Mindclouds

Rains are over

cloud flakes float away

in involuntary laziness

lingering over ripening fields.

A lone half naked boy

standing on the river bank

stretches his arms to catch

the cloud flakes to make

kites for autumnal fairs.

The landlord’s daughter

selecting cards, closing

the bedroom doors

for her November wedding.

Returning school children

propose to donate their picnic

money for Kerala flood victims.

After post-lunch fiesta

the beautiful mother of two kids

biting her nails dreams of

a long holiday next monsoon.

Suddenly the sky darkens

roll of thunder make

the boys run home,

the would be bride

peeps through the railings

in bemused apprehension.

 Sabita Sahu

My Most Embarrassing Moment

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

My host informed me at the breakfast table, Prafulla! You remember about this evening’s dinner invitation! The Japanese Ambassador’s wife will felicitate you after your presentation. You know I am invited because of you, otherwise these culture buffs never bother about us, and we are bank note counting machines who cannot distinguish between Expressionism and Avantgardism. My host used these two terms to impress me and I acknowledged to please him, saying prudes and snobs are everywhere. If you give them importance their inflated egoes will ride roughshod on your emotions. Ignore them. You are what you are. By the by what should I speak on this evening can, you suggest....What can I suggest; best you speak on Indian culture or about your own language and related things.

As our car approached the gates of the massive structure with wide lawns and a burst of exotic flowers all around, I asked my host: what place is this? O’ did I not tell you, this is the mansion of Archibald Leech, a world renowned heart surgeon and a very prominent promoter of social work and international Cultural Synchronizer. Your name was recommended by Prof John E. Altazen, Dean University of New Orleans. Yes, I said, Altazen has invited me I thought that it would be held in the University. Yes, but some public men wanted it here as many foreign dignitaries would come and you know the hospitality costs- my host smiled. Come, you will meet many people...

After long forty five years I do not remember the details of my speech but I spoke on the principal tenets of Indian renunciation and how it has given the value base to art and literature in India. The time allotted to me was thirty minutes but I exceeded freely as the receptive audience did not betray any symptom of boredom. The applause and the ovation they gave still rings in my ears. But more than that I remember the most embarrassing moments of my life that followed. After the meeting, the party began. It was 8.15 pm but the light outside was like our 4 pm sunshine in May. I was gheraoed by a few admirers and also a few journalists. After 15 minutes somebody I knew called me, rather rescued me from probing questions eating away into the party time. He gave me a glass of whisky and we moved out into the lawn. The party was around a swimming pool- not exactly around, on two sides of the pool. The pool was comparatively large. The water was clear like crystal and still as if a transparent pearly sheet was on the surface. It was glistening in the early evening light. I don’t know why I doubted whether it was water so still and clear or a glass cover over it reflecting the mellowing sunlight. Unconsciously, the whisky definitely was not heady- may be the pleasant events of the evening were an elixir- I wanted to tap the surface with my shoe and I did. I fell down with a splash stabbing the ears of many despite the mood created by the jazz over the wire recorder swaying the guests and they came running to lift me up- my suit dripping the pearly liquid of the pool and my eyes blinded by my mind’s agonising shame beating my heart to a cacophonous asymmetry I came up and stood on my legs shaking in listless embarrassment. Strange voices showered their concerns thinking I had a fit or something. What happened, are you ill, head reeling or what? I had only a sheepish smile on my face. Then they laughed, o’ the drink, may be you had one too many. I had no explanation to offer. Kind hands held me and took me into a room. My shoes and coat were removed. Someone dried me with a dryer, another brought a full sleeve sweater.  I felt warm and somewhat comfortable. I put on my shoes again. But how to salvage my pride? The man who was the darling of the hundred odd guests, felicitated and honoured, applauded half an hour ago shall not leave this place as the butt end of laughter. I must regain the attention of  the party. I was determined for I was not really drunk or had any ailment. It was curiosity and may be an illusion I chased to my fall in the pool.

I went to the centre of the party. Picked up the mike and said, Ladies Gentlemen and Friends: I will now give you a few songs in Indian languages and show their parallels in English and American literatures. I had full faith in my singing abilities although I am not a great singer. I started with an odia song from Upendra Bhanja. My second one was from Tagore and the third was form Hindi. I translated each song into English after rendering it and pointed out the parallels in English. The party became warm, cheers encouraged me; request for recitations from English came from Madam Ambassador. I recited from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet.  My dramatic rendering and my English floored them. I rose up tall to their unending applause. And then I joined the party with my confidence restored, my pride salvaged.

Living

Have you forgotten the hands

that knitted your fortune,

What fortune , 'O' that beggar to...
Oh no! no beggar no millionaire

how ungrateful you are !

