. Strip away agriculture and civilisation collapses into a very well-dressed famine. Turns out, all our progress still runs on dirt, with attitude.
The chickpea’s journey to South America, especially Mexico, is a reminder that globalisation has often travelled under less noble banners. Portuguese and Spanish explorers introduced chickpeas to the New World in the sixteenth century, carrying them across oceans as reliable, non-perishable protein sources. From these initial points of contact, chickpeas spread across Central and South America, embedding themselves into local agriculture and diets. In modern times, Mexico has emerged as a significant exporter, specialising in the Kabuli variety prized for its size and quality, with major production zones in Sonora and Sinaloa. Argentina and Chile also joined the club. Thus, a crop born in ancient Anatolia, nurtured in India, and sanctified by ritual, found itself repackaged for global markets, complete with branding, logistics, and regulatory oversight. The chickpea, once again, remained silent.
Silence, however, does not mean insignificance. Homer knew this. In TheIliad (Book 13) he famously compares arrows ricocheting off Menelaus’s armour to chickpeas and dark-fleshed beans flying off a threshing floor in the wind. The metaphor works only because the audience knew exactly how dried chickpeas behave, hard, resilient, and oddly bouncy. By likening lethal weapons to pulses, Homer not only emphasises the strength of the armour but also performs a subtle act of cultural grounding. The epic world of gods and heroes is momentarily tethered to the everyday agricultural reality of farmers winnowing grain. War, Homer seems to say, may be glorious, but it is ultimately sustained by food. Chickpeas, by 800 BCE, were so deeply embedded in Greek life that their sound and movement were universally recognisable. Even epic poetry depended on legumes.
Indian tradition offers an equally revealing, if more logistical, narrative. In South Indian tale associated with the Mahabharata, an Udupi King is said to have managed catering for the massive armies at Kurukshetra. Legend holds that he could predict daily casualties by observing leftover food. In some versions, the king visits Krishna at night, who eats a handful of roasted chickpeas, the number consumed corresponding mysteriously to the thousands who would fall the next day. This allowed precise meal planning and zero waste on an industrial scale of destruction. These divine data analytics allowed the king to cook exactly the right amount of food, avoiding waste on a genocidal scale. It is perhaps the earliest example of just-in-time inventory management, achieved without software, powered entirely by chickpeas and divine omniscience.
If you have ever wondered why Udupi cuisine is famous for efficiency and planning, this story offers a clue. Here, chickpeas function not just as food but as instruments of cosmic accounting.
Interestingly, while early Vedic texts sometimes viewed certain pulses as unsuitable for sacrifice, the Mahabharata period saw chickpeas elevated into sraddha rites (funeral rituals) and daily offerings. They transitioned from questionable to sacred, a promotion many humans would envy.
Thiruvalluvar’s ethical framework accommodates this evolution effortlessly:
“Sharing food and caring for all life is the highest of virtues.”-- Kural 322
A noble idea, until chickpeas quietly steal the spotlight. Modest, beige, and absurdly cooperative, they divide endlessly without complaint and nourish everyone from monks to gym bros. While humans argue ethics in panels and podcasts, chickpeas get on with the job, feeding the masses without ego. In the moral economy of virtue, they don’t preach but they simply multiply and sustain, humbling us one hummus bowl at a time.
Across civilisations, chickpeas became the dependable fuel of endurance. Roman soldiers consumed them as part of their standard rations, boiling them into thick porridge known as “puls” when meat was scarce. Gladiators relied on pulses for strength, earning nicknames that emphasised grain and legume consumption rather than heroism. Spanish and Portuguese sailors trusted chickpeas on long sea voyages because they did not rot, sulk, or demand refrigeration. During World War II, Allied researchers turned again to pulses to address vitamin deficiencies among troops, while the modern Indian Army continues to include chickpea flour and whole chickpeas in field rations due to their high caloric density and reliability. Empires rise and fall, but soldiers keep eating chickpeas.
