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A METAPHOR IN THE EVENING SKY (Satis Shroff)
Satis Shroff is a writer & poet based in Freiburg and has been writing, editing and teaching professionally for more than twenty years. A regular contributor to the American Chronicle and its syndicate of 21affiliated US newspapers, he is also the author of a travelogue Through Nepalese Eyes, and his anthology of poems ‘Under the Shadow of the Himalayas: A Gurkha Mother, A Broken Poet and Mental Molotovs.’ He has studied Zoology and Botany in Nepal, Medicine and Social Sciences in Germany and Creative Writing in Freiburg and Writers Bureau (Manchester). He describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. Satis Shroff was awarded the German Academic Exchange Prize., and is a lecturer in Basle (Switzerland). For more poems & articles by the author please read visit: http://www.amchron.com/ and www.http://www.blog.ch . Or just look up at google & yahoo under: satis shroff literature.
Copyright © 2007 by Satis Shroff, Freiburg
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A METAPHOR IN THE EVENING SKY (Satis Shroff)
It was a glorious sunset,
The clouds blazing in scarlet and orange hues,
As the young man, riding on the back of a lorry,
Sacks full of rice and salt,
Stared at the Siwaliks
And Mahabharat mountains
Dwindling behind him.
As the sun set in the Himalayas,
The shadows grew longer in the vales.
The young man saw the golden moon,
Shining from a cloudy sky.
The same moon he’d seen on a poster
In his uncle’s kitchen
As he ate cross-legged his dal-bhat-shikar
After the hand-washing ritual.
Was the moon a metaphor?
Was it his fate to travel to Kathmandu,
Leaving behind his childhood friends
And relatives in the hills,
Who were struggling for their very existence,
In the foothills of the Kanchenjunga,
Where the peaks were not summits to be scaled,
With or without oxygen,
But the abodes of the Gods and Goddesses.
A realm where bhuts and prets,
Boksas and boksis,
Demons and dakinis prevailed.
Glossary:
Gurkhas: Nepali soldiers serving in Nepalese, Indian and British armies
Dal-bhat: Linsen und Reis
Shikar: Fleischgericht
Bhuts and prets: Demonen und Geister
Boksas und Boksis: männliche und weibliche Hexen
*****
HARMONY FOR THE HEART (Satis Shroff)
As the Breisgau-train dashes in the Black Forest,
Between Elztal and Freiburg,
I am with my thoughts in South Asia.
I saunter towards Swayambhu in Nepal,
The hill of the Self-Existent One.
‘Om mane peme hum’ stirs in the air,
As a lama passes by.
I’m greeted by cries of Rhesus monkeys,
Pigeons, mynahs, crows,
The whole world is full of music,
Making it, feasting on it,
Dancing and nodding to it.
Music has left its cultural confines.
The train stops at Zähringen-Freiburg.
I get off and peer at the blue-green forest in the distance.
It’s Springtime.
As I approach my home at the Pochgasse,
I discern Schumann’s sonate number 3,
Played by Vladimir Horowitz.
That’s harmony for the heart.
Glossary:
Bahn: train
Mumbai: Bombay
Bueb: small male child
Chen: Verniedlichung, like Babu-cha in Newari
Schwarzwald: The Black Forest of south-west Germany
Miteinander: togetherness
*****
In the Shadow of the Himalayas (Satis Shroff)
My Nepal, what has become of you?
Your features have changed with time.
The innocent face of the Kumari
Has changed to the blood-thirsty countenance of Kal Bhairab,
From development to destruction,
You’re no longer the same.
There’s insurrection and turmoil
Against the government and the police.
Your sons and daughters are at war,
With the Gurkhas again.
Ideologies that have been discredited elsewhere,
Flourish in the Himalayas.
With brazen, bloody attacks
Fighting for their communist rights,
And the rights of the bewildered common man.
The Nepalese child-soldier gets orders from grown-ups
And the hapless souls open fire.
The child-soldier cannot reason,
Shedding precious human blood.
Ach, this massacre in the shadow of the Himalayas.
We can only hope for a fragile peace,
Like a drowning man clinging to a straw.
Om Shanti,
Om Shanti.
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MENTAL MOLOTOVS (Satis Shroff)
When Hoyerswerda burns
They discuss about the asylum-seekers.
Peaceful, righteous Germans go
In the streets with candles.
When a house burns in Mölln
They discuss about bringing back
Soldiers from the dangers of Somalia.
At the Turkish funeral in Solingen
The Chancellor keeps away
And avoids thus
Rotten eggs and tomatoes
That might come his way.
When the trial comes
The former skinhead neonazi
Has a lot of hair.
He wears a two-piece suit,
Ties a tie around his neck
And looks oh-so-respectable.
He peers into the cameras
With clear blue eyes and says:
"I'm innocent and a victim
Of the modern industrial society."
And withdraws his statement.
The judges are lenient,
And the neo gets off on bail,
Gestures with his middle finger
And quips: "Leck mich am Arsch!"
As he speeds away in a car
Only to reappear with a Molotov
Like the Sphinx again.
"Ausländer Raus!
Deutschland den Deutschen!"
These are the slogans
Still making the rounds in 2006.
The old black and white flag
From the Third Reich
Raises no eyebrows
At soccer stadiums, streets and pubs.
It's fashionable again
To throw mental Molotovs
At blacks, browns, yellows,
And all non-Teutonics
At cocktails, chats
Stammtisch and in the streets
Against anything alien.
‘I don't like foreigners
I'll kill you,’ says a drunk
In broad daylight at the local Bahnhof.
Please don't ask me,
How it feels
To be a non-Teutonic
In Deutschland.
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THE AGONY OF WAR (Satis Shroff)
Once upon a time there was a seventeen year old boy
Who lived in the Polish city of Danzig.
He was ordered to join the Waffen-SS,
Hitler’s elite division.
Oh, what an honour for a seventeen year old,
Almost a privilege to join the Waffen-SS.
The boy said, “Wir wurden von früh bis spät
Geschliffen und sollten
Zur Sau gemacht werden.”
A Russian grenade shrapnel brought his role
In the war to an abrupt end.
That was on April 20, 1945.
In the same evening,
He was brought to Meissen,
Where he came to know about his Vaterland’s defeat.
The war was lost long ago.
He realised how an ordinary soldier
Became helpless after being used as a tool in the war,
Following orders that didn’t demand heroism
In the brutal reality of war.
It was a streak of luck,
And his inability to ride a bicycle,
That saved his skin
At the Russian-held village of Niederlausitz.
His comrades rode the bicycle,
And he was obliged to give them fire-support
With a maschine-gun.
His seven comrades and the officer
Were slain by the Russians.
The only survivor was a boy
Of seventeen.
He abandoned his light maschine-gun,
And left the house of the bicycle-seller,
Through the backyard garden
With its creaky gate.
What were the chances in the days of the Third Reich
For a 17 year old boy named Günter Grass
To understand the world?
The BBC was a feindliche radio,
And Goebbels’ propaganda maschinery
Was in full swing.
There was no time to reflect in those days.
Fürcht und Elend im Dritten Reich,
Wrote Bertold Brecht later.
Why did he wait till he was almost eighty?
Why did he torment his soul all these years?
Why didn’t he tell the bitter truth,
About his tragi-comical role in the war
With the Waffen-SS?
He was a Hitlerjunge,
A young Nazi.
Faithful till the end.
A boy who was seduced by the Waffen-SS.
His excuse:
„Ich habe mich verführen lassen.“
The reality of the war brought
Endless death and suffering.
He felt the fear in his bones,
His eyes were opened at last.
Günter Grass is a figure,
You think you know well.
Yet he’s aloof
And you hardly know him,
This literary titan.
He breathes literature
And political engagement.
In his new book:
Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln
He confides he has lived from page to page,
And from book to book.
Is he a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles,
In the same breast?
Grass belongs to us,
For he has spent the time with us.
It was his personal weakness
Not to tell earlier.
He’s a playwright, director and actor
Of his own creativeness,
And tells his own tale.
His characters Oskar and Mahlke weren’t holy Joes.
It was his way of indirectly showing
What went inside him.
Ach, his true confession took time.
It was like peeling an onion with tears,
One layer after the other.
Better late than never.
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Works by Günter Grass: Surrealist poems Die Vorzüge der Windhühner 1956, grotesque plays Hochwasser 1956, Onkel-Onkel, Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo, Die bösen Köche 1957, original novel Die Blechtrommel 1959 (The Tin Drum), poems and drawings Gleisdreieck 1960, Hundejahre 1963, Die Plebjer proben den Aufstand 1966, Büchner Prize 1965, illustrated poems Ausgefragt 1967, third novel örtlich betäubt, play Davor, 1969 gesammelte Gedichte1971, Maria zuehren 1973, Liebe geprüft 1974, wie ich mich sehe 1980, ,fourth novel Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke 1972,a study of melancholy Melancholia I, lengthy novel Der Butt1977, Das Treffen in Telgte 1979, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus 1980, Widerstand lernen, Politische Gegenreden 1980-1983, Aufsätze zur Literatur 1957-79 in 1980.Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln 2006.
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Wer den Dichter will verstehen
Muß in Dichters Lande gehen.
- Goethe
THE LURE OF THE HIMALAYAS (Satis Shroff)
500 years ago near the town of Kashgar,
I, a stranger in local clothes was captured
By the sturdy riders of Vali Khan.
What was a stranger
With fair skin and blue eyes,
Looking for in Vali Khan’s terrain?
I, the stranger spoke a strange tongue.
‘He’s a spy sent by China.
Behead him,’ barked the Khan’s officer.
I pleaded and tried to explain
My mission in their country.
It was all in vain.
On August 26, 1857
I, Adolph Schlagintweit,
a German traveller, an adventurer,
Was beheaded as a spy,
Without a trial.
I was a German who set out on the footsteps
Of the illustrious Alexander von Humboldt,
With my two brothers Hermann and Robert,
From Southhampton on September 20,1854
To see India, the Himalayas and Higher Asia.
The mission of the 29000km journey
Was to make an exact cartography
Of the little known countries,
Sans invitation, I must admit.
In Kamet we reached a 6785m peak,
An elevation record in those days.
We measured the altitudes,
Gathered magnetic, meteorological,
And anthropological data.
We even collected extensive
Botanical, zoological and ethnographic gems.
Hermann and I made 751 sketches,
Drawings, water-colour and oil paintings.
The motifs were Himalayan panoramas,
Single summits, glacier formations,
Himalayan rivers and houses of the natives.
Padam valley, near the old moraine
Of the main glacier at Zanskar in pencil and pen.
