A DAY IN MAY: 1987

SO FROM 14 MAY 1879 TO MAY 14 1987 ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT YEARS

■Emeritus Professor Satendra Nandan is Fiji’s leading writer.

1987:Six Nights in May, was first published in Fiji and subsequently in Europe with the subtitle ‘Death in Paradise’.

This is a fragment from his long poem to be published in his Collected Poems.

If you could know the next instant To find its unimaginable intent

In your life:utterly revealed. Or recover that lost moment Gone into timeless eternity, You could control your fate And be wise like a prophet.

But those moments remain Like death, in their mystery. There’s nothing in human breath

To unravel what is gone Or what could happen

In that incandescent instant: The heart may stop beating Your garden keeps growing And children keep playing... You’re pronounced dead; While the lights of the ambulance

Keep flashing on the street You lie like a loaf of stale bread

By the roadside — with cold feet.

How much blood, do you see In the breaking of hearts betrayed?

But the trees will grow again Like the inevitable fall of rain.

All paradises are lost Except a fool’s:

In our two eyes

The light goes out

Two sweatdrops hang on to your brow Like dewdrops on withered leaves.

II

So it happened on my island

Often missing from many maps

Made of the remnants of lands

From within and without,

Where they prayed with folded hands.

In such a place in sailing ships My peasant ancestors were sent

Like bullets loaded, and spent

Their lives building little things

Like birds build their nests

With feathers from their wings On trees, huts swept by winds,

Floods in rivers over their farms Again and again, oh that rain!

While children played lachidari On twisted tamarind trees

Limbs of the old and lonely

In that ghostly orchard

Where Hanuman lifted the mountain Or so we were told by our Nani

Pure as Gangama ki pani!

As dry coconuts fell to the ground Like human skulls,round and round, While children crossed the rivers.

Broken leaves on boughs grow again On black earth and pouring rain With cane knives and spades

With their hearts and hands

They created a world of plenty

With bits from the leftovers

Of life’s forgotten debris.

They become strongest where they were broken—

Things are most loved when forsaken.

III

So from 14 May 1879 to May 14 1987 One hundred and eight years —

The number is suspiciously auspicious I’m told by pundits and priests

Who carried their mantras with wisdom

In pothas wrapped in red clothes To send us to heaven across the seas seven.

Stories can give us strength

For deep down we’re made of tales Where there is no tomorrow: Yesterday is what you carry

Bundles over that bloody head scarf And see the other side of sorrow.

Field after field they planted

Where the sun came slanted

In their half-thatched bures

Where they led their half-lives; They loved,lived and died

No one heard them when they cried But they miraculously multiplied.

When they were young and strong Singing many a peasant song

That kept them going

In rain and sunshine

Cyclones and hurricane

In fields with a mark of Cain;

They grew as birds flew overhead They buried those who suddenly died: Floating with marigolds, hibiscus petals

Like people shipwrecked on a reef

Who today remembers their grief?

Oh those hours in the sun

In the bitter harvest of sugar cane

The bougainvilleas bloomed on the edges

On white walls, white houses

While hearts bled white in the sun As fathers remembered their dead sons. Mother’s wept and swept the front yard: It was hard, things were breaking

Like waves on black rocks

Who laughs now, who mocks?

Now all gone under the volcanic ocean: My heart is rinsed of every emotion.

IV In the storm my mother was born.

The island was large and lovely

And beautiful and bountiful.

Her children were tall palm trees Their hair blew in the wild wet wind As they ran down the hills

While I read dreaming of daffodils. Today my heart with an agony fills To think how they were betrayed While a cruel game was played.

The raintrees bent in grief

Touched lives that were so brief.

The day dawned with joy

And there was hope

In the heart of a little boy

Or was it sorrow he didn’t understand? Holding his hand I took him to school Why was I born such a fool?

It was the 14 of May: just another day But all wasn’t right in Walu bay.

A bright sun, a little drizzle

The air deceptively cool

A thin mist hung over Joske’s Thumb Or so it seemed: a black veil in the vale—

Treachery wears a mask: oh do not ask? Life doesn’t always reveal

What we so traitorously feel.

A gentle rain fell on the ocean

In its blue vertiginous splendor Covering wrinkled cheeks with tears.

They were preparing to rape

A sacred place wearing a strange shape Gas masks and guns, breaking a nation In my Father’s noblest mansion.

Hearts like boughs break

And we repair and make

Those things we can

The measure of every man.

It’s the body’s pain

Breaking into so many bits That remains in every cell

What more shall I tell?

Ik dil ke tukre hazaar huwe

Koi yahan gira, koi wahan gira

V

Between the glow worms

And the stars, we still exist, So near, yet so far,

With life’s many a scar

That lingering brokenness

Of a world so brutally broken.

What’s done is done

In the dying light of the sun— Lest we forget, Best we forgive? ...

Lost paradises are rare

In moments of despair

I see the sun going dark

Darkening the landscape of my heart Betrayed but not broken.

We have loved the lips

Of those who are no more

The hands that gave us food Brothers and sisters,cousins all, All gone into some dark ravine Of history and forgetting:

How will you know those no more And those still scattered grieving?

You, my child, keep breathing

Till you become one with the soil To understand: there’re no paradises Except in your innocent eyes:

You’ll not search for one

Until you’ve lost it.