Date of Publish: 2019-05-11

A few poems by Shalim M Hussain

 

A Lesson in History

 

My grandmother’s only fear was that she would lose her children.

Have many children, she said

To anyone willing to listen

If you have one child

And if that one child dies, what will you live on?

She and Dada did a good job.

Fertile for thirty five years until menopause

She had fifteen children

Four of whom didn’t survive childhood

And whom she rarely mourned.

 

Like all sensible children of the river

She made peace and pancakes for the

River and the tremors.

 

In ‘50

When the earth shook like a bull on heat

She prayed to old forgotten gods

She prayed to the energies of the universe.

When the ground beneath her bedstead cracked

And spat out boiling fish, she steeled her nerves.

Stood on her doorway and waited for the wriggling and writhing to end.

 

She waited on the doorway for flesh to fall off the bones,

Then collected the dried heads,

Hung them on the jute reed wall

Beside a poster of pink roses

And a framed embroidered handkerchief

Passed a thread through the spines and made a cummerbund

Wore it for the rest of her life

Until almost four decades later

dying of a rot in her ovaries

With her children witnessing the wasting

She knew she had

At last defeated the earthquake

And broke the thread.

 

Golluckgonj

 

After a long ride down a road newly raised

And porcupined against the river

We unload our cameras on a rice field half-India half-immigrant

Its two weeks past the 26^th of January-

 

And they are celebrating.

The rain came first and let me tell you it was cold, cold-

We had to postpone the Republic. His lungi is muddy, his ganji crusted with

Sweat. Looks like the map of Bangladesh, he laughs

 

Then asks if the camera is on.

 

I stand on the raised border- two endless lines of concertina

Four strings on each line, the space in between

Heaped with more coiled wire.

I wonder but don’t ask if they are electrified.

 

The border policeman on his bicycle stops, eats his lunch on the grass

He has never cycled across the lines.

The air from the other side filtered through the metal screen should

But doesn’t smell different.

 

I had more expectations

From my first international border, I guess.

 

There, on that raised mound

Where four lines of betelnut trees mark a rectangle

And still ripen every March, inside that was home.

Our phones catch the signal from the other side.

 

He feeds us country chicken and fish. We sit on his wife’s furniture

Five years old but the varnish still glossy. The false ceiling, an old sari-could have been his late mother’s. And the door I lean against

Looks old, so old that it could be

The last remnant of the home across the lines.

 

Birth Certificate

The last time I arm-wrestled my father

He made me struggle

Against his strength

Against a granite palm-print

Against the bamboo knots on

His fingers

The familiarity of which I had

Almost forgotten.

 

And just when

I had almost brought him down

He gave one last push

I gave up.

His back on the floor,

His skin and the thin layer of concrete

Almost the same he asked

Son, how old am I?

Forty eight I said

 

They printed the same on his death certificate.

 

I protested: boys went to school late in the ‘50s

There were always the younger ones

To care for, the cattle to feed

The famine to survive.

My aunt opened her father’s Quran

Against alif lam meem were the dates

Of her birth, the three after her that

Didn’t survive and my father’s

 

My plan to give my father a few more years

Came to nothing.

 

A little Shopping for Father

Seven years before he passed,

The old man

Thrust a hundred rupees in my hand

And whispered that I and I alone

Should buy the ten metres of plain white cloth

For my father, his eldest son.

Someone scolded him,

You fool, they said,

How can you make him do this?

But Dada was not at fault.

He didn’t own his mind

And worse, he didn’t own anyone’s trust

 

Some kind soul took the blood money from me

But later in the afternoon when the burial was over,

I walked between the mosque and the hardware store

A polythene bag wrapped around my brain

And a passing stranger asked if I was hungry.

 

He walked me to a sweet store,

Almost gloated as I sat silently

My cheeks puffed with too much crying

My lips burning with sugar syrup.

The stranger left me his handkerchief

And money to pay for the meal.

 

About the poet --

(Shalim M Hussain is a poet, writer and translator. He received the R.L. Poetry Award 2017(Editor’s Choice) for Betelnut City-the first collection of his English poems. He has translated poet Kamal Kumar Tanti’s Post Colonial Poems into English from the Assamese. He can be reached at - [email protected])

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