By Shailendra Aima
In the early morning quiet,
When even the stars glimmered,
he heard it whistle.
In fact, during the night before
When Taraknath had put out the lamp,
And the dogs had stopped howling,
And the petrified lambs had stopped bleating,
he did hear it whistle.
Taraknath didn’t know
Whether to step out in the first light
Or to cling to his hovel.
Or to wait for Yambarzal
in a stupor - dazed, perplexed, baffled.
He didn’t dare to throw a glance
To draw respite, some fortitude,
at Zagat Amba, the mother
who long back, had forsaken the fetish.
How else could the misery descend,
Like a swarm of locusts,
Like the wolves on a hunt,
Like the plague, he had only heard of?
He boggled, blubbered, boohooed
"Maeji! Maeji! Maeji!"
as he had done, when the raiders
had swarmed Sangrama,
where Zagat Amba the deity
had presided the life,
the destiny, the form and the essense
of all incumbents – his world, her cosmos.
Where Yambarzal would snatch his Takhti
And he chased her tumbling down the hill.
That groove of almonds, just above.
The saffron fields, and the gurgling brook.
And the holy spring, the abode of the Mother.
Masterji liked him, and he adored him.
Taraknath – a fatherless child
Sat at his feet – a devout pupil to
The great educator. And learned and
earned the trust, the adulation, and also
Yambarzal, his only daughter.
Raiders had shot his father
And shot his neigbours, too.
But Masterji survived –
as the only man who had scurried
to a college, to the city,
far away from Sangrama.
And so the foursome,
Masterji, Tarak, Yambarzal and Zagat Amba
Had carried on the fun, the drudgery, the poise
And the ecstasy of belonging, labour, prayer
and of a life divine.
What’s there to tell thee
Of the hills, the brooks, the streams
and the snows;
Of the grand Chinars, the mighty walnuts,
The weeping willows, and the
squeaking birches.
Of the Phullaiy – or the blossoms,
the spring on the trees.
Of the cherries, the plums, the apples
and of the apricots.
The lotuses and the roses, the daffodils
and the hyacinths.
They would go as offerings to the Zagat Amba
from Yambarzal, who with great care
And painstakingly made garland after garland,
Bouquet after bouquet.
And climbed up every dawn and dusk
To bedeck the abode and to adorn the deity.
Blessed they were
When Amba descended
And came toddling into Yambar’s lap
But left them Masterji, to his eternal rest
From down the plains in Jammu’s west
Where hostilities had broken
Between the neigbours two,
inflicting death, Destruction, artillery fires, air raids,
and a stray burst wiped the life
Out of Masterji’s kind, benign
and handsome frame.
And now this strife again,
A different neighbour, nay thy known fraternity
A friend’s son, a friend in fact,
an acquaintance too.
All shades of folks, from the cleric to the butcher
From the hawker to the teacher.
In fact that vegetable vendor, even the milkman.
All exulting in a fervour, in a rage,
in a frenzy, of a Great Revolution,
Of the mission so dear - Iconoclasm,
Purgation, from Morocco to Malysia.
Of Ummah, of Jehad, of terror of blasts.
Yambarzal had set out to Muran,
To meet Amba and her sweet new born.
Tarak kept back for Zagat Amba,
The mother divine, and to bedeck her abode
As the rest of his ilk, kept disappearing
In a quiet, silent, stream of migrants, exiles.
"Rah, ta, ta", the staccato from the AKs
Silenced the melody of the aarti
And quiet went the screeching loudspeakers.
All dumb, all quiet, silence, a deathly hush.
Zagat Amba departed, went
far away to some undisclosed destination.
Tarak was clinging to the fetish,
To a stone blasted into smithereens.
And his lips, his stomach,
His entire viscera, his blood, his tissues, his cells
His entire antahkaran kept blubbering, boohooing,
"Maeji! Maeji!, Maeji."
His red dripping into the vermilion,
The grand finale of his execution
was his return back
to the womb of his Mother.
His beloved Zagat Amba.
Yambarzal envied him to her last,
Fretting and fuming in the exile
of a Migrant camp to the West of Jammu,
where the two neighbours
were shaking hands
and simpering over the redundant Borders.
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