Two Poems
By Shamsher Bahadur Singh; Translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
‘hamaare siwaa inkaa rus kaun jaane!’
vo apnoN kii baateN, vo apnoN kii Khoo-boo
hamaarii hii hindii, hamaarii hii urduu!
ye koyel-o-bulbul ke meeThe taraane
hamaare siwaa inkaa rus kaun jaane!
‘We keep it between us’
We keep it between us, and inhale the perfume:
The Hindi we belong to, the Urdu that’s ours.
The koel’s, the bulbul’s, their unbroken melody,
We both know it as few else do.
1946
Defence
Above the open page,
in the distance beyond the door,
a glimpse of a two-inch
piece of sky,
purplish,
dark-blue.
The walls,
their backs to it,
have the calmness
of light oyster-pink whitewash.
Evening has fallen.
A July evening,
the vanguard of rainy nights.
The book, open, is
Aragon: Poet of French Resistance.
(To save them from wild beasts,
human gorilla bones
have kitted out poets in a new armour,
Aragon especially.) Then . . .
stepping on the silken rug,
through the damp doorway,
a thought enters my room:
A civilisation as refined, as precious,
as high as Indian skies,
is anyone defending it?
Shamsher Bahadur Singh was born in Dehra Dun in 1911 and died in 1993 in Ahmedabad. In 1965, he was appointed editor of the UGC-funded Urdu-Hindi Dictionary. He wrote in Urdu, Hindi, and, very occasionally, in English. Among his many awards are the Sahitya Akadami Award, the Tulsi Puraskar, and the Kabir Samman.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in 1947 in Undivided India, where he still lives, according to his passport. A new collection of his poems, Of Least Concern, is to be published by Literary Activism/Westland later this year. He lives in Dehra Dun.