A view from Gunshankar peak 6023 metres,
From the Trans-Sutlej chain in aquarelle.
A European female in oriental dress in Calcutta 1855.
Brahmin, Rajput and Sudra women draped in saris.
Kristo Prasad, a 35 year old Rajput
Photographed in Benaras.
An old Hindu fakir with knee-long rasta braids,
Bhot women from Ladakh, snapped in Simla.
Kahars, Palki-porters from Bihar,
Hindus of the Sudra caste.
A Lepcha armed with bow and arrows,
In traditional dress up to his calves
And a hat with plume.
Kistositta, a 25 year old Brahmin from Bengal,
Combing the hair of Mungia,
A 43 year old Vaisa woman.
A wandering Muslim minstrel Manglu at Agra,
With his sarangi.
A 31 year old Ram Singh, a Sudra from Benaras,
Playing his Kolebassen flute.
The monsoon,
And thatched Khasi houses at Cherrapunji
The precious documents of our long journey
Can be seen at the Alpine Museum Munich.
Even a letter,
Sent by Robert to our sister Matilde,
Written on November 2, 1866 from Srinagar:
‘We travelled a 200 English mile route,
Without seeing a human being,
Who didn’t belong to our caravan.
Besides our horses, we had camels,
The right ones with two humps,
Which you don’t find in India.
We crossed high glacier passes at 5500m
And crossed treacherous mountain streams.’
My fascination for the Himalayas
Got the better of me.
I had breathed the rare Himalayan air,
And felt like Icarus.
I wanted to fly higher and higher,
Forgetting where I was.
My brothers Hermann and Robert left India
By ship and reached Berlin in June,1857.
I wanted to traverse the continent
Disregarding the dangers,
For von Humboldt was my hero.
Instead of honour and fame,
My body was dragged by wild riders in the dust,
Although I had long left the world.
A Persian traveller, a Muslim with a heart
Found my headless body.
He brought my remains all the way to India,
Where he handed it to a British colonial officer.
It was a fatal fascination,
But had I the chance,
I’d do it again.
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MUSIC BETWEEN EAST AND WEST (Satis Shroff)
I’ve become a European,
Integrated and assimilated,
But I am with my thoughts in South Asia.
I hear the melodious cry of the vendors:
‘Pan, bidi, cigarette,’
Interspersed with ‘garam chai! Garam chai!’
The sound of sambosas bubbling in vegetable oil,
The rat-ta-tat of onions, garlic and salad
Being rhythmically chopped in the kitchen,
Mingled with the ritual Sanskrit songs of the Hindus:
‘Tame-wa Mata, Sabita tame-wa,
Tame-wa vidhyam, Tame-wa saranam.’
The voices of uncles, aunts, cousins
Debating, discussing, gesticulating, grimacing
In Nepali, English, Newari, Hindi and Sindhi.
I head for Swayambhu,
The hill of the Self-Existent One.
Om mane pame hum stirs in the air,
As a lama passes by.
I’m greeted by cries of Rhesus monkeys,
Pigeons, mynahs, crows,
And the cracks of Heckler & Koch guns of the Royal Army.
*****
A MOTHER’S PRECIOUS JUWEL (Satis Shroff)
The gurkha with a khukri
But no personal enemy,
Works under the Union Jack,
In missions he doesn't comprehend.
Johnny Gurkha still dies
Under foreign skies.
Her grandpa died in Burma
For the glory of the British.
Her husband in Mesopotemia.
Her brother fell in France,
Against the Teutonic hordes.
She prays to Shiva of the Snows for peace
And her son's safety.
Her joy and her hope,
Till a British officer arrives,
With a letter and a poker-face.
‘Your son fell on duty, Madam’ he says dryly,
The death of a mother's precious jewel,
And the Himalayan pain in her heart.
.
Glossary:
Gurkha: soldier from Nepal
khukri: curved knife used in hand-to-hand combat
Shiva: a God in Hinduism
******
A SPARTAN LIFE THAT KILLS (Satis Shroff)
A frugal Nepalese mother lives by the seasons
And peers down to the valleys
Year in and year out
In expectation of her Gurkha son.
A telegram comes
A world crumbles down
The Nepalese mother cannot utter a word.
Gone is her son,
Her precious jewel,
Her only insurance and sunshine,
In the craggy hills of Nepal.
And with him her dreams,
A spartan life that kills.
Glossary:
Gurkha: soldier from Nepal
******
BOMBAY BROTHEL (Satis Shroff)
‘You’re not going to get away this time.
And you’ll never ever bring a Nepalese child
To a Bombay brothel,’ I said to myself.
I’d killed a man who’d betrayed me
And sold me to an old, cunning Indian woman,
Who ran a brothel in Bombay’s Upper Grant Road.
I still see the face of Lalita-bai,
Her greedy eyes gleaming at the sight
Of rich Indian and Arab customers.
I hear the eternal video-music of Bollywood.
The man I’d slain
Had promised to give me a job,
As a starlet in Bollywood.
I was young, naïve and full of dreams.
He took me to a shabby, cage-like room,
Where three thugs did the rest.
They robbed my virginity,
Thrashed me, put me on drugs.
I had no control over my limbs,
My torso, my mind.
It was Hell on earth.
******
BOLLYWOOD NIGHTMARE (Satis Shroff)
I was starring in a bad Bollywood film,
A lamb that had been sacrificed,
Not to the Hindu Gods,
But to Indian customers and pimps
From all walks of life.
What followed were five years of captivity,
Rape and molestation.
I pleaded with tears in my eyes
To the customers to help me out of my misery.
They just shook their heads,
Beat me, ravished me
And threw dirty rupees at my face.
I never felt so ashamed, demeaned,
Maltreated in my young life.
One day a local doctor with a lab-report
Told Lalita-bai that I had aids.
From that day on I became an outcast.
I was beaten and bruised,
For a disease I hadn’t asked for.
I felt broken and wretched.
I returned to Nepal, my homeland.
I lived like a recluse,
Didn’t talk to anyone.
I worked in the fields,
Cut grass and gathered firewood.
I lost weight.
I was slipping.
Till the day the man who’d ruined
My life came in search of new flesh
For Bombay’s brothels.
I asked the man to spend the night in my house.
He agreed readily.
I cooked for him, gave him a lot of raksi,
Till he sang and slept.
It was late at night.
I knew he’d go out to the toilet
After all that drinking.
I got up, took my naked khukri
And followed him stealthily.
The air was fresh outside.
A mountain breeze made the leaves
Emit a soft whispering sound.
I crouched behind a bush and waited.
He murmured drunkenly ‘Resam piri-ri.’
As he made his way back,
I was behind him.
I took a big step forwards with my right foot,
Swung the khukri blade
And hit him behind his neck.
I winced as I heard a crack,
Flesh and bone giving in.
A spurt of blood in the moonlight.
He fell with a thud in two parts.
His distorted head rolled to one side,
And his body to the other.
My heart was racing.
I couldn’t almost breathe.
I sat hunched like all women do,
Waited to catch my breath.
The minutes seemed like hours.
I got up, went to the dhara to wash my khukri.
I never felt so relieved in my life.
I buried him that night.
But I had nightmares for the rest of my life.
Glossary:
khukri: curved multipurpose knife often used in Nepali households and by Gurkha regiments as a deadly weapon.
Dhara: water-sprout in the hills.
Resam piri-ri: a popular Nepali folksong heard often along the trekking-trails of Annapurna, Langtang and Everest.
Bollywood: India’s Hollywood
******
When Mother Closes Her Eyes (Satis Shroff)
When mother closes her eyes,
She sees everything in its place
In the kingdom of Nepal.
She sees the highest building in Kathmandu,
The King’s Narayanhiti palace.
It looms higher than the dharara,
Swayambhu, Taleju and Pashupati,
For therein lives Vishnu,
Whom the Hindus call:
The unconquerable preserver.
The conqueror of Nepal?
No, that was his ancestor Prithvi Narayan Shah,
A king of Gorkha.
Vishnu is the preserver of the world,
With mercy and goodness.
Vishnu is all-pervading and self-existent,
Visits Nepal’s remote districts
In a helicopter with his consort and militia.
He inaugurates buildings,
Factories and events.
Vishnu dissolves the parliament too,
For the sake of his kingdom.
His subjects and worshippers are, of late, divided.
Have Ravana and his demons besieged his land?
When mother opens her eyes,
She sees Vishnu still slumbering
On his bed of Sesha, the serpent
In the pools of Budanilkantha and Balaju.
Where is the Creator?
When will he wake up from his eternal sleep?
Only Bhairab’s destruction of the Himalayan world was to be seen.
Much blood has been shed
Between the decades and the centuries.
The mound of noses and ears
Of the vanquished at Kirtipur,
The shot and mutilated at the Kot massacre,
The revolution in front of the Narayanhiti Palace,
When Nepalese screamed and died for democracy.
Till lately the corpses of the Maobadis,
Civilians and Nepalese security men.
The people long for peace and harmony,
After a decade of bloodshed.
It’s fragile peace,
And the people have no choice,
But to hope for better days,
Till Vishnu and Ravana have settled their issues.
The Nepalese still whisper in Kathmandu,
Helambu, Sindu Palchowk:
Hush! Sleeping Gods should not be awakened.
******
A DISRUPTED LIFE (Satis Shroff)
I bought some buns and bread at the local bakery
And met our elderly neighbour Frau Nelles.
She looked well-dressed and walked with a careful gait,
Up the Pochgasse having done her errands.
She greeted in German with ‘Guten morgen.’
Sighed and said, ‘ Wissen Sie,
I feel a wave of sadness sweep over me.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Today is our wedding anniversary.’
‘Is it that bad?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘My husband just stares at me and says nothing,
And has that blank expression on his face.
This isn’t the optimistic, respected philology professor
I married thirty years ago.
He forgets everything.
Our birthdays, the anniversaries of our children, the seasons.
My husband has Alzheimer.
Es tut so weh!
Our double bed isn’t a bed of roses anymore,
It’s a bed of thorny roses.
I snatch a couple of hours of sleep,
When I can.
I don’t have a husband now,
I have a child,
That needs caring day and night.
I’ve become apprehensive.
I’m concerned when he coughs
Or when he stops to breathe.
He snores again,
And keeps me awake.
Has prostrate problems,
And is fragile.
Like Shakespeare aptly said:
‘Care keeps his watch in every old (wo)man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.’
Neither can I live with myself,
Nor can I bring him to a home.
Glossary:
Guten morgen: good morning
Es tut so weh!: It pains such a lot
****
KATHMANDU IS NEPAL (Satis Shroff)
There were two young men, brothers
Who left their homes in the Eastern Himalayas.
