Intellectual

Bharat Majhi

Translated by Sailen Routray

Almandine on gray-green schist, found in Tyrol, Austria; 19x11x7cm

Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

We start roaming the world aimlessly

from the time of our birth.

You shout from behind our backs

with some random names.

Sometimes those names stick

with a vengeance that surprises, even you.

 

You do not like our leaving the village

to bake bricks in Hyderabad or to

level the earth in Raipur.

You do not like our staying put either.

You do not like our sons

working on the fields

or for that matter our daughters

wearing torn frocks.

 

You team up with the village elder and

he takes our fingerprints.

The sacks containing the prescribed

caloried food meant for us

grow wings and fly away.

 

You can comment lucidly

on our parched lands

with your throat moist with bottled water.

You enter the textbooks

of our children while elaborating

on the pernicious effects

of not exercising the right to vote.

 

We do not know

how much to eat per diem.  

We do not know what to eat,

and how much to bend while

greeting whom.

We do not know exactly how much

should we kiss our wives,

and for how long to sit and where.

 

Because we start roaming the world

aimlessly from the time of our birth.

 

Someone tells us that

you are beyond all questioning.

We might forget the arts

of  baking bricks or levelling the earth;

but we have to be excited

with the names that you have given us.

You will arrive with your face glistening

on the back cover of  learned tomes;

but it just might be that

we won’t ever touch

the glitter of that face.

 

Note: This translation was first published in issue number 287 of the magazine Indian Literature in May-June 2015. The poet Bharat Majhi (born in 1972 in Kalahandi) works in an Odia media house in Bhubaneswar. He has published nine volumes of poems in a poetic career spanning more than three decades. Amongst other recognition, he has won the Bhubaneswar Book Fair Award in 2008 and the Sanskriti Award in 2004.