"Brahmarakshas" by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (English Translation)

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh

On that side of the city near the ruins

an abandoned, empty well

and within, in cold darkness

in waters deep within

amid deep-sunken stairs

in the old stale puddle…

I cannot follow these seeming foundations

these depths.

Encircling that well, entangled

silently stood the fig trees.

In them hang the abandoned owl-nests,

brown, round.

The smells of a hundred past pieties

green, jungly, raw

swim in the air and become the weighted doubt

of some unknown quality

that unsettles the heart.

On the railings of the well, beguiling, green

elbows resting

leans the white flowered tagar tree

and nearby,

a flashing red flowered cluster

my kanher

calling me to that edge of danger

where the black mouth of the well

glances upward toward the sky’s emptiness.

In the emptiness of the well’s thick darkness

sits the gatekeeper Brahmarakshas

and from within rises echo after echo

like the mutterings of the insane.

Speculations,

defilement.

to wash away, at every moment

the shadow of impurity — 

day and night, to make clean—

Brahmarakshas, scouring his body

with the claws of his hand, again

and again hands chest mouth

still it stays

still it stays!!

And… from his lips

strange strotras, mantras

fevered curses in chaste sanskrit,

lines on the forehead weave

glistening strands of thought.

In a continuous stream’s maddening flow

—life’s sympathy blots.

But when, in the well’s deep inner wall

oblique sun-rays fall and

motes rise,

light surfaces

he thinks the sun has bowed and saluted him.

When a moonbeam forgets its way

and its rays stagger off the walls

he thinks it worships him as the

venerable knower.

Body and mind pierced, yet

he rejoices, feeling the sky

too has humbly accepted him.

And with a twofold, frightening potency

his understanding mind ranges

through the folk-tales of Sumer-Babylonia, mellifluent Vedic hymns

today’s chands, mantras, theorems, theories

of Marx Engels Russel Toynbee Heidegger Spengler Sartre even Gandhi

everyone’s proof commented on afresh—

all this as he bathes in the well’s dense greenness.

…this thundering, echoing, moving

darkness—bringing up phonemes

obscure words revolving anew

each word dividing its resonance

each form battling its reflection

maimed

becoming

the echo that wars with its echo

upon the well’s rails

beguiling green elbows rest, and the

white tagar flowers listen

                               —to these echoes!

The delicate fruits of the gooseberry tree

listen, the ancient fig

listens, I too listen to the tragedy that drifts

in this mad allegory

barred within this old well.

X X X

Very high a dark savorous stairway 

                                its ill-lit step... 

they of a strange interior universe.

A stepping-up and a falling;

again, a stepping-up and a-slipping,

with twisted feet

and on its chest many sores.

More fierce than when good and evil meet

calamity between good and a greater good

small fortune,

more likely misfortune!!

...an exorbitant fullness'

                    anguish is dear... 

geometry's eye constructs

                   a moral investiture

self-consciousness's subtle moral recollection—

 

....when has it been easy

to placate an exorbitant completeness

all explanation is precious!!

The sun comes out

anxiety's red haemorrhaging-river

flows into the day;

the rising moon

on the wound

dazzling white bandages on 

its disarrayed forehead.

stars scatter the sky's edge

from uncountable decimals

come decimal-drops on all sides:

in the transposed spreading field

beaten, he comes to use,

and lies spread...

chest and arms open extended,

a purifier.

His person a tender quartz, temple-like,

in that temple a stairway

it is hard to climb

the lonely stair.

With emotion with thought

the coordinated formed matter

the stair of assimilated arithmetic 

I left for him.

That thought-emotion, that work coordinated and formed

in research

amidst all pandits, all thinkers he

in search of a guru

drifts!!

But the age turned and he came trading fame

...his only wealth from work now,

from that wealth a heart & mind,

and, subject to wealth, from within

truth's glint

                 ever solders.

Self-consciousness and yet in this

love's discord...

a world consciousness unmade!!

At greatness' feet

an agitated dejected mind!

If only I had met him those days

then living his anguish myself

I would have told him his worth

                     his greatness!

Of his, and his greatness',

use to people like us

I would have spoken of that inward greatness!!

Powdered within

and outside between two stone slabs

this is a farcical tragedy!!

In the well himself

endlessly inside the mad symbols

how he within the dark room

kept at his arithmetic

and died...

in dense barbed undergrowth

in a dark cavity

                      dead bird like

                      departed

that flame unknown slept forever

this happened: why!

Why did this happen!!

Brahmarakshas' breast-fed student

I so wished to be

whose incomplete works

whose pain's source

                      collected, extracted, risen

                      I could bring.

Part of the syllabus in:

University of Delhi, BA(Hons) English, Semester 5, Modern Indian Writing in English Translation