He gave his years, sweaty days,

night pills and you measure

things with money...

Yes: what other measure

you have? Monkeys jump from

tree to tree- rich men play

in farm houses, everything is for sale

sell if you have, buy if you can

whatever your measure - no way.

But death, the end certain

Why not live? 

You call this life?

No, no living LIVING.

Ok. Thank you, good tea,

let me go plant some life

for a living you know !!

Sabita Sahu

Vertical Till The End

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

I am sure, I never wanted consciously to be born. How was I born into this hot, flat and perpetually overcrowded world, I don’t know. Is it process and reality? Is it  nature’s urge or as they say, God’s will - the biological inevitability of dynamic nature or what? I am not convinced by the logical and mythical arguments of people who were born before me; the theories of divine will, Karma or Original Sin or even Darwin’s Evolution. By fact check I know I was born by the sexual union of a man and a woman whom I call father and mother. The sky and earth are not my parents, but my present father and mother – both dead - who had nursed my growth and upbringing, educated me and did everything possible to let me fly my way in my part of skyspace.

From the early dawn of conscious living- I am sure I grew into a mature conscious being very early in life - I never obey orders: I obey laws, regulations, rules but not commands. I did my  school home task as it was routine. I trusted people, followed all disciplines as I was influenced by the Bhagawat and The Mahabharata at a very tender age. My values came from those epics. My sense of rhythms came from classical songs and also from Upendra Bhanja and Gangadhar Meher. I tried to create and compose songs and I did choric songs all my life, not as a professional but just to please myself. And I know I am a difficult man to please for I always search for alternatives in ideas, beliefs and rituals. My parents were deeply religious.  Every month they performed fire rituals and yajnas. I always opposed them much to their chagrin but I never tried to break their rhythms of life. I read whatever was available at home, at school and in public libraries. My favourite pastime was debate just for the heck of it. I often challenged my own convictions.

As I grew into a self-confident earning person at the threshold of youth my ideas gradually became more and more rebellious. I questioned the process of this birth, procreation and death routine of life enforced on us by so called civilization. Birth is a biological fact. Hunger and thirst are natural urges which must be constantly satisfied for survival. When assured survival leads to growth the sex urge disturbs for which marriage is institutionalised in societies, otherwise perversions will vitiate the moral equipoise of the society. Marriage or consensual living or just matting and aging, lingering with sans eyes, sans taste for a final heave of the frame before cessation. Then follows other rituals of the living for the dead.

 Well, why this process is enforced on man by civilization? If you ask a person, are you happy – he will say no in many devious ways. Man is never happy with what he has. No tower for man is tall enough. Empire State Building is now dwarfed by others, the Twin tower destruction notwithstanding; man will go on building towers touching the moon, till the moon and stars disappear from our galaxy. Man today wants to live for more than 150 years. Google team is researching to see that life attains double century now that a century is almost assured by our advanced medical science. The hospitals are ever increasing in number and size. Obamacare, Modicare , Ayurvedic , Homeopathic, Psychic cure, Yogic, Magic, Faith cure and exotic centres are ever growing everywhere. The reason is no man is ready to die.

I don’t know whether I should celebrate man’s obsession with living and the desire to continue even in a horizontal stage as a burden on the children, denying their fullness of life or to lament over human foolishness which has found no intellectual refinement down and up the centuries?  The surprise expressed by Yudhisthira in The Mahabharata answering the query Of Dharmabaka that every moment people die but those who are alive they think of life’s immortality. The irony of it all hits you on the face.

On the one hand we should be proud of man that his battle against death and disease continues unabated. The three original enemies of man were and are - Hunger, Disease and War as Yuval Harari puts it we have conquered to a great extent hunger. But not fully.  We now fight malnutrition, unhealthy eco –system and search for a home and sartorial joys.  Sickness and disease are almost conquered but not death. Wars continue, declared and undeclared; terror continues to walk in daylight.

I celebrate life, my personal life in many ways. I have lived life my style. I have loved soulfully. I have read beautiful things with love.  Why then should I yield my body to wither and waste surrounded by children and friends, causing pain to them, weaning them away from their life? People who vegetate in a hospital bed apply for euthanasia – a word I learned only in this century. I will leave the world while smiling at my beloved’s pranks; while singing for her my lifelong devotion to love; while lecturing in intellectual gatherings on the virtues of life, the joys of living and the divinity of human vitality and love. I will not apply to man or god for permission. Let me enjoy the pride of having ended my life as god’s rival.

The Unseen Agent

The unseen agent moves around

eats away my life in steady bites

I eat my hunger to keep him alive,

to make me move from dawn to dusk

to feed him what he loves to eat.

