At last, you too, O Didi, have eaten
The fruit of the forbidden tree!
Those who eat its fruit are thrown away by God
From the garden of Eden into the dustbin of Earth.
Those who eat its fruit discover youth
Within their bodies; that youth sets fire
To all the organs of body; then men, like drunkards,
Go to live in a forest leaving their homes behind
And build there with a great devotion
Their Spring-dwellings.
Now I play on my old bamboo-flute sitting alone
Into Kashful garden as white as a dhuti.
Crossing the border, its tone cannot reach you
At your father-in-law’s house in Odisha.
It is many years you went to your husband’s house.
After your departure, barbed wires came
In the border.
How will I go to you, Didi,
When the border-guards, like hunters, raise their
Hungry guns towards us as if we were the tasty
Hariyal doves sitting on the boughs of a peepul tree?
Now when the fields of Autumn get full
Of mustard-flowers, your memory gets alive;
You wearing the yellow sari used to run like a fairy
On the dew-wet boundaries of mustard-fields
Catching my one hand tightly- I started panting-
I only recollect those sweet scenes now.
When the mango trees get surged now with small
Green mangoes, I rush to our kitchen to steal away
Some salt and then I start sharpening oyster
On the cemented ghat of our pond-
It seems you are coming within a moment
Filling the loose end of your sari with mangoes
And addressing me, you say, ‘Look at, Apu,
How big the mangoes are! Surely seeds have grown
Within them.’
O my sister, leaving those wild pleasures behind,
Which pleasures do you run after now?
Which peace does one get by getting married,
Which peace does one get by going to a father-in-law’s house,
Which peace does one get by getting mad with body
When the salty tears of separation raise waves
Into her Apu’s two eyes?
Was Adam happy for a moment leaving the garden of Eden?
O Durgadi, are you happy too, leaving your Apu behind?
Yours
Apu
– – – – – –
*Tree of the Knowledge
*’Didi’ means ‘elder sister’
*A kind of dove in Bengal
