BPatsani blogpost: Badatota, My Pretty Little World

BPatsani blogpost: Badatota, My Pretty Little World: BADATOTA, MY PRETTY LITTLE WORLD (For my grandfather Sri Chaitan Patsani) "chhota mor gaan ti, bhugol pothi patare pachhe nathau...

Badatota, My Pretty Little World

BADATOTA, MY PRETTY LITTLE WORLD
(For my grandfather Sri Chaitan Patsani)

"chhota mor gaan ti,
bhugol pothi patare pachhe
nathau taar naan ti”*
- Sachi Rautaray

Badatota is my pretty little world
From where I began.
Badatota is my village
Where I was born years back
And pissed on my grandpa’s face
When I was a baby.

Humorous and fun-loving,
He would talk of the affair
With pride and pleasure.

Kind, compassionate and loving
With passion for riding and adventure,
Grandpa died a year after,
Probably of heart attack,
While the fish he brought
Was waiting half burnt.
That made the difference
To me and papa as well
And marked the beginning.

I would sit watching from the verandah
Paper boats and bubbles
On the muddy flow of rain water.
I would sing of unknown heights
Transported to the glorious past
And that divine steady movement,
Baliyatra and boita bandan,
The obstinacy of the paikas not to give in,
And equally ecstatic
I would enjoy swimming in the village pond
Floating like a boat on the surface
And pulling in to the centre.

I would pray the five-faced Mahavir
After bath and drink the tulsi-water
Kept in a stone bowl for devotees..

Chandan Yatra, Dola or Jhulan,
All would make me festive
And drunken to be Blakean,
And I would be sad to see it end.

The southern wind blowing across
The woods on the Barunai Hill,
Pleasures and pastimes
In my heavy heart would fill.

The school, the tools
And elder grandpa’s palm-leaf poetry,
The village versifier-cum-mason
Chintamani’s half-baked dream,
Odishi kirtan led by Ravi-uncle
And after all my people’s toil
To rise above the ordinary
Half sunk in petty quarrels
And mediocre means,
Their innocent mischief and failures,
Frail yet fascinating,
Their pleasure in being alive
And their humble desire to be acting,
What might be the measure;
All built in me a sense of being,
A keen sense of pride and positivism
That I nursed secretly,
The inorganic glory
Embedded in the organic,
Epitomized in its quietness.
Badatota is my starting point from where
I began moving in and around, spinning.

More than a mere place, a place of accident,
Badatota is that which made me learn what I am.
Badatota is my distant moon, my destiny
And destination under those banyan trees,
Its hanging roots longing for ground, reflecting
All possible dimensions of living and the purpose.
Firm and vital, moving in stillness,
Badatota, in fact, is my grave and womb,
My still centre and extension
Where I am to meet my end soon.






____________________________
*Small is my village, but it is there,
Even if in any geography book
There is no mention of it.

(from my poetry collection
VOICE OF THE VALLEY,
published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata/1993)


Bipin Patsani

THE INHERITOR

                                                                      

             (for my maternal grandfather

               late Kunjabihari Samantaray

  of  Barasahi, Khurda in Odisha)

I have seen only your old snap, Grandpa,

Your old and beautiful snap

Taken probably in a studio in Calcutta

Sometime in nineteen twenties or thirties

And that I greedily possess,

Having recovered it dust ridden

From the mud wall of indifference and lime

At your own home where it was just a photo

That was losing its lustre in course of time.

Even my mother doesn’t remember

If she had seen you,

Since she was hardly a one year old baby

When you left this world young and romantic,

May be at the age of twenty five or thirty.

And granny told me how, inhibited,

You would come quietly like a thief

To fondle mom when no one was around,

Hiding from the watchful eyes

Of your old fashioned mother,

As if fatherhood those days

Was something to be ashamed of.

            

             Granny would just watch me grow

And tears of happiness would come to her eyes

Nursing, as it were, a secret pride

In my progress and position at school.

But one thing I don’t understand.

When the question of inheritance came,

The inheritance of his adopted son

Who posed to be our well-wisher,

Why did your brother say granny was childless?

Or to put it rightly, why did he say

That the baby, my mother, had died years ago

And granny, in fact, had sold him her share?