Modern science, arriving fashionably late as usual, now confirms what ancient armies, monks, and farmers already knew. Chickpeas are celebrated as “brain food,” dense with nutrients that support cognitive function, mood regulation, and neurological health. Nutritional psychiatry highlights their role in reducing inflammation and stabilising the gut brain axis, making them valuable in alleviating anxiety and depression. Unlike the sugar-fuelled spikes and crashes of contemporary diets, chickpeas offer slow-release energy, the kind required for sustained thought, emotional regulation, empathy, and decision making. In a world addicted to instant gratification, caffeine dependence, and burnout worn as a badge of honour, the chickpea is almost offensively patient. That patience makes it profoundly incompatible with modern lifestyles, and incompatibility, in our times, is the surest mark of subversion.
If this sounds like ancient wisdom romanticised through hindsight, it is worth noting that modern civilisation has recently spent billions of dollars rediscovering precisely the same conclusion, often during lunch breaks. Sometime in the post-Covid era, somewhere between a glass walled co-working space and an overbranded café serving ethically sourced air, a young startup founder sat staring at his laptop, attempting to optimise a problem modern life seems uniquely skilled at inventing, how to eat “mindfully” without actually having time to eat. His company was building an AI-driven wellness platform designed to “personalise nutrition using real time biometric feedback.” Investors liked it. The pitch deck had the correct fonts. The valuation was impressive for something that had not yet solved hunger, distraction, or exhaustion.
Lunch arrived in recyclable packaging engineered to survive a nuclear winter. Inside was a bowl labelled Ancient Protein Medley. It contained quinoa flown in from the Andes, kale grown in a vertical farm two kilometres away, avocado sourced from somewhere geopolitically awkward, and, almost as an afterthought, roasted chickpeas. The chickpeas were rebranded as “plant-based protein spheres,” presumably because “chickpea” did not sound sufficiently disruptive, scalable, or fundable.
As the founder ate mechanically between Slack notifications, his smartwatch vibrated with updates. Blood sugar stable. Cortisol marginally elevated. Cognitive focus acceptable. The AI recommended breathing exercises and fewer screens. The founder ignored both and continued eating. The irony was complete. A system powered by cloud computing, global capital, and predictive algorithms had concluded, after millions in funding, that roasted chickpeas were ideal for sustained energy and mental clarity.
This was not new knowledge. Roman soldiers had marched on it. Tamil farmers had lived on it. Sailors had crossed oceans with it. But now it had a dashboard, a graph, and a subscription model.
Later that evening, the same founder attended a panel discussion on sustainability. Someone in the audience asked about regenerative agriculture. The panellists responded confidently, invoking carbon credits, blockchain traceability, lab-grown proteins, and the future of food. No one mentioned legumes fixing nitrogen. No one mentioned soil. No one mentioned that the chickpeas quietly sitting in the founder’s lunch bowl had already done more for planetary health than the entire panel combined. The chickpeas, true to form, offered no comment, no keynote, and no thought leadership, only nourishment.
The chickpea’s journey eastward is no less intriguing. It reached China via the Silk Road, settling primarily in Xinjiang, where evidence of cultivation dates back around two thousand years. There, it became part of Uighur medicinal traditions, prescribed for ailments ranging from hypertension to itchy skin. During the Tang and Yuan dynasties, chickpeas gained prominence as a “cosmopolitan” food, sometimes referred to as the “Muslim bean”. Yet in central China, the chickpea struggled for a distinct identity, often conflated with the common pea even by Li Shizhen[1], the famed Ming dynasty herbalist. Not all travellers are recognised for who they are, some spend centuries being mistaken for someone else.
And yet, through all this travel, confusion, commodification, and conflict, the chickpea remained quietly regenerative. Unlike extractive crops, it forms a symbiotic relationship with Rhizobium bacteria in its roots, fixing nitrogen from the air and enriching the soil. It takes and gives simultaneously, leaving the land better than it found it. This is perhaps the most radical aspect of the chickpea’s philosophy, one that stands in stark contrast to modern economic models based on extraction and exhaustion.
