Mainstream WeeklyI 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)