“Kamatipura”

Namdeo Dhasal, a young guy, Revolutionary thinker and The Poet of underworld. Born in 1949, Namdeo Dhasal is Maharashtra’s leading poet and the only Indian poet to have received a Lifetime Achievement Award from country’s apex literary institution, the Sahitya Akademi. He is the author of nine books of poetry.

Dhasal is a quintessentially Mumbai poet. Raw, raging, associative, almost carnal in its tactility, his poetry emerges from the underbelly of the city — it’s menacing, unplumbed netherworld. This is the world of pimps and smugglers, of crooks and petty politicians, of opium dens, brothels, and beleaguered urban tenements. In a recent article on Dhasal, I described his poetic world as that of “Mumbai without her make-up, her Botox, her power yoga; the Mumbai that seethes, unruly, menacing, yet vitally alive, beneath the glitzy mall and multiplex, the high-rise and flyover.

“Kamatipura”

(Translation: Dilip Chitre)

The nocturnal porcupine reclines here

 Like an alluring grey bouquet

 Wearing the syphilitic sores of centuries

 Pushing the calendar away

 Forever lost in its own dreams

Man’s lost his speech

 His god’s a shitting skeleton

 Will this void ever find a voice, become a voice?

If you wish, keep an iron eye on it to watch

 If there’s a tear in it, freeze it and save it too

 Just looking at its alluring form, one goes berserk

 The porcupine wakes up with a start

 Attacks you with its sharp aroused bristles

 Wounds you all over, through and through

 As the night gets ready for its bridegroom, wounds begin to blossom

 Unending oceans of flowers roll out

 Peacocks continually dance and mate

This is hell

 This is a swirling vortex

 This is an ugly agony

 This is pain wearing a dancer’s anklets

Shed your skin, shed your skin from its very roots

 Skin yourself

 Let these poisoned everlasting wombs become disembodied.

 Let not this numbed ball of flesh sprout limbs

 Taste this

 Potassium cyanide!

 As you die at the infinitesimal fraction of a second,

 Write down the small ‘s’ that’s being forever lowered.

Here queue up they who want to taste

 Poison’s sweet or salt flavour

 Death gathers here, as do words,

 In just a minute, it will start pouring here.

O Kamatipura,

 Tucking all seasons under your armpit

 You squat in the mud here

 I go beyond all the pleasures and pains of whoring and wait

 For your lotus to bloom.

 — A lotus in the mud.