Thiruvalluvar warns us gently but firmly:
“Harm done to others inevitably returns to oneself.” – Kural 319
A warning humans hear, nod at, and immediately ignore. The chickpea takes a cooler approach. It survives by being outrageously generous, throwing itself into curries, salads, and hummus without a trace of resentment. No revenge arc, no ego. Just pure edible goodwill. While we stress over karma and consequences, the chickpea lives its truth, give everything away, become indispensable, and achieve immortality in every lunch bowl.
Humanity today resembles the ancient chickpea, hard, resilient, perpetually defensive. We pride ourselves on toughness, bouncing off crises with admirable persistence, yet rarely ask what we leave behind. Climate change, trade wars, and political upheavals are the shrill winds of Homer’s winnowing floor, tossing us about. The question is not whether we survive the tossing, but whether we enrich the soil when we land. Progress, the chickpea suggests, is not about becoming larger, louder, or more profitable. It is about being regenerative, ordinary, and useful.
In an age obsessed with luxury, consumption, and curated lifestyles, the chickpea offers a quietly subversive model. It is not elite food, but it is the food of soldiers, monks, labourers, and families. It does not advertise, rebrand, or reinvent itself. It simply nourishes.
Thiruvalluvar captures this understated wisdom perfectly:
“From seeds come harvests, and from giving comes abundance.” -- Kural 1030
A line politicians quote solemnly before approving tax breaks for themselves. The chickpea, deeply unimpressed, just does the math. One seed becomes many, then redistributes itself aggressively into every cuisine on earth. No gatekeeping, no merit tests, no ‘personal responsibility’ lecture. While humans weaponise scarcity and call it policy, the chickpea runs a ruthless experiment in abundance and wins, by being cheap, shared, and impossible to cancel. The chickpea has lived this truth for millennia.
So perhaps the real lesson of globalisation does not lie in trade agreements or consumer choices but in a small legume that has travelled from ancient Turkey to modern Mexico, survived Roman marches and mythic wars, endured misnaming and trade barriers, and still ends up quietly nourishing someone’s meal.
Even now, after dashboards have glowed, algorithms have pontificated, and every opinion has been optimised into a performance, the answer remains stubbornly ancient, from Roman roads to Tamil fields. The chickpea does not care about your ideology, your portfolio, or your meticulously curated identity. It will grow, fix nitrogen, feed someone, and move on without a press release.
In a world addicted to spectacle, branding, and moral pontification, this calm, beige indifference feels almost obscene. Quiet competence and unfashionable, the chick pea, turns out to be the rarest, and most outrageously extravagant, luxury left.
The travelled chickpea. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
[1] Li Shizen(1518-1593), Ming acupuncturist, herbalist, naturalist, pharmacologist, physician.
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
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Bibliography
Pongal festival, milk boiling ritual, symbolism of abundance and ecology
Ramaswamy, N. (2004). Festivals of Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
Origins of chickpea domestication in the Fertile Crescent; dates (7500–6800 BCE); wild ancestor Cicer reticulatum
Zohary, D., Hopf, M., & Weiss, E. (2012). Domestication of Plants in the Old World (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spread of chickpeas to India by 3000–2000 BCE
Fuller, D. Q. (2006). Agricultural origins and frontiers in South Asia. Journal of World Prehistory, 20(1), 1–86.
India producing ~70% of global chickpeas; modern trade disputes
FAO. (2023). FAOSTAT Statistical Database: Pulses Production and Trade. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Thiruvalluvar quotations, dating (~2nd century BCE–2nd century CE), agrarian ethics
Pope, G. U. (1886). The Tirukkural. London: Oxford University Press.
Introduction of chickpeas to the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese explorers
Smith, B. D. (2011). General patterns of niche construction and the management of ‘wild’ plant and animal resources. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366(1566), 836–848.