The older one, for his father had barked at him,
“Go to Nepal and never come home again.”
The younger, for he couldn’t bear the beatings
At the hands of his old man
.
The older brother sobbed and stifled his sorrow and anger,
For Nepal was in fact Kathmandu,
With its colleges, universities, Education Ministry,
Temples, Rana-palaces and golden pagodas
Its share of hippies, hashish, tourists,
Rising prices and expensive rooms to rent.
The younger brother went to Dharan,
And enlisted in the British Army depot
To become a Gurkha,
A soldier in King Edwards Own Gurkha Rifles.
He came home the day became a recruit,
With a bald head, as though his father had died.
He looked forward to the parades and hardships
That went under the guise of physical exercises.
He thought of stern, merciless sergeants and corporals
Of soccer games and regimental drills
A young man’s thrill of war-films and scotch
And Gurkha-rum evenings.
He’d heard it all from the Gurkhas
Who’d returned in the Dasain festivals.
There was Kunjo Lama his maternal cousin,
Who boasted of his judo-prowess,
And showed photos of his British gal,
A pale blonde from Chichester
In an English living-room.
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THE BEAT GOES ON (Satis Shroff)
There’s a brodelndes Miteinander,
Different sounds, natural sounds,
Musical sounds.
I hear Papa listening to classical ragas.
We, his sons and daughters,
Dancing the twist, rock n’ roll, jive to Cool Britania,
The afternoon programme of the BBC.
Catchy Bollywood wechsel rhythms,
Sung by Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle,
Rafi, Mukesh and Kishor Kumar.
In the evenings after Radio Nepal’s External Service,
Radio Colombo’s light Anglo-American melodies:
Dean Martin’s drunken schmaltz,
Billy Fury, Cliff Richards, Rickey Nelson,
And Sir Swivel-hip, Elvis Presley
Wailing ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.’
Out in the streets the songs of the beggars,
‘Amai, paisa deo,
Babai khanu chaina.’
Overwhelmed by the cacaphony
Of the obligatory marriage brass-band,
Wearing shocking green and red uniforms.
A tourist wired for sound walks by,
With a tortured smile on his face,
An acoustic agitation for an i-Pod listener,
Who prefers his own canned music.
From a side street you discern the tune
Of ‘Rajamati kumati’ rendered by a group
Of Jyapoo traditional musicians,
After a hard day’s work,
In the wet paddy fields of Kathmandu.
Near the Mahabaoudha temple you see
Young Sherpas, Thakalis, Tamangs, Newars
Listening, hip-hopping and break-dancing
To their imported ghetto-blasters:
Michel Jackson’s catchy tunes,
Eminem, 2 Pac, Madonna, Shakira, 50 Cents.
*****
MUSIC IN THE AIR (Satis Shroff)
Everyone hears music,
Everyone makes music,
With or without instruments,
Humming the latest MTV or Bollywood tunes,
Drumming on the tables, wooden walls,
Boxes, crates, thalis, saucers and pans.
Everyone’s engaged in singing and dancing.
The older people chanting bhajans and vedic songs,
Buddhist monks reciting from the sutras in sonorous voices,
When someone dies in the neighbourhood.
Entire nights of prayers for the departed soul,
Interspersed with serious Tibetan monastery music.
Music between Heaven and Earth,
Music that stirs your soul.
The whole world is full of music,
Making it, feasting on it,
Dancing and nodding to it.
I remember the old village dalit,
From the caste of the untouchables,
Who’d come and beat his big drum,
Before he proclaimed the decision of the five village elders,
*****
THE MUSIC OF THE BREAKERS (Satis Shroff)
I remember the beautiful music
From the streets of Bombay,
Where I spent the winters during my school-days.
Or was it musical noise?
Unruhe, panic and flight for some,
It was the music of life for me
In that tumultuous, exciting city.
When the sea of humanity
Was too much for me,
I’d escape by train to the Marine Drive,
And see and hear the music of the breakers,
The waves of the Arabian Sea
Splashing and thrashing
Along the coast of Mumbai.
Your muscles flex, the nerves flatter,
The heart gallops,
As you feel how puny you are,
Among all those incessant and powerful waves.
Glossary:
Wechselrhythmus: changing rhythms
Bahn: train
Mumbai: Bombay
Bueb: small male child
Chen: Verniedlichung, like Babu-cha in Newari
Schwarzwald: The Black Forest of south-west Germany
Miteinander: togetherness
*****
Beyond Cultural Confines (Satis Shroff)
Music has left its cultural confines.
You hear the strings of a sitar
Mingling with big band sounds.
Percussions from Africa
Accompanying ragas from Nepal.
A never-ending performance of musicians
From all over the world.
Bollywood dancing workshops at Lörrach,
Slam poetry at Freiburg’s Atlantic inn.
A didgeridoo accompaning Japanese drums
At the Zeltmusik festival.
Tabla and tanpura involved in a musical dialogue,
With trumpet and saxaphone,
Argentinian tango and Carribian salsa,
Fiery Flamenco dancers swirling proudly
With classical Bharta Natyam dancers,
Mani Rimdu masked-dancers accompanied
By a Tibetan monastery orchestra,
Mingling with shrill Swiss piccolo flute tunes
And masked drummers.
As I walk past the Café Bueb, the Metzgerei,
The St. Blasius church bells begin to chime.
I see Annette’s tiny garden with red, yellow and white tulips,
‘Hallochen!’ she says with a broad, blonde smile,
Her slender cat stretches itself,
Emits a miao and goes by.
I walk on and admire Frau Bender’s cherry-blossom tree,
Her pensioned husband nods back at me.
And in the distance, a view of the Black Forest,
With whispering wind-rotors,
And the trees in the vicinity,
Full of birds
Coming home to roost.
*****
LIFE IS A COSMIC DANCE (Satis Shroff)
My soul is a passionate dancer.
I hear music where ever I am,
Whatever I do.
I hear the lively rhythm beckoning me to dance.
Sometimes it’s violins and Vienna waltz.
At other times a fiery salsa.
A Punjabi bhangra or a slow fox.
Life is a cosmic dance.
With its kampfmuster
And its own choreography.
We have people around us.
We look at each other,
Oblivious of the others.
Mesmerised,
Drawn together by an invisible force.
The passionate Flamenco guitarist wails,
‘Life is an apple:
Pluck it,
Relish it,
And throw it away.’
****
Patchwork Kaleidoscope (Satis Shroff)
What’s happening around us?
Lovers getting united,
Only to be separated.
Champagne glasses are raised.
We look deep into our eyes,
Our very souls.
There are reunions
But with other partners and families.
Patchwork families,
With tormented and bewildered children.
Marriages between gays and lesbians,
Adopted children to give the new bond
A family touch.
A colourful kaleidoscope unfurls before our eyes.
Do we know enough about relationships?
You and me.
Me and you.
Till death do us part?
Or till someone enters your or my life,
And takes my breath away.
Or yours.
*****
OH, ARCHANA (Satis Shroff)
Archana came from Kirtipur,
The hill of the noseless and earless.
She was a Vajracharya woman
Of the priest caste.
She spoke a language
Full of sweet monosyllables.
A young woman with fine features,
She could stare at one
And see through to the depths of one’s heart.
Raj was a Chettri from the Eastern hills,
With a sacred thread on his neck,
From the warrior and noble caste.
They loved each other in the Nepalese way,
Talking with their eyes and hearts.
Never in physical ecstasy,
Always platonic and united in dreams.
No rumbas, no slow fox.
Just the sweet odour of her hair and neck
In moments of stolen darkness
In a movie hall,
With two hundred curious eyes,
Focused on the Bollywood silver screen.
Or was it on their necks?
******
TWO LOVERS (Satis Shroff)
The two were through with their colleges.
She chose to study at Tribhuvan university.
He was awarded a scholarship to Germany.
She said, ‘But no one is forcing you
To study abroad. I fear that it’ll take years.
Perhaps you won’t come to Nepal.’
On the day of his departure
She appeared alone at the Tribhuvan airport,
With a ritual silver copper plate:
Scarlet yoghurt tika, beetle nuts, spices,
A garland of lotus flowers and sweet meat.
A traditional Nepalese farewell.
Years later came a letter from Nepal.
A physician friend wrote:
‘Dear Raj,
Archana of Kirtipur has married
A Brahmin businessman from Pokhara.
Sorry to bring you this sad news.
Sincerely,
Ashoke Sakya.’
‘I’m sad today,’ said Raj,
As he hid his face
In his blonde fiancee’s shoulder.
It was like Ambar Gurung’s old song:
‘I am the sky,
You are the earth,
Even though we desire so much,
We cannot be united.’
That’s caste system for you,
And for me.
MY TORMENTED SOUL (Satis Shroff)
I dream of a land far away.
A land where a king rules his realm,
Where the peasants plough the fields,
That don’t belong to them.
A land where a woman gathers
White, red, yellow and crimson
tablets and pills,
From the altruistic world tourists who come her way.
Most aren’t doctors or nurses,
But they distribute the pills,
With no second thoughts about the side-effects.
The woman possesses an arsenal,
Of potent pharmaceuticals.
She can’t read the finely printed alien instructions,
For she can neither read nor write.
The very thought of her giving the bright pills and tablets
To another ill Nepalese child or mother,
Torments my soul.
How ghastly this thoughtless world
Of educated trekkers who give medical alms,
Play the macabre role of physicians
In the amphitheatre of the Himalayas.
*****
THE SLEEPING VISHNU (Satis Shroff)
Nepalese men and women
Look out of their ornate windows,
In west, east, north and south Nepal
And think:
How long will this krieg go on?
How much do we have to suffer?
How many money-lenders, businessmen,
Civil servants, policemen,
Gurkhas
Do the Maobadis want to kill
Or be killed?
How many men, women, boys and girls
Have to be mortally injured
Till Kal Bhairab is pacified
By the Sleeping Vishnu?
Our fervent prayers have been heard.
May there be everlasting peace again in Nepal.
We have no choice,
But to lay our hopes on the fragile peace.
*****
FROM LICHHAVIS TO RANAS (Satis Shroff)
Lichhavis, Thakuris and Mallas have made you eternal
Man Deva inscribed his title on the pillar of Changu,
After great victories over neighbouring states.
Amshu Verma was a warrior and mastered the Lichavi Code.
He gave his daughter in marriage to Srong Bean Sgam Po,
The ruler of Tibet, who also married a Chinese princess.
Jayastathi Malla ruled long and introduced the system of the caste,
A system based on the family occupation,
That became rigid with the tide of time.
Yaksha Malla the ruler of Kathmandu Valley,
Divided it into Kathmandu, Patan and Bhadgaon for his three sons.
