A Nostalgic Poem

Growing Up Amid the Ruins and the Rains                       

Growing up in Udayagiri, my Utopia,

a sleepy, small town in central Odisha,India,

was just like growing up amid the ruins.

It was love that kept us alive. We

learnt  juvenile that one law that

binds or bends or fructifies all of us is love.

Mornings at Udayagiri. “Akashvani,

the news-reader Gouranga Charan Rath

welcomes you...”. We merely listened

to the voice, imagined a pot-bellied

bald man with chicken pox marks on his face

reading news while scrubbing his back.

Rains were awful, power cuts for

weeks, incessant rains, mountain rains

with thunder storm, eerie wind. Mother

was prepared with her kerosene stove

for  a minimal meal of rice and dalma

with pickles and  papadam, since her

soil-hearth was wet for days. The

open-drain in our courtyard, water

splashing, flooding like Mahanadi

in Cuttack, was a pleasure to  us

and a never-ending penalty for our maid  Tintu-maa

all the time scrubbing water with a broom and grumbling .

Time was flooding somewhere between yesterday

and today, amid our ancestral blessings of defeat

and loss. Is today an answer to yesterday?

Water lingered in Siriki dam, Dugudi, Christian mountain

Nua street, Pathan street, market square, Mahaguda street and

MMC hospital, the only one in the district

where doctors from the U.K. made occasional appearances

giving hope to the poor and the  faith to the agreeable.

 My youngest siblings were privileged to see the light of life there.

Hours and places, now beyond the recognition of time.

Like a speech  dictionless, without a meaning.

Or, the nameless shrubberies  of the Himalayas.

After days and days of rain, as the sun was

about to disappear from our faces, cockroaches

and dragon-flies  taking over our kitchen

and bed-posts, we pretending with books

inside the compulsory mosquito-net,

one evening, Gouranga Charan Rath

again, “Akashvani…”. From one end of

Udayagiri to another, Mili bayani’s or

Meraj baya’s rough hands exploding,

exploring the ruins of rain, marveling at

the town’s weak fortifications. The water was

receding everywhere -- Udayagiri, Daringbadi,

Kumbharkupa, Kanabageri, Badanaju, Malikapori, Kalinga and

further down at Bhanjanagar. During such

nights, I never slept, just counting the legs

of a peeled-off  bleached cockroach, perched like

a dinosaurs on the top of my head

above the mosquito-net. Thinking of the

low-lying homes and flooded fields where

nothing grew except weeds, I sighed . That night

I almost heard the deep hollow words echo

inside my sister’s disturbed sleep, against

her dream of roaring waters, and half-drowned

voices of my dead brother and deceased

neighbours -- Babu, Guni, Bapuni--the wailing

of their mothers in a sing-song voice.

And saw  my mother’s loss of her only son

in her under-eye dark circles. As I

prepared myself for the lingering night’s sleep,

my sister whispered, “Did you hear something?”

Pulling our pooled quilt over my face,

I said, “Didi, you may sleep--Udayagiri is

safe now.” She had a reticent sleep.

At night, in the culmination of the  rain, we could

perceive the stars, the moon, round and full,

wearing a romantic small rainbow tiara and enjoying

its embryonic telluric privileges while sketching

the disposed waters to the ambitious blue. Ambitious?

No, Udayagiri was far from all ambitions. It never is.

But the morning sun was. After months and

months of rain, an ambitious wintry sun.

Udayagiri had nothing to do with 

the rich ancient maritime history of Odisha.

The damp, black evenings were like faces

of  onus; the rainstorm of our sins

wailed in the form of jackals from the

mountains all around. In the photographs

of my insomniac eyes, the sounds  of my hurt

wandered. I learnt the alphabet of silence and patience

without animosity, anger or pretense

from Udayagiri winters. Udayagiri, the Darjeeling of Odisha.

Were there only two seasons in Udayagiri? The rain and

winter? The ambitious sun  always remained

lenient, hiding in the darkly-begotten womb of dense forests of Kalinga Ghat.

Summer was the other name for  Spring.

Beige birds sang pleasantly from behind the

leafless gulmohur trees, loaded with red flowers.

On my way from school, miming and nagging

a cuckoo to yell, forgetting  her sweet voice.

I enjoyed that game. A game that makes

me livid now elsewhere in the metropolis.

My tissues are aerated with echoes of the

chirping birds of Udayagiri till today; I am christened.

I was christened. All along it has been there.

I feel its existence, but not sure of the

space it has occupied in my being.

Growing up among the ruins, patiently,

I have become mature in the art of  frolicking

with my shadow till sundown. Each

dark night, it creeps under my door,

that feel of love and  the sense of loss borrowed

from Udayagiri. I feel its rustle, but

cannot touch it. Sense its breath through

the walls, thinking of the walls of our

Golla Street house, the timeless patches on the  

walls like  illusory shadows of  elephants,

zebras or  a mad woman’s ruffled  head or 

a dog barking or yawning. Breathing shadows.

In darkness I touch and feel the ruins.

Ruined pillars, archways, moth-destroyed wedding  albums.

Sultry, sticky cream-powder-comb boxes. Detached parents and sisters.         

I draw a portrait  on the sky. It senses

my anguish. The heavens descend with their quills.

Failing to get its clue, I sulk, shrivel and wilt.