Modern chickpea cultivation in Mexico (Sonora, Sinaloa), Kabuli variety exports
Gaur, P. M., et al. (2012). Chickpea breeding and production. Plant Breeding Reviews, 36, 1–87.
Homer’s Iliad Book 13 chickpea/threshing-floor simile
Homer. (c. 8th century BCE). The Iliad, Book XIII. Trans. E. V. Rieu. London: Penguin Classics.
Udupi King / Mahabharata legends involving chickpeas and casualty prediction
Hiltebeitel, A. (2001). Rethinking the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chickpeas in sraddha rites and post-Vedic ritual elevation
Olivelle, P. (1993). The Āśrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roman soldiers, gladiators, and chickpea-based diets (“puls”)
Garnsey, P. (1999). Food and Society in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chickpeas in maritime rations and early modern naval diets
Braudel, F. (1981). The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, Vol. 1. New York: Harper & Row.
Use of pulses in World War II nutrition and modern military rations
Nestle, M. (2002). Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nutritional psychiatry: chickpeas, gut–brain axis, slow-release energy
Jacka, F. N. et al. (2017). Nutritional psychiatry: The present state of the evidence. The Lancet Psychiatry, 4(3), 271–282.
Modern “wellness tech,” quantified nutrition, and startup food culture
Lupton, D. (2016). The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nitrogen fixation via Rhizobium in chickpeas; regenerative agriculture
Peoples, M. B., et al. (2009). The contributions of legumes to reducing the environmental risk of agricultural production. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 133(3–4), 223–234.
Chickpeas in China via Silk Road; Xinjiang cultivation; “Muslim bean”
Hansen, V. (2012). The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Li Shizhen and historical misclassification of chickpeas
Unschuld, P. U. (1986). Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
I could be a molecule of thought Uncanny, secret, Dimension less.
I could be all elements --immense, eternal -- A cosmos holding galaxies of passion.
I may be a note of music Hanging in the air, faint, feeble, But repeating like an echo,
Or a speck of silence in a wind-funnel, Gyrating into a tornado, Sonorously lingering to infinity.
I’m overwhelmingly tender. I hold worlds in a gentle embrace. I’m also a razor blade, Can slash love with a single stroke And leave it to bleed to death.
I am war. I am peace. Dispassionate and diligent, I’m a nuance undulating through Sangfroid and turbulence.
I’m a bubble forming, dissolving, Forming again, breaking again, Floating relentlessly to join waters On alien shores And linking minds.
I’m a length of thread from a kite that is Stubborn in its desire to fly, Connecting to the Earth While scanning the strip of its sky.
I wander free, unfettered by Diverse minds and tongues, Wearing my happy pan-world face,
Spanning dams and deserts, Oceans and mountains, Freezing and erupting in alternate moments, I travel borderless.
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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Seasons gently fold into one another Silently, Not making too much noise but Leaving no space for A signature smell of each till finally they could not be told apart.
The secret summer koel sits stiff hidden in the wet boughs Flapping rain off its drenched feathers, Its song gone hoarse in the thunder storm.
Monsoon paper-boats lie cramped in parched puddles Amidst dead dragonflies littered around in a mess.
A sedate autumn, heavy in its Yellow bounteousness, Waits behind the frost-draped trees, Scorched by the day And soaked by the night.
Winter kites struggle Through the smoky warmth Of a sweating sky. Their long curvy tails, Caught in the crisscrossing strips of clouds, Wriggle and writhe and roll clumsily Like flying serpents in many hues.
This is yet another world That experiences terrible mood swings. Seasons blend into one another In obscure irregularity, And the century old pattern of living Goes haywire. Mankind's mood changes too -- Is really life falling apart In this absurd mess?
I wouldn't know, I just sit fixing my aching gaze On the path of another time, For the return of a tomorrow of a foregone age that has shifted from Its course in the anomalous days. But is sure to find its way one day To my waiting window!
