When from inside the gamble grove
the cuckoo would call and call
and beyond on the railroad track
the train rolled on with its unending litter
saying clitter-click-clack-got-to-get-back;
we ambled across the path along the grove
listening to the peasant leader
mellow and expansive on rice beer
He said nothing untoward
but seemed to prattle on and on
and was foaming at the mouth.
It is only now we know
though he came to nothing much
the farmers are seeing better days
It is ages since he ceased to be
Yet I’d still look for him
along the path by the gamble grove
to tell him that it’s only now that we know.
Between my childhood and my youth
Swayed the gamble grove of my village
where we took turns guarding the silkworms
day and night
when at the merest clack
the still darkness of the gamble grove
resounded like gongs
the grunting leopard at midnight
and the gecko’s noonday tattoing
merged in us like earth and water
We kept our hands steady
to save the worms from bats and crows
between the call of the hornbill at midnight
and the swish of swarming munias at dawn
the dirty things that talked then
the vulgar confidences we exchanged
glowed strange like the dense green domes
of the gamble grove.
One night, however, from one dark nook of the grove
we harried and chased two love-birds
may be, in the woods, the hunting instinct is prime
and urgent
their petrified faces are wilted flowers now.
We grew up day by day with a rage to live
like the worms when they begin to strip the trees bare
soon as they leave the nursery of the sieve
the smell of musk melons and ripe jackfruit
the lure of our gamboling days at the grove!
While scouring about in the fallow
we sometimes landed plumb in front of snakes
chasing red dragon flies we would walk into nettles
or groped about for fish in the wallow
the half-light of the gamble grove was our life
the opacity of a clean pond scoured by jumping fish
Even now, I’d rather go back to the gamble grove
Dear reader, is this homesickness
what they call nostalgia?
But I have seen a stormy world-leader.
romp home after a long, long banishment
and unabashedly kiss the earth
After flying round the poles
the swan homes in.
Spending its life span in the grove
the maturing worms crawl down to the earth
It’s time I too settled inside a cocoon
I’d rather be a golden thread a few cubits long
to merge in the fabric
of this my golden land
unseen and unnoticed
After all, who remembers the peasant leader
foaming at the mouth?
