MEMORIES OF RAIN:NADI
MEMORY FINDS ITS OWN STREAMS, RIVULETS ARE BUT BETRAYED DREAMS. The falling rain was beautiful to see from the top of the hill.
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Satendra Nandan’s forthcoming volume, LIFEJourneys : Love & Grief, will be published later this year. His recent publication is GIRMIT: Epic Lives in Small Lines.
The river rose as sleep Spilling over banks
Like someone in love Pouring forth its soul
if from a deep its dissolving
Limbs longing at the midnight hour For places it had been
Looking for its lost ways,
Where once it had flowed
In the landscape without bridges And she was free to move
To meet its all-embracing sea.
Memory finds its own streams Rivulets are but betrayed dreams.
There was a glory in the sky The dark rain-laden clouds And the wildness of waves Were one in each other’s arms.
We all lose our way Always—once or twice Even banished thrice,
As if someone we knew Has died in a distant land: All you remember is
That last wave of her hand.
But the rains didn’t stop
And fell for days and nights:
In its splashing waters we grew up. Even as the broken banks
Took our huts and goats ;
Our hearts grieved for lost things Like birds with wet wings
Shaking trees, but still flew,
We saw it all :and we grew.
It rains like grief
The more you live, the more you’ll grieve;
If life is a gift, the greenest leaf, Say I live, and will not leave.
But the rain doesn’t stop
It falls : the beauty of the falling rain Comes again and again
Like the recurring pain of birth As things are washed away ,
New leaves grow on fallen trees
That are close to their earth.
Children suddenly you.
are
bigger than
And fruits floated to the ocean Bananas, watermelons ,breadfruits In the thick rolling muddy waters Life wriggling towards an ocean In its eternal motion.
Battan Singh and his red cow On the roof of the house
Drifted down the hills
And was caught in the boughs
Of a drowning raintree.
For three days
The man and the beast
Lay entangled in the branches Of the leaning tree
Buffeted by wind and rain.
No one cared for his turbaned pain.
The falling rain was beautiful to see From the top of the hill.
We rolled down to the river
The river rolled on Like that old song.
We watched : lightning struck— A cow tumbled in the barren field. A curse was upon us
A sacred cow was dead.
The village prayed, buried its dead Where it had fallen:
Thunder rolled in the mountains And I was afraid in my wet bed.
Such were the joys of my youth Childhood had come and gone Playing on the river sands
The children from the river koro Lesu, Blooma,Luisa ,Litia ,Kini All brothers and bahini. We knew no sorrow
Nor thought of tomorrow.
Now all life.
The rain too has stopped .
gone in the many floods of
And the river is empty of children.
I’m told the river quietly flows And the grass sings ,night and day Without the floods of yesterday.
The river has changed its course, Just like you and me,of course. And the clouds moving overhead Across a sky so desolately clad.