LET US MOVE OUT IN TO THE UNKNOWN
Let us move out into the unknown In the smoke of sunlight, Breathing the hollow whispers in the wind, Straining our ears for the morning music That struggles to Wriggle out of the frosty boughs.
When the dwarf days reflect on the Parchment of streets, When the afternoons slant grim on the terrace And hibiscus buds blur on the Misty splotches of glass, It is the time to move into the unknown, Brushing off the patina on the bones And fingers of ice tracing out a Warm tomorrow On the shivering edge of the Season’s map.
Let us move out into the unknown. Who knows, we might discover The stolen moon in some other sky Before a star skewered night Descends in a crumpled heap On the stiff shoulders of time...
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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"I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you a nobody, too?" (Emily Dickinson)
NOBODY
It is not easy to tell the tale of nobody. A nobody's tale is without a beginning or an end, Like jumbled up letters on a mussy page, Obscure sketches from a hand untrained.
A nobody's anonymous world Battered by the day, and Bruised by the night, Spins and shatters in a gyrating vortex Of liquid darkness and light.
A nobody lives and dies and again lives And breathes a dream in between, Desperate to see just one come true, and For a glimpse of green in a bald ruin.
The crimson dawn in a nobody's sky Burns hopes to ash. A moon flings shards of silver At nobody’s world, aiming a cruel slash.
The fog settles forever thick and grey Outside a nobody's window. In a nobody's land, seasons don't change. There settles permanent a season of snow.
Songs painted black by storm clouds Croak beyond a nobody's door. The wind mourns in the hollow orchards Roses bleed on a cracked floor;
It is hard to tell a nobody's tale That has neither a beginning, nor an end. It's the story of a doomed soul, That neither has a foe, nor a friend!!
From Public Domain
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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That night a shadow spread over the Moon's face. The moon, heavy in its Pain of loss became red And shed scarlet tears On the nocturnal earth caught in a Warm vaporous net.
The shadow lengthened down to A morning full of rain and river And the waves screaming a vow To drag the fields into Coffins of sand even while They still breathed in green.
The morning after, No sun peeped through the clouds of east. No music dropped from the wind Or the drowsy trees.
The green lay inert in its grave And rotted. Dreams rotted too, eaten away By worms swarming in grey abandon.
The shadow swallowed everything Like a desert, like an ocean, Like the endlessly expanding time.
Everything, like the moon went inside the dark, crippling net. The sparkle in a thousand pairs of eyes sank in the shadow of the river In a permanent eclipse.
From Public Domain
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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Stuck in an absurd divide, Between truth and half-truth, I am a mirror capturing the contours Of the days that were then. Faces shift on the page of glass, Blurry, painted and plain.
Overlapping faces of Civilisations rise and fall To their broken glory. Cities, fortresses, landscapes Along the meandering length of time, Crawl to meet the end of a story.
Faces wearing triumphs of battles won On bloody fields, that were once Sprawls of flowing green, smile Under a starry fragrance.
Faces crumpled at war-cries, At sirens screaming, At loud laments ripping apart The ecstatic valleys of spring, Faces baffled at the uncanny chants in The ruins, caves and dens, And the whispers of yesterdays' ghosts Echo in silence.
Cradling a bundle of unborn days And untold tales inside, I sit like a stoic saint waiting to see, The other faces that will float into My page of glass.
What is that incorrigible legacy Time will pass to me? I wait to discover my digital face Muraled on the rocks of another planet Smiling at me happily.
Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger Books, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.
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Afsar Mohammad teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has published five volumes of poetry in Telugu. He has published a monograph with the Oxford University Press titled, The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India. His Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, has been published from Cambridge University Press. His first poetry collection was Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems. These poems are from his second collection, Fasting Hymns, which has been translated to Telugu by P Srinivas Goud as Upavaasa Padyaalu. You can read a review of the book by clicking here.
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