Dr. Nandini Sahu
Director &
Professor of English
School of Foreign
Languages
Indira
Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)
New Delhi, India
Why is it that they tell me
I do look dignified
After such humiliations.
My life full of such trivialities.
I know this much,
I am in Arjuna, and he in me,
I am seeking release in the love of my lord-
Krishna;
And Karna- in a strange corner of my heart
One after another shock
Ensnaring me, like a China doll
I am not myself.
I am not alone Arjuna’s love,
Nor Krishna’s
Nor even Karna’s lone victim,
Nor the diadem-studded queen
None of these I am.
I embrace ‘all I bleed in ‘all’
In the ‘Kurusabha’
In my long clothes, my shame I armour
spread-eagling in all.
This body I wear is not mine.
Like the expansive earth, it encompasses
‘all’
My five sons-
particles of my blood
I know not their roots. Yet I call them mine.
I bleed infinitely in the lost identity of
‘all’.
from my own ‘self’
In Krishna, in Arjuna, or in Karna (?)
In one,
Honestly I like to know
What it feels like
To be lost in one
To be absorbed wholesomely in ‘one’
This is Kurukshetra –
The land of half-humans, demi-gods:
On the blood-torn land
I cannot wait, nor can I cry aloud.
So my heart,
Like fire I play with you
Oh, fire!
I am fire,
I am born of fire, my life is fire,
I know not, if my death be fire too!!
Sycophants, one and all, encircle me
Sway and swindle me, sweltering my bones
As if tickling me
By putting one after another tiara on my head
Trying to heal my unlocked hairs – the
‘Kurukshetra’
of the Pandavas.
An illusion I am
I suffer, I am symbol of suffering
Even when I laugh with the cruel, heat blood
Of Dushasaa, I suffer.
And in the city of the dead
I die hundred times in delusion
I seek release, I know not where -
May be in all!!!