Taj Mahal

I do not care
 If the Taj means to you
 The great symbol of love;
 I do not care
 If perchance
 You should bear
 Towards its aura of colourful romance
 A reverence deep and true:
 Love, not here, not here
 But elsewhere
 Must be our rendezvous.

What sense does it make
 For the poor to be
 Frequenting
 These haunts of royalty?
 What sense does it make
 For soulful lovers
 To traverse
 A pathway
 So rudely dense
 With the imprint of an imperial day?

Past the trappings
 And the frill work of romance
 You must have peeped, ah Love,
 And noticed how
 Behind the elaborate song and dance
 Lie evidences of less lovely things.
 Into the dark and cheerless interiors
 Of our own houses
 You must have looked-

You whom
 The icy tombs
 Of dead kings
 Divert to ecstasy.

Countless are the people
 Who have loved;
 Nor were their vows contracted
 With less faith,
 Less intensity.
 All that they lacked
 Were the instruments of pomp,
 Because like you and I
 They too were underlings.
 These awesome monuments,
 These tombs,
 These ramparts,
 These fortifications-
 Testimonies to the grandeur of willful emperors-

Oh, what are they
 But festering ulcers
 In the rotten womb of time?
 And into these have poured
 The common sweat and blood
 Of our common ancestors.

Even they must have loved, ah Love,
 Whose deft fingerwork
 Has given to the Taj
 Its beautiful splendour:
 Yet
 Their nameless loves lie buried
 Under nameless graves,
 And no one did ever light a lamp
 Upon their rough and jagged headstones.

These lush lawns,
 This pensive river bank,
 And the palace fair,
 These filligreed walls and arches
 Soaring high,
 These shapely minarets
 And these squares of subtle art-
 Oh, in all these
 I can hear the monstrous laughter
 Of a wanton emperor
 Reverberating with a monstrous insult
 Full in the face of our forlorn loves.

This is no place for us, ah Love,
 This cannot be our rendezvous;
 Elsewhere must we go,
 Elsewhere remove.
 (Translated from Urdu by Badri Raina)
 (Published in Dialogue India 2, Calcutta, 1962)