(Translated
from the original Assamese by the writer)
A moment,
oh, it’s just a moment
that has
made my heart overflow
with the
divine glory of your beauty.
You are a
happy dream of the brush–
some
god’s own child, some princess,
some
foster-daughter of a great hermit;
Your
beauty is chiselled in the lines
on the
rocks of the Ajanta hills.
But, oh,
the shadow has fallen upon you:
the curse
of some by-gone life:
mud-like
penury,
hatred
heaped upon your class by discriminating society,
darkness
that has accumulated through centuries
in this
filthy, unknown corner of the earth.
What
abundant store you possess of beauty:
long
tresses of hair flowing freely,
black,
shining like a serpent’s tail,
a
well-shaped nose like the clear outline
of a
hillock across the horizon,
your
blood beaming like unalloyed gold
below the
subdued azure of your skin,
two lips
of pure coral peeping beside the fingers
you are
biting in bashfulness,
your neck
bending a little under the burden
of the
flesh-flowers of the breasts,
the thin
loin like the middle of a vina,
trembling
with the steps,
the
buttocks bulging out like a wave of the brush,
the
petals of your feet turning red like alakta
at the
strokes of shingles and prickles.
This
beauty that thus burns in your body
is only
kindled by the dirty rags,
painted
black with poverty.
I know
not what vision of love divine
Apollo is
dreaming in his seven-horsed golden chariot,
enchanted
by the magic of your beauty.
For, you
can be no mean morsel
that the hungry
mortal millions can accept with hands,
soiled
with the pettiness and sin
of this
sphere’s dirty squalor.
A moment,
oh, it’s just a living moment of the forgotten past,
which
flashed upon my sight a snap of your beauty
through
an open window of the running train.
Yet, that
moment still lives in the sub-conscious of my mind,
And its
light scintillates at moments like all start,
or peeps
like moon-beams through the fog.
You are a
lovely dream of the little hours of winter night,
enmeshed
in sorrow;
a lotus
in the mud of reality;
Lakshmi
Devi without the gift of treasured vaults.