It was Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha,
Who brought you together,
As a melting pot of ethnic diversities.
With Gorkha conquests that cost the motherland
Thousands of ears, noses and Nepalese blood.
The intrigues and tragedies in the palace went on unabated.
The Ranas usurped the royal throne
And put a prime minister after the other for 104 years.
104 years of poverty, isolation and medieval existence.
Times have changed.
We are a new constitution again,
The Congress rules with the Maoists.
****
PANCHAYAT PROMISES (Satis Shroff)
Thirty years of Panchayat promises of an ancient Hindu rule
With a system based on the five village elders,
Like the proverbial five fingers in one’s hand,
That are not alike and yet function in harmony.
The Panchayat government was an old system,
Packed and sold as a new and traditional one.
A system is just as good as the people who run it.
And Nepal didn’t run.
It revived the age-old chakary,
Feudalism with its countless spies and yes-men,
Middle-men who held out their hands
For bribes, perks and amenities.
Poverty, caste-system with its divisions and conflicts,
Discrimination, injustice, bad governance
Became the nature of the day.
A big chasm appeared between the haves-and-have-nots.
The social inequality, frustrated expectations of the poor
Led to a search for an alternative pole.
The farmers were ignored, the forests and land confiscated,
Corruption and inefficiency became the rule of the day.
Even His Majesty’s servants went so far as to say:
Raja ko kam, kahiley jahla gham.
*****
VOLATILE HIMALAYAS (Satis Shroff)
The birthplace of Buddha
And the Land of Pashupati,
A land which King Birendra declared a Zone of Peace,
Through signatures of the world’s leaders
Was at war till recently.
Bush’s government paid 24 million dollars for development aid,
Another 14 million dollars for insurgency relevant spendings
5,000 M-16 rifles from the USA
5,500 maschine guns from Belgium.
Guns that were aimed at Nepali men, women and children,
In the mountains of Nepal.
Gott sei Dank, this corner of the world,
Under the shade of the Himalayas,
Is not volatile anymore.
*****
GUNS INSTEAD OF BOOKS (Satis Shroff)
My academic friends have changes sides,
From Mandalay to Congress
From Congress to the Maobadis.
The students from Dolpo and Silgadi,
Made unforgettable by Peter Mathiessen in his quest for his inner self
And his friend George Schaller’s search for the snow leopard,
Wrote Marxist verses and acquired volumes
From the embassies in Kathmandu:
Kim Il Sung’s writings, Mao’s red booklet,
Marx’s Das Kapital and Lenin’s works,
And defended socialist ideas
At His Majesty’s Central Hostel in Tahachal.
I see their earnest faces, with guns in their arms
Instead of books,
Boisterous and ready to fight to the end
For a cause they cherish in their frustrated and fiery hearts.
But aren’t these sons of Nepal misguided and blinded
By the seemingly victories of socialism?
Even Gorbachov pleaded for Peristroika.
Putin admires Germany, its culture and commerce.
Look at the old, crumbling Soviet Union,
And other East Bloc nations.
They have all swapped sides and are EU and Nato members.
When will we, in Nepal, learn
About the fruits of democracy and tolerance?
*****
TIME STANDS STILL IN NEPAL (Satis Shroff)
Globalisation has changed the world fast,
But in Nepal time stands still.
The blind beggar at the New Road gate sings:
‘In a land where the tongue-tied live,
The deaf desire to rule’.
Oh my Nepal, quo vadis?
The only way to peace and harmony is
To lay aside the arms.
Can Nepal afford to be the bastion
Of a movement and a government
That rides rough-shod
Over the lives and rights of fellow Nepalis?
Can’t we learn from the lessons of Afghanistan, Romania,
Poland, East Germany and Iraq?
The Maobadis are getting a chance at the polls,
Like all other democratic parties.
For the Maobadis are Bahuns and Chettris,
Be they Prachanda or Baburam Bhattrai,
Hush, an unholy alliance has made the rounds,
The political parties and the Maoists are united
And are rattling their sabres under Vishnu’s bed of serpents.
Will Narad bring us good news?
Shall we huddle and shiver together in angst?
We shall do what the Germans do:
Warten und Tee trinken.
Wait, watch and drink tea.
___________________________________
Wonderful clarity and good details. (Sharon Mc Cartney, Fiddlehead Poetry Journal)
_____________________________________________________________
A MOMENT OF MAGIC (Satis Shroff)
She had short, golden hair
Tied neatly behind
With a blue satin-scarf.
And yet I saw her
Wearing a diadem
And a flowing satin gown,
Like a princess.
A meek, submissive smile
A movement of her fair hair
Akin to a Bolshoi ballerina
In moments of embarrassment and coyness.
Her blue Allemanic eyes, sweet and honest
They knew no intrigue,
Neither treachery nor rebellion.
‘I was brought up to obey,’ she whispered.
Pure bliss and love sublime,
A book you could read.
Plain and straight,
And not in-between the lines.
An openness, and yet
She's resolute and seeks
Perhaps stability
Or security?
A neglected childhood
With pain and punishment.
A legacy of the Black Forest
Nevertheless, she remained
Soft and tender, submissive and sincere.
Not demanding and aggressive
Ever alert and considerate.
Murmurs and sighs filled the air.
Love became stormy and frantic.
Sweat and aphrodisiac mingled,
To create a moment of magic,
To recede in moans and whispers
And a thousand kisses.
Brought to reality
By the rays of the dying sun
And the sudden noise
Of birds coming home to roost.
A tranquillity after the tumult
Within our passionate souls.
A METAPHOR IN THE EVENING SKY (Satis Shroff)
It was a glorious sunset,
The clouds blazing in scarlet and orange hues,
As the young man, riding on the back of a lorry,
Sacks full of rice and salt,
Stared at the Siwaliks
And Mahabharat mountains
Dwindling behind him.
As the sun set in the Himalayas,
The shadows grew longer in the vales.
The young man saw the golden moon,
Shining from a cloudy sky.
The same moon he’d seen on a poster
In his uncle’s kitchen
As he ate cross-legged his dal-bhat-shikar
After the hand-washing ritual.
Was the moon a metaphor?
Was it his fate to travel to Kathmandu,
Leaving behind his childhood friends
And relatives in the hills,
Who were struggling for their very existence,
In the foothills of the Kanchenjunga,
Where the peaks were not summits to be scaled,
With or without oxygen,
But the abodes of the Gods and Goddesses.
A realm where bhuts and prets,
Boksas and boksis,
Demons and dakinis prevailed.
Glossary:
Gurkhas: Nepali soldiers serving in Nepalese, Indian and British armies
Dal-bhat: Linsen und Reis
Shikar: Fleischgericht
Bhuts and prets: Demonen und Geister
Boksas und Boksis: männliche und weibliche Hexen
*****
HARMONY FOR THE HEART (Satis Shroff)
As the Breisgau-train dashes in the Black Forest,
Between Elztal and Freiburg,
I am with my thoughts in South Asia.
I saunter towards Swayambhu in Nepal,
The hill of the Self-Existent One.
‘Om mane peme hum’ stirs in the air,
As a lama passes by.
I’m greeted by cries of Rhesus monkeys,
Pigeons, mynahs, crows,
The whole world is full of music,
Making it, feasting on it,
Dancing and nodding to it.
Music has left its cultural confines.
The train stops at Zähringen-Freiburg.
I get off and peer at the blue-green forest in the distance.
It’s Springtime.
As I approach my home at the Pochgasse,
I discern Schumann’s sonate number 3,
Played by Vladimir Horowitz.
That’s harmony for the heart.
Glossary:
Bahn: train
Mumbai: Bombay
Bueb: small male child
Chen: Verniedlichung, like Babu-cha in Newari
Schwarzwald: The Black Forest of south-west Germany
Miteinander: togetherness
*****
In the Shadow of the Himalayas (Satis Shroff)
My Nepal, what has become of you?
Your features have changed with time.
The innocent face of the Kumari
Has changed to the blood-thirsty countenance of Kal Bhairab,
From development to destruction,
You’re no longer the same.
There’s insurrection and turmoil
Against the government and the police.
Your sons and daughters are at war,
With the Gurkhas again.
Ideologies that have been discredited elsewhere,
Flourish in the Himalayas.
With brazen, bloody attacks
Fighting for their communist rights,
And the rights of the bewildered common man.
The Nepalese child-soldier gets orders from grown-ups
And the hapless souls open fire.
The child-soldier cannot reason,
Shedding precious human blood.
Ach, this massacre in the shadow of the Himalayas.
We can only hope for a fragile peace,
Like a drowning man clinging to a straw.
Om Shanti,
Om Shanti.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
MENTAL MOLOTOVS (Satis Shroff)
When Hoyerswerda burns
They discuss about the asylum-seekers.
Peaceful, righteous Germans go
In the streets with candles.
When a house burns in Mölln
They discuss about bringing back
Soldiers from the dangers of Somalia.
At the Turkish funeral in Solingen
The Chancellor keeps away
And avoids thus
Rotten eggs and tomatoes
That might come his way.
When the trial comes
The former skinhead neonazi
Has a lot of hair.
He wears a two-piece suit,
Ties a tie around his neck
And looks oh-so-respectable.
He peers into the cameras
With clear blue eyes and says:
"I'm innocent and a victim
Of the modern industrial society."
And withdraws his statement.
The judges are lenient,
And the neo gets off on bail,
Gestures with his middle finger
And quips: "Leck mich am Arsch!"
As he speeds away in a car
Only to reappear with a Molotov
Like the Sphinx again.
"Ausländer Raus!
Deutschland den Deutschen!"
These are the slogans
Still making the rounds in 2006.
The old black and white flag
From the Third Reich
Raises no eyebrows
At soccer stadiums, streets and pubs.
It's fashionable again
To throw mental Molotovs
At blacks, browns, yellows,
And all non-Teutonics
At cocktails, chats
Stammtisch and in the streets
Against anything alien.
‘I don't like foreigners
I'll kill you,’ says a drunk
In broad daylight at the local Bahnhof.
Please don't ask me,
How it feels
To be a non-Teutonic
In Deutschland.
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THE AGONY OF WAR (Satis Shroff)
Once upon a time there was a seventeen year old boy
Who lived in the Polish city of Danzig.
He was ordered to join the Waffen-SS,
Hitler’s elite division.
Oh, what an honour for a seventeen year old,
Almost a privilege to join the Waffen-SS.
The boy said, “Wir wurden von früh bis spät
Geschliffen und sollten
Zur Sau gemacht werden.”
A Russian grenade shrapnel brought his role
In the war to an abrupt end.
That was on April 20, 1945.