An emotional lady, thank God, mother is alive

To see a dozen grandchildren of her own

Born to her three sons and two daughters,

And dying for brotherly care and concern

She would have gladly sacrificed her share.

Granny was satisfied with the thought

That it was she who had adopted a son

And mother was happy too to have a brother.

Their sacrifice was made unimportant.

With fifty percent share of the property,

             Mom was ignored when the papers were signed.

“Your signature will be taken later

If necessary,” my mother was told.

What she could not understand at the time

Was that it would not have ever been necessary,

And granny herself was too innocent

To smell of any such development.

Nor did she know that the thumb impression

She might have given earlier on

What she was told to be the paper of adoption,

Was actually the sale of her fortune.

Your brother now is no more.

After undergoing the painful experience

Of being bed-ridden for twelve cruel months

Awaiting the end, which would come only

After confusing confessions, he died in 1980.

Poor old man, he carried with him nothing

But the cane walking stick

I had taken for him from Puri.

Kept in the dark all the years of her life

And having been made to know late

That she had no legal link with the inheritor,

The vacuum granny could not bear.

She died two years after

Without a bona fide to perform her last rite,

And all that I could do

Was to watch everything like an idiot,

Silent under the spell of Uncle Hypocrite,

Who in his usual do-gooder way would tell me,

“You should not have come travelling a thousand km

And wasting money to attend a sheer ceremony.”

When material gains are all that people care,

Delicate feelings like the fond memory of one

Who once loved and probably had a dream,

Have little importance in the game.

Thus, you have been long forgotten, Grandpa;

In spite of your faith in goodness

You have been forgotten at home

And it pains to see no trace of your name.

                  ____________ 

(In honour of my mother Sulochana Devi,

 who passed away on July 29, 2011./

 From my 3rd poetry collection 'HOMECOMING'

 published in 2010)

Bipin Patsani 

THE GAME

What seems to be fascinating

Soon becomes a void;

A river, robbed of its natural flow,

Bares boulders in its bed.

The privileged enjoy their clouts

And exploit every opportunity

To be in focus and fortune,

While the poor die unseen, unknown,

Fumbling in the dark.

Bridges break, towers fall and falls fraternity,

Giving rise to the walls which divide people.

Living in a fake world, I feel dying.

Should I sing psalms on those who build

Dreadful deceits and rob public property?

Should I write odes on those in power

And feel proud to be seen near?

No, my poem is not for them.

My poem, comfortable in silence,

Is scared of the world so selfish and violent.

It is scared of the brute force growing blue-lines

Everywhere, moving around to hit and run.

My poem doesn’t want to go out in the open,

Lest some mad mob should kill it in a clash

And rip apart its syntax of flesh and bone,

Scattering words and syllables in a blast.

My small town poem is not safe either

On the badly damaged road of the town

That sees monsoon after monsoon

Awaiting repair, harbouring rain water

And overflowing drains to wipe away its tone.

Disillusioned with everything

That the world makes me experience,

I would like to make poems of sand and surf

On the fair bare beach just for my pleasure.

I would build a new world of images,

Build and break on the sands and rebuild

To break again after the end of the game

And smile the supreme builder’s smile.

I would dance then in joy

To see the tides wash away

All my works and relics, leaving behind

A fresh field to begin new nothings

Till I have time to have the game going.

                  _____________    

 (from my forthcoming poetry collection

  "THIS LIFE, THIS DEATH")

 Bipin Patsani

PAST PERFECT AND PRESENT INDEFINITE

PAST PERFECT AND PRESENT INDEFINITE

(On starvation deaths in Kalahandhi

  and Kashipur in Odisha)

The art of living, sharing, caring for all

And working together for a common goal

Is the greatest art mankind must learn,

If at all for its misdeeds it cares to mourn.

Love for freedom, national pride,

Sense of loss in an ancient war,

The burden of the past and tradition,

And the animation of the sublime on stones

May help produce the space-shuttle poetry

Of some private pleasure, five-star agony

Or even in building up some info-tech story.

Awards and honours mean much for the elite;

But the lifestyle of the common people,

The pain and strain they endure

Is a nation’s true identity.

Why is it that we have plenty of people

Who have passions for poetry and politics,

But none to show us some definite direction?

