This Place is Enough
Between two addresses, an undiscovered geography—
I wrote it, kept it aside, and bothering not to read
A face at first, then a second, and a third…
A story that was yours and mine remained an unfinished business
Like a corpus of drying clothes tossing in the wind
Like always, ripe with a miscellany of the unconsummated
In those pages, I tuck another day,
Turning them and then I walk away
Winter! A muffler around my neck
I turn back to inspect something, groping for my pocket
Feeling like a stranger to myself,
I disappear from the street into an alley
From the visible self, past the threshold of the door
Household, to courtyard, to solitude
In the guise of hope fear follows at each step
My shadow, like a receipt for arrivals and departures
So I have stopped
Here and there, between shadows, measuring my height
And then running with shackled feet, until
This place that is enough to stand, hide
And lie in silence
Or turn into the green doob grass.
Translation from Hindi by Arup K Chatterjee and Amrita Ajay.