In the same evening,
He was brought to Meissen,
Where he came to know about his Vaterland’s defeat.
The war was lost long ago.
He realised how an ordinary soldier
Became helpless after being used as a tool in the war,
Following orders that didn’t demand heroism
In the brutal reality of war.
It was a streak of luck,
And his inability to ride a bicycle,
That saved his skin
At the Russian-held village of Niederlausitz.
His comrades rode the bicycle,
And he was obliged to give them fire-support
With a maschine-gun.
His seven comrades and the officer
Were slain by the Russians.
The only survivor was a boy
Of seventeen.
He abandoned his light maschine-gun,
And left the house of the bicycle-seller,
Through the backyard garden
With its creaky gate.
What were the chances in the days of the Third Reich
For a 17 year old boy named Günter Grass
To understand the world?
The BBC was a feindliche radio,
And Goebbels’ propaganda maschinery
Was in full swing.
There was no time to reflect in those days.
Fürcht und Elend im Dritten Reich,
Wrote Bertold Brecht later.
Why did he wait till he was almost eighty?
Why did he torment his soul all these years?
Why didn’t he tell the bitter truth,
About his tragi-comical role in the war
With the Waffen-SS?
He was a Hitlerjunge,
A young Nazi.
Faithful till the end.
A boy who was seduced by the Waffen-SS.
His excuse:
„Ich habe mich verführen lassen.“
The reality of the war brought
Endless death and suffering.
He felt the fear in his bones,
His eyes were opened at last.
Günter Grass is a figure,
You think you know well.
Yet he’s aloof
And you hardly know him,
This literary titan.
He breathes literature
And political engagement.
In his new book:
Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln
He confides he has lived from page to page,
And from book to book.
Is he a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles,
In the same breast?
Grass belongs to us,
For he has spent the time with us.
It was his personal weakness
Not to tell earlier.
He’s a playwright, director and actor
Of his own creativeness,
And tells his own tale.
His characters Oskar and Mahlke weren’t holy Joes.
It was his way of indirectly showing
What went inside him.
Ach, his true confession took time.
It was like peeling an onion with tears,
One layer after the other.
Better late than never.
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Works by Günter Grass: Surrealist poems Die Vorzüge der Windhühner 1956, grotesque plays Hochwasser 1956, Onkel-Onkel, Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo, Die bösen Köche 1957, original novel Die Blechtrommel 1959 (The Tin Drum), poems and drawings Gleisdreieck 1960, Hundejahre 1963, Die Plebjer proben den Aufstand 1966, Büchner Prize 1965, illustrated poems Ausgefragt 1967, third novel örtlich betäubt, play Davor, 1969 gesammelte Gedichte1971, Maria zuehren 1973, Liebe geprüft 1974, wie ich mich sehe 1980, ,fourth novel Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke 1972,a study of melancholy Melancholia I, lengthy novel Der Butt1977, Das Treffen in Telgte 1979, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus 1980, Widerstand lernen, Politische Gegenreden 1980-1983, Aufsätze zur Literatur 1957-79 in 1980.Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln 2006.
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Wer den Dichter will verstehen
Muß in Dichters Lande gehen.
- Goethe
THE LURE OF THE HIMALAYAS (Satis Shroff)
500 years ago near the town of Kashgar,
I, a stranger in local clothes was captured
By the sturdy riders of Vali Khan.
What was a stranger
With fair skin and blue eyes,
Looking for in Vali Khan’s terrain?
I, the stranger spoke a strange tongue.
‘He’s a spy sent by China.
Behead him,’ barked the Khan’s officer.
I pleaded and tried to explain
My mission in their country.
It was all in vain.
On August 26, 1857
I, Adolph Schlagintweit,
a German traveller, an adventurer,
Was beheaded as a spy,
Without a trial.
I was a German who set out on the footsteps
Of the illustrious Alexander von Humboldt,
With my two brothers Hermann and Robert,
From Southhampton on September 20,1854
To see India, the Himalayas and Higher Asia.
The mission of the 29000km journey
Was to make an exact cartography
Of the little known countries,
Sans invitation, I must admit.
In Kamet we reached a 6785m peak,
An elevation record in those days.
We measured the altitudes,
Gathered magnetic, meteorological,
And anthropological data.
We even collected extensive
Botanical, zoological and ethnographic gems.
Hermann and I made 751 sketches,
Drawings, water-colour and oil paintings.
The motifs were Himalayan panoramas,
Single summits, glacier formations,
Himalayan rivers and houses of the natives.
Padam valley, near the old moraine
Of the main glacier at Zanskar in pencil and pen.
A view from Gunshankar peak 6023 metres,
From the Trans-Sutlej chain in aquarelle.
A European female in oriental dress in Calcutta 1855.
Brahmin, Rajput and Sudra women draped in saris.
Kristo Prasad, a 35 year old Rajput
Photographed in Benaras.
An old Hindu fakir with knee-long rasta braids,
Bhot women from Ladakh, snapped in Simla.
Kahars, Palki-porters from Bihar,
Hindus of the Sudra caste.
A Lepcha armed with bow and arrows,
In traditional dress up to his calves
And a hat with plume.
Kistositta, a 25 year old Brahmin from Bengal,
Combing the hair of Mungia,
A 43 year old Vaisa woman.
A wandering Muslim minstrel Manglu at Agra,
With his sarangi.
A 31 year old Ram Singh, a Sudra from Benaras,
Playing his Kolebassen flute.
The monsoon,
And thatched Khasi houses at Cherrapunji
The precious documents of our long journey
Can be seen at the Alpine Museum Munich.
Even a letter,
Sent by Robert to our sister Matilde,
Written on November 2, 1866 from Srinagar:
‘We travelled a 200 English mile route,
Without seeing a human being,
Who didn’t belong to our caravan.
Besides our horses, we had camels,
The right ones with two humps,
Which you don’t find in India.
We crossed high glacier passes at 5500m
And crossed treacherous mountain streams.’
My fascination for the Himalayas
Got the better of me.
I had breathed the rare Himalayan air,
And felt like Icarus.
I wanted to fly higher and higher,
Forgetting where I was.
My brothers Hermann and Robert left India
By ship and reached Berlin in June,1857.
I wanted to traverse the continent
Disregarding the dangers,
For von Humboldt was my hero.
Instead of honour and fame,
My body was dragged by wild riders in the dust,
Although I had long left the world.
A Persian traveller, a Muslim with a heart
Found my headless body.
He brought my remains all the way to India,
Where he handed it to a British colonial officer.
It was a fatal fascination,
But had I the chance,
I’d do it again.
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MUSIC BETWEEN EAST AND WEST (Satis Shroff)
I’ve become a European,
Integrated and assimilated,
But I am with my thoughts in South Asia.
I hear the melodious cry of the vendors:
‘Pan, bidi, cigarette,’
Interspersed with ‘garam chai! Garam chai!’
The sound of sambosas bubbling in vegetable oil,
The rat-ta-tat of onions, garlic and salad
Being rhythmically chopped in the kitchen,
Mingled with the ritual Sanskrit songs of the Hindus:
‘Tame-wa Mata, Sabita tame-wa,
Tame-wa vidhyam, Tame-wa saranam.’
The voices of uncles, aunts, cousins
Debating, discussing, gesticulating, grimacing
In Nepali, English, Newari, Hindi and Sindhi.
I head for Swayambhu,
The hill of the Self-Existent One.
Om mane pame hum stirs in the air,
As a lama passes by.
I’m greeted by cries of Rhesus monkeys,
Pigeons, mynahs, crows,
And the cracks of Heckler & Koch guns of the Royal Army.
*****
A MOTHER’S PRECIOUS JUWEL (Satis Shroff)
The gurkha with a khukri
But no personal enemy,
Works under the Union Jack,
In missions he doesn't comprehend.
Johnny Gurkha still dies
Under foreign skies.
Her grandpa died in Burma
For the glory of the British.
Her husband in Mesopotemia.
Her brother fell in France,
Against the Teutonic hordes.
She prays to Shiva of the Snows for peace
And her son's safety.
Her joy and her hope,
Till a British officer arrives,
With a letter and a poker-face.
‘Your son fell on duty, Madam’ he says dryly,
The death of a mother's precious jewel,
And the Himalayan pain in her heart.
.
Glossary:
Gurkha: soldier from Nepal
khukri: curved knife used in hand-to-hand combat
Shiva: a God in Hinduism
******
A SPARTAN LIFE THAT KILLS (Satis Shroff)
A frugal Nepalese mother lives by the seasons
And peers down to the valleys
Year in and year out
In expectation of her Gurkha son.
A telegram comes
A world crumbles down
The Nepalese mother cannot utter a word.
Gone is her son,
Her precious jewel,
Her only insurance and sunshine,
In the craggy hills of Nepal.
And with him her dreams,
A spartan life that kills.
Glossary:
Gurkha: soldier from Nepal
******
BOMBAY BROTHEL (Satis Shroff)
‘You’re not going to get away this time.
And you’ll never ever bring a Nepalese child
To a Bombay brothel,’ I said to myself.
I’d killed a man who’d betrayed me
And sold me to an old, cunning Indian woman,
Who ran a brothel in Bombay’s Upper Grant Road.
I still see the face of Lalita-bai,
Her greedy eyes gleaming at the sight
Of rich Indian and Arab customers.
I hear the eternal video-music of Bollywood.
The man I’d slain
Had promised to give me a job,
As a starlet in Bollywood.
I was young, naïve and full of dreams.
He took me to a shabby, cage-like room,
Where three thugs did the rest.
They robbed my virginity,
Thrashed me, put me on drugs.
I had no control over my limbs,
My torso, my mind.
It was Hell on earth.
******
BOLLYWOOD NIGHTMARE (Satis Shroff)
I was starring in a bad Bollywood film,
A lamb that had been sacrificed,
Not to the Hindu Gods,
But to Indian customers and pimps
From all walks of life.
What followed were five years of captivity,
Rape and molestation.
I pleaded with tears in my eyes
To the customers to help me out of my misery.
They just shook their heads,
Beat me, ravished me
And threw dirty rupees at my face.
I never felt so ashamed, demeaned,
Maltreated in my young life.
One day a local doctor with a lab-report
Told Lalita-bai that I had aids.
From that day on I became an outcast.
I was beaten and bruised,
For a disease I hadn’t asked for.
I felt broken and wretched.
I returned to Nepal, my homeland.
I lived like a recluse,
Didn’t talk to anyone.
I worked in the fields,
Cut grass and gathered firewood.
I lost weight.
I was slipping.
Till the day the man who’d ruined
My life came in search of new flesh
For Bombay’s brothels.