I search for him everywhere

in the kitchen, bedroom, toilet,

in the bathtub and TV programmes

he moves like a crooked shadow

beyond my grasp, beyond my pain

I give up and turn again

to  routines fixed by others.

Yes, he comes like an obedient student

I receive him with a smile
like a waylost soldier
tired, sick and unarmed:
he watches me when I sleep

but slides away when I rise

to bask in the crimson sun.

Sabita Sahu

Suspicion

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

In Shakespeare’s Othello when Iago seeing Desdemona come out of Cassio’s tent casually commented – Ha’ I like not that - Othello’s face fell , seeds of suspicion were planted deep in his heart. Why? It was because he was always unsure of himself as the right person for Desdemona. His racial identity and his physical state (the young effects in my body are now defunct) often goaded him to a psychic self – loathing. This sub-conscious realisation of his own weaknesses and the unadmitted unacknowledged inadequacies were struck by the diabolical mind of Iago. The simmering uncertainties of his ego were enflamed into suspicion. Ordinarily suspicion is not accepted as a vice but it is. It corrodes a mind, takes the person away from his / her reality and makes the person so self- immersed that he starts at a shadow, doubts every move of people except the persons who skilfully play on the protagonist’s mind leading him to see what they show. Scepticism and cynicism always lead to suspicious activities. Iago’s scepticism made him suspect everything. A man who fails to achieve or to fulfil ambitions or to attain projected goals becomes suspicious of people and their words, actions. Suspicion makes a person a killer, for, his own honourable ego refuses to make any compromise once suspicion enters the being of a man. Othello kills, destroys his love and in so doing destroys innocence.

Suspicion, in the sphere of politics, is a royal virtue, for power games move along lines where suspicion is a precautionary measure. Both Machiavelli and Kautilya have made suspicion a weapon of self- preservation. In the modern days too, politics induces people to suspect each other. The divide and rule policy of the British government  followed universally is to create  suspicion between groups, castes, religions and even languages so that  perpetual strife between peoples and groups would give the ruler choices to manipulate for their own advantage .

Suspicion is not always born naturally. Inner discord, upbringing and circumstances of childhood and youth make a person suspicious of people and ideas. In today’s India, rumours and fake news enrage people and the nursed suspicions get released to certainty. The lynching mobs, the cow vigilante groups in India act on suspicion of cow killing or cow lifting. They kill the hapless person(s) on mere suspicion.  The Facebook and the WhatsApp rumours about child lifters also leads to murder. If you ask why don’t they report the matter to the police or hand over the suspected cow killer or the child lifter to the authorities, you may get the most unsavoury answers – maybe it is racial hatred that comes out and the annonymity of a mob gives the individual the vicious release of his hate in terms of gory violence.

Today suspicion is not a rare vice. Parents are suspicious of children. Spouses ruin marital life by mutual suspicion.  Chiefs in government or organizations always suspect another talented person for fear of losing control. Even teachers are suspicious of scholars, scholars of valuable research. Motive hunting goes on at every level. Speeches are analysed, sentences are contextualized and attacking points are sharpened. The man who suspects and spies has his own moral logic and even political justification. The ‘Vishkanya’ the poison woman’ used by the kings in the past had its own morals, the safety of the kingdom and the people had its own infalliable logic. The modern version of it is the honeytrap and extraction of secret information. In a terror- ridden world suspicion is a normal expedient value which people must pursue and practice for survival constraints.

But strangely suspicion is not included in the list of deadly sins; the Indian Shadaripus too do not include suspicion. The Arthashastra considers the inner enemies more dangerous. The senses are to be controlled hence one should give up desire (kama), anger, greed, arrogance, pride and excitement. Spies in the Arthashastra are advised to avoid liquor and women but the modern spies like James Bond(007) are romanticized by sexy dolls and liquor is a mere water substitute. But suspicion of people, places, governments, gadgets and words are shown in our undercover and overground activities. Krishna and Shakuni move the Mahabharata plot forward by strategies based on suspicion of nature man and motives. The present day society is almost vocalized by suspicion, measures therof and counter measures. Suspicion now should be added to the list of enemies of man as the worst and the most fatal.

Futility

Spring and summer return dumb

murmurless waits the earth

to watch the cycle of nothingness

in vivid cycles of birth and death.

Parents disappear from sight

mangoes fall like pelted stones

urchins pick up 

trees never see

pain chases pleasure

like night the day

no gauge to size up

unsung lyrics written long ago.

How long to watch 

the fleeting scenes

the silent parade of

the seasons, mind and heart

losing count of nature's motion.

If all this is to 

draw a zero,

the finger and sand are enough

why need book and degree, 

pen and brush

to imitate the dots

leading to a dark infinity.

Sabita Sahu