When achievements reduce to be personal,

Failure remains to be the collective responsibility

Of a people for sheer debate to end verbal.

One wonders at those unknown soldiers

Who had given us a taste of victory

In their fight to death, eternally present

As undying resistance to force,

For history to remember,

Instrumental in its way to peace.

Though age makes us weary,

Makes us sad, self-centered and lonely,

The lines of Gopabandhu,

Who wept for the poor, worked for them

And wrote for them, still haunt our memory.

“Not in years, months,

Not in days, nor hours of pleasure;

Man lives in his work,

And the work, his only measure.”

                       II

While the coastal belt bears nature’s brunt

Having to experience cyclones and flood,

The anguished west has a hungry earth to tread.

Our ambitious appetite

For name, fame and creativity

Helps in no way to end poverty.

In this land of temples and gods

People are, as it were, too great and godly

To think of the wretched of the earth,

Who, in their opinion, are destined to die

Starvation deaths or eating mango kernel,

Cursed to make only babies to rock.

They seduced and stole their god,

They stole all their woods

And the little they had for food.

The dignity of living as humans they denied them,

For which a mother now sells even her child

Compelled to pay so great a price for a handful of rice.

In our incompatible feudal minds, aids,

How much big, doesn’t add up to our needs

As it all disappears in the black hole

Of our recklessness and greed.

Our big-brother-show of promise

Like the rock edict mockery of peace

Ebbs with the dark waters of dying waves.

                                    III

It is not for our lack of courage

Or skill that we suffer.

We too had our greener days.

The malady is elsewhere.

When strength becomes weakness,

The burden of achievement

Turns out to be the cause of misery.

Others built a sound sustenance

And left their pride to God;

We made God our face

And installed pride in the head instead.

Idle worshippers of cult figures

And alien to commitment and work culture,

Most of us love to depend on others.

Money comes and goes

And we get used to our woes

Spending the little we have or get in pleasing

Gods and godheads much in a community feast.

The larger part of a loan

 Which otherwise could have assuaged

The suffering, is found finished and gone

In celebration of some sorrow or a little gain

To please all gods in the neighborhood.

                               IV

The big and beautiful adorns the Odissi sky

With religious fervor even in sensual joy.

So, there is this dumb dereliction,

This deletion of the basic needs

Which shy away in the dominant presence

Of the big black God of total absence.

The Radha Krishna myth takes new dimensions,

New depths in its passionate presentation.

The miserable, rejoicing their transformation

In the night, strip to their hells at dawn.

The primeval theme of love, sex, war,

Possession and pride gives us a good ride.

The thought of a lost war and the struggle

Compensates the loss and abuse.

It contemplates the sluggishness

If it doesn’t exhaust means by much use

Like a militant outfit, left with little to offer the people

It makes suffer, wasting more on weapons and the hit.

Pillars only don’t ensure peace

If the ground beneath is hollow,

Where each and every one growls

For a bigger share of the kill.

If past perfect is our treasure,

Can’t our present be progressive

And food for all be our pleasure?   

                            V

When power politics

In a caste ridden society

Aims at establishing superiority,

The concept of a welfare state

And democracy doesn’t work.

Since the deprived,

Most often victims of false prestige,

Feel contented with a gift of lies

And stick to image worship

In their love for noble lineage

Which, they think, can deliver the good,

A humble origin doesn’t fit into

The scheme of the things to begin with.

Thus we sit and wait

In the deluxe suite of our insight

Looking for some poetic truth

And invest on our intellectual exercise,

Aching for some new surprise, new image,

Good enough to please, conceal and confuse.

                          VI

The desperate dreams

And defiance of a simple folk

That has always loved

To have a life of its own

Free from subjugation,

The beautiful landscape,

The golden beach

And the mystic silence

Of the poetic network

Of magnificent temples

Come to my mind and I smile

When they ask me,

“How do your people write

So good poetry?”

But when I am asked

About starvation deaths

At my place

Or a mother selling her child

For a handful of rice

Even after fifty-four years

Of Independence,

I feel miserable myself

Groping for words.

                                          - Nov 2001

(from my forthcoming poetry collection

 "THE BITTER CANTO")

Bipin Patsani