I asked the man to spend the night in my house.
He agreed readily.
I cooked for him, gave him a lot of raksi,
Till he sang and slept.
It was late at night.
I knew he’d go out to the toilet
After all that drinking.
I got up, took my naked khukri
And followed him stealthily.
The air was fresh outside.
A mountain breeze made the leaves
Emit a soft whispering sound.
I crouched behind a bush and waited.
He murmured drunkenly ‘Resam piri-ri.’
As he made his way back,
I was behind him.
I took a big step forwards with my right foot,
Swung the khukri blade
And hit him behind his neck.
I winced as I heard a crack,
Flesh and bone giving in.
A spurt of blood in the moonlight.
He fell with a thud in two parts.
His distorted head rolled to one side,
And his body to the other.
My heart was racing.
I couldn’t almost breathe.
I sat hunched like all women do,
Waited to catch my breath.
The minutes seemed like hours.
I got up, went to the dhara to wash my khukri.
I never felt so relieved in my life.
I buried him that night.
But I had nightmares for the rest of my life.
Glossary:
khukri: curved multipurpose knife often used in Nepali households and by Gurkha regiments as a deadly weapon.
Dhara: water-sprout in the hills.
Resam piri-ri: a popular Nepali folksong heard often along the trekking-trails of Annapurna, Langtang and Everest.
Bollywood: India’s Hollywood
******
When Mother Closes Her Eyes (Satis Shroff)
When mother closes her eyes,
She sees everything in its place
In the kingdom of Nepal.
She sees the highest building in Kathmandu,
The King’s Narayanhiti palace.
It looms higher than the dharara,
Swayambhu, Taleju and Pashupati,
For therein lives Vishnu,
Whom the Hindus call:
The unconquerable preserver.
The conqueror of Nepal?
No, that was his ancestor Prithvi Narayan Shah,
A king of Gorkha.
Vishnu is the preserver of the world,
With mercy and goodness.
Vishnu is all-pervading and self-existent,
Visits Nepal’s remote districts
In a helicopter with his consort and militia.
He inaugurates buildings,
Factories and events.
Vishnu dissolves the parliament too,
For the sake of his kingdom.
His subjects and worshippers are, of late, divided.
Have Ravana and his demons besieged his land?
When mother opens her eyes,
She sees Vishnu still slumbering
On his bed of Sesha, the serpent
In the pools of Budanilkantha and Balaju.
Where is the Creator?
When will he wake up from his eternal sleep?
Only Bhairab’s destruction of the Himalayan world was to be seen.
Much blood has been shed
Between the decades and the centuries.
The mound of noses and ears
Of the vanquished at Kirtipur,
The shot and mutilated at the Kot massacre,
The revolution in front of the Narayanhiti Palace,
When Nepalese screamed and died for democracy.
Till lately the corpses of the Maobadis,
Civilians and Nepalese security men.
The people long for peace and harmony,
After a decade of bloodshed.
It’s fragile peace,
And the people have no choice,
But to hope for better days,
Till Vishnu and Ravana have settled their issues.
The Nepalese still whisper in Kathmandu,
Helambu, Sindu Palchowk:
Hush! Sleeping Gods should not be awakened.
******
A DISRUPTED LIFE (Satis Shroff)
I bought some buns and bread at the local bakery
And met our elderly neighbour Frau Nelles.
She looked well-dressed and walked with a careful gait,
Up the Pochgasse having done her errands.
She greeted in German with ‘Guten morgen.’
Sighed and said, ‘ Wissen Sie,
I feel a wave of sadness sweep over me.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Today is our wedding anniversary.’
‘Is it that bad?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘My husband just stares at me and says nothing,
And has that blank expression on his face.
This isn’t the optimistic, respected philology professor
I married thirty years ago.
He forgets everything.
Our birthdays, the anniversaries of our children, the seasons.
My husband has Alzheimer.
Es tut so weh!
Our double bed isn’t a bed of roses anymore,
It’s a bed of thorny roses.
I snatch a couple of hours of sleep,
When I can.
I don’t have a husband now,
I have a child,
That needs caring day and night.
I’ve become apprehensive.
I’m concerned when he coughs
Or when he stops to breathe.
He snores again,
And keeps me awake.
Has prostrate problems,
And is fragile.
Like Shakespeare aptly said:
‘Care keeps his watch in every old (wo)man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.’
Neither can I live with myself,
Nor can I bring him to a home.
Glossary:
Guten morgen: good morning
Es tut so weh!: It pains such a lot
****
KATHMANDU IS NEPAL (Satis Shroff)
There were two young men, brothers
Who left their homes in the Eastern Himalayas.
The older one, for his father had barked at him,
“Go to Nepal and never come home again.”
The younger, for he couldn’t bear the beatings
At the hands of his old man
.
The older brother sobbed and stifled his sorrow and anger,
For Nepal was in fact Kathmandu,
With its colleges, universities, Education Ministry,
Temples, Rana-palaces and golden pagodas
Its share of hippies, hashish, tourists,
Rising prices and expensive rooms to rent.
The younger brother went to Dharan,
And enlisted in the British Army depot
To become a Gurkha,
A soldier in King Edwards Own Gurkha Rifles.
He came home the day became a recruit,
With a bald head, as though his father had died.
He looked forward to the parades and hardships
That went under the guise of physical exercises.
He thought of stern, merciless sergeants and corporals
Of soccer games and regimental drills
A young man’s thrill of war-films and scotch
And Gurkha-rum evenings.
He’d heard it all from the Gurkhas
Who’d returned in the Dasain festivals.
There was Kunjo Lama his maternal cousin,
Who boasted of his judo-prowess,
And showed photos of his British gal,
A pale blonde from Chichester
In an English living-room.
--------------------------------------------
THE BEAT GOES ON (Satis Shroff)
There’s a brodelndes Miteinander,
Different sounds, natural sounds,
Musical sounds.
I hear Papa listening to classical ragas.
We, his sons and daughters,
Dancing the twist, rock n’ roll, jive to Cool Britania,
The afternoon programme of the BBC.
Catchy Bollywood wechsel rhythms,
Sung by Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle,
Rafi, Mukesh and Kishor Kumar.
In the evenings after Radio Nepal’s External Service,
Radio Colombo’s light Anglo-American melodies:
Dean Martin’s drunken schmaltz,
Billy Fury, Cliff Richards, Rickey Nelson,
And Sir Swivel-hip, Elvis Presley
Wailing ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.’
Out in the streets the songs of the beggars,
‘Amai, paisa deo,
Babai khanu chaina.’
Overwhelmed by the cacaphony
Of the obligatory marriage brass-band,
Wearing shocking green and red uniforms.
A tourist wired for sound walks by,
With a tortured smile on his face,
An acoustic agitation for an i-Pod listener,
Who prefers his own canned music.
From a side street you discern the tune
Of ‘Rajamati kumati’ rendered by a group
Of Jyapoo traditional musicians,
After a hard day’s work,
In the wet paddy fields of Kathmandu.
Near the Mahabaoudha temple you see
Young Sherpas, Thakalis, Tamangs, Newars
Listening, hip-hopping and break-dancing
To their imported ghetto-blasters:
Michel Jackson’s catchy tunes,
Eminem, 2 Pac, Madonna, Shakira, 50 Cents.
*****
MUSIC IN THE AIR (Satis Shroff)
Everyone hears music,
Everyone makes music,
With or without instruments,
Humming the latest MTV or Bollywood tunes,
Drumming on the tables, wooden walls,
Boxes, crates, thalis, saucers and pans.
Everyone’s engaged in singing and dancing.
The older people chanting bhajans and vedic songs,
Buddhist monks reciting from the sutras in sonorous voices,
When someone dies in the neighbourhood.
Entire nights of prayers for the departed soul,
Interspersed with serious Tibetan monastery music.
Music between Heaven and Earth,
Music that stirs your soul.
The whole world is full of music,
Making it, feasting on it,
Dancing and nodding to it.
I remember the old village dalit,
From the caste of the untouchables,
Who’d come and beat his big drum,
Before he proclaimed the decision of the five village elders,
*****
THE MUSIC OF THE BREAKERS (Satis Shroff)
I remember the beautiful music
From the streets of Bombay,
Where I spent the winters during my school-days.
Or was it musical noise?
Unruhe, panic and flight for some,
It was the music of life for me
In that tumultuous, exciting city.
When the sea of humanity
Was too much for me,
I’d escape by train to the Marine Drive,
And see and hear the music of the breakers,
The waves of the Arabian Sea
Splashing and thrashing
Along the coast of Mumbai.
Your muscles flex, the nerves flatter,
The heart gallops,
As you feel how puny you are,
Among all those incessant and powerful waves.
Glossary:
Wechselrhythmus: changing rhythms
Bahn: train
Mumbai: Bombay
Bueb: small male child
Chen: Verniedlichung, like Babu-cha in Newari
Schwarzwald: The Black Forest of south-west Germany
Miteinander: togetherness
*****
Beyond Cultural Confines (Satis Shroff)
Music has left its cultural confines.
You hear the strings of a sitar
Mingling with big band sounds.
Percussions from Africa
Accompanying ragas from Nepal.
A never-ending performance of musicians
From all over the world.
Bollywood dancing workshops at Lörrach,
Slam poetry at Freiburg’s Atlantic inn.
A didgeridoo accompaning Japanese drums
At the Zeltmusik festival.
Tabla and tanpura involved in a musical dialogue,
With trumpet and saxaphone,
Argentinian tango and Carribian salsa,
Fiery Flamenco dancers swirling proudly
With classical Bharta Natyam dancers,
Mani Rimdu masked-dancers accompanied
By a Tibetan monastery orchestra,
Mingling with shrill Swiss piccolo flute tunes
And masked drummers.
As I walk past the Café Bueb, the Metzgerei,
The St. Blasius church bells begin to chime.
I see Annette’s tiny garden with red, yellow and white tulips,
‘Hallochen!’ she says with a broad, blonde smile,
Her slender cat stretches itself,
Emits a miao and goes by.
I walk on and admire Frau Bender’s cherry-blossom tree,
Her pensioned husband nods back at me.
And in the distance, a view of the Black Forest,
With whispering wind-rotors,
And the trees in the vicinity,
Full of birds
Coming home to roost.
*****
LIFE IS A COSMIC DANCE (Satis Shroff)
My soul is a passionate dancer.
I hear music where ever I am,
Whatever I do.
I hear the lively rhythm beckoning me to dance.
Sometimes it’s violins and Vienna waltz.
At other times a fiery salsa.
A Punjabi bhangra or a slow fox.
Life is a cosmic dance.
With its kampfmuster
And its own choreography.
We have people around us.
