Amrita Pritam
A City
Translated from the Punjabi by Rituparna Sengupta
1
Who hid away in the warehouse the harvest sown by the stars?
Dusted sacks of clouds release clouds of dust in the night’s bazaar;
The moon is like a hungry calf nibbling at a dry udder,
While the earth tied to her stall laps at the sky’s manger.
2
At the hospital’s entrance, Rights, Truth, Faith, Respect:
So many words lie sick that a crowd collects;
Will they receive a diagnosis, a cure?
For now, it seems their days are over.
3
A house in this city where the homeless stay,
Their lives distraught when no work comes their way;
The first night of old age whispers to them softly,
That their whole youth had been stolen in this city . . .
4
Last night saw bitter cold and this morning, Social Services
Found a corpse on the road with no name, no address;
At the corpse’s cremation there was no one to mourn it,
Perhaps it was a beggar who died or some philosophy did . . .
5
A girl screams out from a man’s embrace like something snapped from her body,
The police station erupts in laughter and the café bubbles with glee;
Hawkers roam the streets selling news for a dime,
And what’s left of her body is mauled yet another time.
6
Under the gulmohar people meet, loudly they laugh and sing,
Each wants to hide from the others news of his own dying;
Each drags around his marble tombstone,
And stands guard over a corpse—his own.
7
Machines grind away in this printing press of a city,
Where every person is like a separate letter, lonely;
Every prophet a compositor who joins letters to find,
Words are woven together, yet can’t string together a line.
8
The name of this city is—Delhi,
But what’s in a name? It could be any;
Every night the future’s dream takes the present’s soiled sheet,
Drapes itself with half of it, spreads the other half beneath,
For a while it stays awake lost in thought,
And then it downs a sleeping draught.
Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was a prominent Punjabi poet, writer, editor, and translator. Her work has won several major literary honours, and earned much critical and popular acclaim.
Rituparna Sengupta is a literary translator, writer, and scholar from India. Currently, she teaches at O P Jindal Global University.