Are the chains in a house
When a girl runs away
Do you remember the night
Which appeared in old films again and again
Whenever a girl ran away,
Stone lampposts in the rain,
Their lights just enough
to show the restlessness of eyes?
And all those songs of passion on the silver screen
Have come true in your own house, today
Did you think that those songs
Were composed only for the actors and actresses?
And that perilous enactment
Of the ruination of ‘Laila’
Which, rising unbroken from the stage
Did spread in the personal lives of the viewers?
2
You won’t ever read us
The letter
Which, before leaving,
She left on the table.
You will conceal from the whole world
Her words,
you will steal
her glass, her mercury, her ebony
her boat with the seven sails
but how will you steal
the years of a girl who has run away?
The years, much of which might have remained
In the dusk of her veil.
Will you destroy
All the things she has left behind?
Will you destroy even her absence?
Echoing much more than her presence
Like ‘Santoor’
In the hairs.
3
You will erase her,
Erase a girl who has run away
From the air of her own house,
You will erase her
From her childhood which is within you
From there also
I know
The cruelty of the gentry!
But the fact of her running away
Will not be erased from memory
Like old windmills.
She is not the first girl
Who has run away
Neither will she be the last,
There will be many more boys
Many more girls
Who will run away in the month of March.
The girl runs away
As if vanishing in the flowers
In the stars
Running in a swimming costume
In a packed, well-lit stadium.
4
If, a girl runs away
It’s not always necessary
That a boy must have run away.
There are
Other concerns in life
For which she might go
She can do anything
A woman is not only a birth-giver.
Outside your houses
Strong and armoured like tanks
The girls have changed a lot
I will not permit
That you hoard even their capabilities.
She may be anywhere
She may fall
May break and scatter
But she surely will be involved in everything
She will make her own mistakes
Will see every thing
From beginning to the end
She will even see her own end
Not die someone else’s death.
5
You
Who keep wives away
From prostitutes
And sweethearts from wives
How scared you get
When a woman dauntlessly roams
Searching her self
In prostitutes, wives, and sweethearts at a time!
Now she can be anywhere
Even in those future countries
Where love will be a wholetime engagements.
6
So many girls run away
In their fancies
In their sleepless nights, in their diaries
There number is much larger
Than of the girls who run in reality.
Has any girl run away for you?
Is there not a single red-gravelled path
In your night?
Has marriage been just given to you?
Did you grab it
By your status, your power?
You brought away, all at once
All the nights of a woman –
Even her nights after her death!
You have not wept even once
Resting your head on the bosom of a woman!
Stay, for tonight only
No woman ever said to you.
Stay, for tonight only
So many women the world over
Have said so many times
They came running up to all the doors of the sea
Stay, for tonight only
And till there is a world
There will be a tonight only.
________________________________
Translated by: Roma Prakash & Bidyut Pal
(In 1990s)
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