We look at each other,
Oblivious of the others.
Mesmerised,
Drawn together by an invisible force.
The passionate Flamenco guitarist wails,
‘Life is an apple:
Pluck it,
Relish it,
And throw it away.’
****
Patchwork Kaleidoscope (Satis Shroff)
What’s happening around us?
Lovers getting united,
Only to be separated.
Champagne glasses are raised.
We look deep into our eyes,
Our very souls.
There are reunions
But with other partners and families.
Patchwork families,
With tormented and bewildered children.
Marriages between gays and lesbians,
Adopted children to give the new bond
A family touch.
A colourful kaleidoscope unfurls before our eyes.
Do we know enough about relationships?
You and me.
Me and you.
Till death do us part?
Or till someone enters your or my life,
And takes my breath away.
Or yours.
*****
OH, ARCHANA (Satis Shroff)
Archana came from Kirtipur,
The hill of the noseless and earless.
She was a Vajracharya woman
Of the priest caste.
She spoke a language
Full of sweet monosyllables.
A young woman with fine features,
She could stare at one
And see through to the depths of one’s heart.
Raj was a Chettri from the Eastern hills,
With a sacred thread on his neck,
From the warrior and noble caste.
They loved each other in the Nepalese way,
Talking with their eyes and hearts.
Never in physical ecstasy,
Always platonic and united in dreams.
No rumbas, no slow fox.
Just the sweet odour of her hair and neck
In moments of stolen darkness
In a movie hall,
With two hundred curious eyes,
Focused on the Bollywood silver screen.
Or was it on their necks?
******
TWO LOVERS (Satis Shroff)
The two were through with their colleges.
She chose to study at Tribhuvan university.
He was awarded a scholarship to Germany.
She said, ‘But no one is forcing you
To study abroad. I fear that it’ll take years.
Perhaps you won’t come to Nepal.’
On the day of his departure
She appeared alone at the Tribhuvan airport,
With a ritual silver copper plate:
Scarlet yoghurt tika, beetle nuts, spices,
A garland of lotus flowers and sweet meat.
A traditional Nepalese farewell.
Years later came a letter from Nepal.
A physician friend wrote:
‘Dear Raj,
Archana of Kirtipur has married
A Brahmin businessman from Pokhara.
Sorry to bring you this sad news.
Sincerely,
Ashoke Sakya.’
‘I’m sad today,’ said Raj,
As he hid his face
In his blonde fiancee’s shoulder.
It was like Ambar Gurung’s old song:
‘I am the sky,
You are the earth,
Even though we desire so much,
We cannot be united.’
That’s caste system for you,
And for me.
MY TORMENTED SOUL (Satis Shroff)
I dream of a land far away.
A land where a king rules his realm,
Where the peasants plough the fields,
That don’t belong to them.
A land where a woman gathers
White, red, yellow and crimson
tablets and pills,
From the altruistic world tourists who come her way.
Most aren’t doctors or nurses,
But they distribute the pills,
With no second thoughts about the side-effects.
The woman possesses an arsenal,
Of potent pharmaceuticals.
She can’t read the finely printed alien instructions,
For she can neither read nor write.
The very thought of her giving the bright pills and tablets
To another ill Nepalese child or mother,
Torments my soul.
How ghastly this thoughtless world
Of educated trekkers who give medical alms,
Play the macabre role of physicians
In the amphitheatre of the Himalayas.
*****
THE SLEEPING VISHNU (Satis Shroff)
Nepalese men and women
Look out of their ornate windows,
In west, east, north and south Nepal
And think:
How long will this krieg go on?
How much do we have to suffer?
How many money-lenders, businessmen,
Civil servants, policemen,
Gurkhas
Do the Maobadis want to kill
Or be killed?
How many men, women, boys and girls
Have to be mortally injured
Till Kal Bhairab is pacified
By the Sleeping Vishnu?
Our fervent prayers have been heard.
May there be everlasting peace again in Nepal.
We have no choice,
But to lay our hopes on the fragile peace.
*****
FROM LICHHAVIS TO RANAS (Satis Shroff)
Lichhavis, Thakuris and Mallas have made you eternal
Man Deva inscribed his title on the pillar of Changu,
After great victories over neighbouring states.
Amshu Verma was a warrior and mastered the Lichavi Code.
He gave his daughter in marriage to Srong Bean Sgam Po,
The ruler of Tibet, who also married a Chinese princess.
Jayastathi Malla ruled long and introduced the system of the caste,
A system based on the family occupation,
That became rigid with the tide of time.
Yaksha Malla the ruler of Kathmandu Valley,
Divided it into Kathmandu, Patan and Bhadgaon for his three sons.
It was Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha,
Who brought you together,
As a melting pot of ethnic diversities.
With Gorkha conquests that cost the motherland
Thousands of ears, noses and Nepalese blood.
The intrigues and tragedies in the palace went on unabated.
The Ranas usurped the royal throne
And put a prime minister after the other for 104 years.
104 years of poverty, isolation and medieval existence.
Times have changed.
We are a new constitution again,
The Congress rules with the Maoists.
****
PANCHAYAT PROMISES (Satis Shroff)
Thirty years of Panchayat promises of an ancient Hindu rule
With a system based on the five village elders,
Like the proverbial five fingers in one’s hand,
That are not alike and yet function in harmony.
The Panchayat government was an old system,
Packed and sold as a new and traditional one.
A system is just as good as the people who run it.
And Nepal didn’t run.
It revived the age-old chakary,
Feudalism with its countless spies and yes-men,
Middle-men who held out their hands
For bribes, perks and amenities.
Poverty, caste-system with its divisions and conflicts,
Discrimination, injustice, bad governance
Became the nature of the day.
A big chasm appeared between the haves-and-have-nots.
The social inequality, frustrated expectations of the poor
Led to a search for an alternative pole.
The farmers were ignored, the forests and land confiscated,
Corruption and inefficiency became the rule of the day.
Even His Majesty’s servants went so far as to say:
Raja ko kam, kahiley jahla gham.
*****
VOLATILE HIMALAYAS (Satis Shroff)
The birthplace of Buddha
And the Land of Pashupati,
A land which King Birendra declared a Zone of Peace,
Through signatures of the world’s leaders
Was at war till recently.
Bush’s government paid 24 million dollars for development aid,
Another 14 million dollars for insurgency relevant spendings
5,000 M-16 rifles from the USA
5,500 maschine guns from Belgium.
Guns that were aimed at Nepali men, women and children,
In the mountains of Nepal.
Gott sei Dank, this corner of the world,
Under the shade of the Himalayas,
Is not volatile anymore.
*****
GUNS INSTEAD OF BOOKS (Satis Shroff)
My academic friends have changes sides,
From Mandalay to Congress
From Congress to the Maobadis.
The students from Dolpo and Silgadi,
Made unforgettable by Peter Mathiessen in his quest for his inner self
And his friend George Schaller’s search for the snow leopard,
Wrote Marxist verses and acquired volumes
From the embassies in Kathmandu:
Kim Il Sung’s writings, Mao’s red booklet,
Marx’s Das Kapital and Lenin’s works,
And defended socialist ideas
At His Majesty’s Central Hostel in Tahachal.
I see their earnest faces, with guns in their arms
Instead of books,
Boisterous and ready to fight to the end
For a cause they cherish in their frustrated and fiery hearts.
But aren’t these sons of Nepal misguided and blinded
By the seemingly victories of socialism?
Even Gorbachov pleaded for Peristroika.
Putin admires Germany, its culture and commerce.
Look at the old, crumbling Soviet Union,
And other East Bloc nations.
They have all swapped sides and are EU and Nato members.
When will we, in Nepal, learn
About the fruits of democracy and tolerance?
*****
TIME STANDS STILL IN NEPAL (Satis Shroff)
Globalisation has changed the world fast,
But in Nepal time stands still.
The blind beggar at the New Road gate sings:
‘In a land where the tongue-tied live,
The deaf desire to rule’.
Oh my Nepal, quo vadis?
The only way to peace and harmony is
To lay aside the arms.
Can Nepal afford to be the bastion
Of a movement and a government
That rides rough-shod
Over the lives and rights of fellow Nepalis?
Can’t we learn from the lessons of Afghanistan, Romania,
Poland, East Germany and Iraq?
The Maobadis are getting a chance at the polls,
Like all other democratic parties.
For the Maobadis are Bahuns and Chettris,
Be they Prachanda or Baburam Bhattrai,
Hush, an unholy alliance has made the rounds,
The political parties and the Maoists are united
And are rattling their sabres under Vishnu’s bed of serpents.
Will Narad bring us good news?
Shall we huddle and shiver together in angst?
We shall do what the Germans do:
Warten und Tee trinken.
Wait, watch and drink tea.
___________________________________
Wonderful clarity and good details. (Sharon Mc Cartney, Fiddlehead Poetry Journal)
_____________________________________________________________
A MOMENT OF MAGIC (Satis Shroff)
She had short, golden hair
Tied neatly behind
With a blue satin-scarf.
And yet I saw her
Wearing a diadem
And a flowing satin gown,
Like a princess.
A meek, submissive smile
A movement of her fair hair
Akin to a Bolshoi ballerina
In moments of embarrassment and coyness.
Her blue Allemanic eyes, sweet and honest
They knew no intrigue,
Neither treachery nor rebellion.
‘I was brought up to obey,’ she whispered.
Pure bliss and love sublime,
A book you could read.
Plain and straight,
And not in-between the lines.
An openness, and yet
She's resolute and seeks
Perhaps stability
Or security?
A neglected childhood
With pain and punishment.
A legacy of the Black Forest
Nevertheless, she remained
Soft and tender, submissive and sincere.
Not demanding and aggressive
Ever alert and considerate.
Murmurs and sighs filled the air.
Love became stormy and frantic.
Sweat and aphrodisiac mingled,
To create a moment of magic,
To recede in moans and whispers
And a thousand kisses.
Brought to reality
By the rays of the dying sun
And the sudden noise
Of birds coming home to roost.
A tranquillity after the tumult
Within our passionate souls.
ECSTATIC WITH ECSTASY (Satis Shroff)
The one-eyed and pock-marked Newar landlord
Had ‘rooms to let’ in Kathmandu.
In the sixties came the Hippies,
Flower Power, Make Love, Not War.
They left his flat a mess,
With the sweet smell of Cannabis,
And psychedelic paintings of the walls,
Seminal fluid and menstrual blood
Smeared on the once white sheets.
The Sahuji was plainly perturbed.
‘How could the new sahibs and memsahibs
Behave so inconsiderately?’
