वृक्ष मंदिर

वृक्ष मंदिर

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Temple of Trees

An English rendering, close in spirit; the Hindi remains the poem.

Outside the village, on usar land, saline and barren,
my father planted and tended, outside the village, a Temple of Trees.

Back then there stood three mahua trees and one jamun;
there was a well too,
and water, yes, clean water, just three or four feet below the ground,
where thirsty herdsmen drank, and wandering children at play.

We went there only to gather chalk,
for the black slate, smeared with lamp soot and polished with Amma’s bangle,
on which we wrote ka kha ga gha with a reed pen.

Those trees, from before my father’s time, perhaps from his father’s,
watched it all, mute, from where they stood, detached, utterly alone.
How must this change have felt to them?

Outside the village, on barren usar land, stands the Temple of Trees.
I came here to shed my weariness, to where there is no noise,
only the chatter of flocks of birds, the call of the koel,
the rustling breeze that speaks through the branches,
clouds gathering and swirling, thundering, bringing back childhood,
making me laugh, making me afraid.

Lightning flashes, and memories of childhood flash with it,
the feeling of that contentment which, whenever it returned after childhood,
came sometimes as a sprinkle, sometimes as a downpour.

In the stillness of strange, unknown, misty memories,
like a moving picture, there appear
many faces, some old and familiar, some new, and they too feel
like my own.

It is through our own people that we know who we are;
when our own people change, and new ones come into our life,
who we are changes too.

Faces that no longer peer into me as others do; they simply are,
as I am, within myself, a stranger to myself.
There are only trees, birds, earth, breeze and sky.

Solitude now brings me joy,
the same solitude that once brought the pain of being away from home;
but then I needed to make a name for myself in an unknown world.

Is this how it must be for this Temple of Trees too?
After all, this body of mine has come to bear more than one identity.

Today’s home, tomorrow’s cremation ground!