Thirty years later,
The grey-eyed Love Parade guests,
Were still lying prostrate on his terrace,
Golden brown baked bodies,
Kissed by the rays of Surya,
The Sun God.
One part of his brain whispered,
‘Oh, it’s delightful,
Where can you see so much exotic,
Eros and tantra,
Except at the bathing spouts of Balaju?
The other half of his mind admonished,
‘These shameless grey-eyed creatures,
Don’t behave like guests in the Nepalese sense.
During the Raj in India,
They came with uniforms, cannons and rifles.
Then with long unkempt hair,
Like Shiva’s ascetic followers,
In cotton home-spun clothes,
With the word ‘Ram’ in Devnagari script,
On flimsy blouses, trousers and skirts,
Became high on marihuana.
And now with designer drugs,
Ecstatic with ecstasy
And techno-music.
‘I don’t have to travel to see the world.
The world comes to me,
In all its splendour,’
Chuckled the ageing Sahuji.
Glossary:
Kuiray: grey eyed, a term for westerners
Sahuji: a term for shopkeepers but in this context der Vermieter (landlord)
Raj: British rule in the Indian subcontinent
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE (Satis Shroff)
My husband is mad
Er spinnt
Er ist verrückt!
Says Frau Fleckenstein, my landlady
As she staggers down the steps.
She arrests her swaying
With a hiccup
And says: ‘Entschuldigen Sie’
And throws up her misery,
Discontent, melancholy and agony.
The pent up emotions
Of a forty year married life.
Her husband is a high- brow, an honourable man
A professor with a young mistress.
And she has her bottles:
Red wine, white wine
Burgunder, Tokay and Ruländer
Schnaps, Whiskey,
Kirschwasser and Feuerwasser
The harder the better.
She defends herself
She offends herself
With bitterness and eagerness.
Her looks are gone
Once her asset, now a liability.
A leathery skin, and bags under the eyes
Her hair unkempt, and a pot belly.
A bad liver and a surplus of spleen
A fairy turned a grumbler.
Tension charges the air
Pots and pans flying everywhere
Fury and frustration
Tumult and verbal terror
Rage and rancour
Of a marriage gone asunder.
And what remains is a facade
Of a professor and his spouse
Grown grey and 'grausam'
Faces that say: Guten Tag!
When it's cloudy, stormy, hurricane.
To forgive and forget
That's human folly.
I'll bear my grudges, says milady.
And my landlord is indeed a lord
A lord over his wealth, wife and wretched life
A merciless, remorseless, pitiless existence
In the winter of their lives.
Too old to divorce
And too young to die.
What remains is only the lie.
Satis Shroff writes with intelligence, wit and grace. (Bruce Dobler, Professor in Creative Writing, University of Pittsburgh).
___________________________________________________________________
MY NIGHTMARE (Satis Shroff)
When the night is not too cold
And when my bed isn’t cold
I dream of a land far away.
A land where a king rules his realm,
A land where there are still peasants without rights,
Who plough the fields that don’t belong to them.
A land where the children have to work,
And have no time for daydreams,
Where girls cut grass and sling heavy baskets
On their backs.
Tiny feet treading up the steep path.
A land where the father cuts wood
From sunrise till sunset,
And brings home a few rupees.
A land where the innocent children
Stretch their right hands,
And are rewarded with dollars.
A land where a woman gathers
White, red, yellow and crimson
Tablets and pills,
From the altruistic world tourists
Who come her way.
Most aren’t doctors or nurses,
But they distribute the pills,
With no second thoughts about the side-effects.
The Nepalese woman possesses an arsenal,
Of potent pharmaceuticals.
She can’t read the finely printed instructions,
For they are in German, French, English, Czech,
Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Spanish.
What does she care,
The hieroglyphs are always there.
Black alphabets appear like an Asiatic buffalo to her.
‘Kala akshar, bhaisi barabar,’
Says the dear old woman,
For she can neither read nor write.
The very thought of her giving
The bright pills and tablets
To another ill Nepalese child or mother,
Torments my soul.
How ghastly this thoughtless world
Of educated trekkers,
Who give medical alms
And play the macabre role of physicians
In the amphitheatre of the Himalayas.
******
GROW WITH LOVE (Satis Shroff)
Love yourself
Accept yourself,
For self-love and self-respect
Are the basis of joy, emotion
And spiritual well being.
Watch your feelings,
Study your thoughts
And your beliefs,
For your existence
Is unique and beautiful.
You came to the world alone
And you go back alone.
But while you breathe
You are near
To your fellow human beings,
Families, friends and strangers
As long as you are receptive.
Open yourself to lust and joy,
To the wonders of daily life and Nature.
Don’t close your door to love.
If you remain superficial,
You’ll never reach its depth.
Love is more than a feeling.
Love is also passion and devotion.
Grow with love and tenderness.
******
ABOUT YOU (Satis Shroff)
To think about you
And to long for you
To see you and to love you,
The way you are.
A beautiful blonde face,
Well-chiselled Allemanic features
Eyes as blue as the sky,
That look at me
And smile
That disarming
And sympathetic smile.
The closeness that I have felt
The wonderful children we have,
Each with its own character and personality
As they fill the rooms of our home,
And our lives,
With music from flutes, violins,
Piano and kids’ laptops.
Laughter and tears,
Screams and hurrahs.
Oh, I miss everything
When you are not here.
THE SEA SWELLS (Satis Shroff)
The sea shells on the sea shore
Suddenly the sea swells.
Ring the church and temple bells.
All is not well.
The sea has gone back.
Brown-burnt Tarzans and Janes
From different continents,
Wonder what’s going on.
A man from Sweden
Is immersed in his thriller under the palms.
A mother and daughter from Germany
Frolic on the white sunny beach.
Even the sea-gulls stop and listen
To the foreboding silence.
The sea swells,
Comes back
And brings an apocalyptic destruction:
Sweeping humans, huts and hotels,
Boats, billboards and debris.
Cries for help are stifled by the roaring waves.
The sea goes back.
Leaving behind lost souls,
Caught in suspended animation.
I close my eyes.
Everything dies.
Tsunami. Tsunami.
Shanti. Om shanti.
LIKE PROMETHEUS AND ICARUS (Satis Shroff)
Up and up we flew exultantly
Towards the Himalayas.
Kathmandu, Bhadgaon and Lalitpur
With their palaces, pagodas, shrines,
Brick houses and hotels ,
Lush green fields in the outskirts
Of the valley,
Were becoming smaller and greener.
For a moment in my mind
I was the dragon that rides over the clouds.
I was Prometheus,
The saviour of mankind,
Who gave mortals fire.
I was Icarus,
Flying away from Crete.
As I peered at the majestic silvery Himalayas,
I felt my insignificance in the vastness that unfurled below me.
How many climbers from the West and East,
How many Sherpas and other ethnic porters
Still lie in the crevasses and Himalayan glaciers?
The earth is below us,
And receives us.
I have a feeling of smallness,
Humility, as I alight from the jet.
I’ve seen and felt the spell of the mighty Himalayas,
And what’s beyond the clouds in the sky.
A strong, deep, religious experience,
For I had trespassed the Abode of Snow,
Himalaya: The Home of the Gods.
------------------------------------------
THE NAKED HILLS (Satis Shroff)
A young Nepalese woman
Sits in front of her parents’ thatched home
In the Middle Hills of Nepal.
Her two hands caress her shoulders.
It’s cold in the hills of Nepal,
Where the hills are naked
And its sons have left
In search of better pastures,
For the hills are barren.
Governments and kings
Have come and gone,
But the poverty has remained.
There’s no flour to bake one’s bread.
The mothers seek and pluck Brennessel,
And call it sisnu,
To make a soup
In the frugal hills of Nepal.
In Maghey Sankrati we eat
Stems and roots,
Tarul and sweet-potatoes.
There’s no wheat, maize, rice or mustard
In these naked hills.
Everything has become bitter.
What remains is love and attachment.
A Nepalese bird still sings:
Kafal pakyo.
The berry’s ripe
The berry’s ripe.
THE GODS HAVE LEFT (Satis Shroff)
I walk at a snail’s pace
Study the statues and works of art
From my homeland in the Himalayas.
I discover the Hindu pantheon
The bodhisattvas and exquisite tantric figures
Meditating or in ecstatic poses.
Such a long journey have they made,
From the Himalayas to Freiburg,
Brought by Hippies hagglers out to make a buck.
Incense sticks, temple bells,
Printed Tibetan and Hindu prayers
On fine cotton cloth.
Stacks of vedic verses, sutras and upanishads.
Is it a museum?
A monastery?
Or a temple in Europe?
No, it’s a stall at Freiburg’s potato-market.
The Gods have left Kathmandu Valley forever.
To decorate the living rooms of Europeans.
For them they are conversation pieces,
For us they are Gods and Goddesses,
To be revered and worshipped.
THE NEPALESE REALITY (Satis Shroff)
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Could not put Nepal together again.
Nepalese men and women
Look out of their ornate windows,
In west, east, north and south Nepal
And think:
A decade long war between the Maoists and Royalists
Has come to an end
We have suffered so much.
So many innocent men, women, boys and girls
Have been slain by bullets,
From both sides.
Kal Bhairab seems to be pacified,
For Vishnu has crept to his bed of serpents.
He peers at the unfurling scenario:
A new interim government,
A new constitution,
More amendments.
He hisses with a sulk:
‘What can they do better than I?’
When aristocrats, chauvinists, egoists and phallocrats
Were in power,
The underprivileged castes and tribes,
Women and children,
Went always with empty hands.
A new revolution and democracy is in the land,
But have the people changed their minds?
Or are they still conscious of their caste, birth and tribe?
Of their earlier prejudices, hatred and malice
Towards the dalits, the have-nots?
Our fervent prayers have been heard.
The people are rejoicing in the streets of Kathmandu.
May there be ‘everlasting’ peace again in Nepal,
Though ‘everlasting peace’ has become inflationary.
We have no choice,
But to lay our hopes on the fragile signatures
Of two protagonists,
In the Shadow of the Himalayas.
Rejoice and take reality as it is.
-----------------------------------------------
‘Since 1974 I have been living on and off in Nepal, writing articles and publishing books about Nepal, this beautiful Himalayan country. Even before I knew Satis Shroff personally (later) I was deeply impressed by his articles, which helped me very much to deepen my knowledge about Nepal. Satis Shroff is one of the very few Nepalese writers being able to compare ecology, development and modernisation in the ‘Third’ and ‘First’ World. He is doing this with great enthusiasm, competence and intelligence, showing his great concern for the development of his own country.’ (Ludmilla Tüting, journalist and publisher, Berlin).
Had ‘rooms to let’ in Kathmandu.
In the sixties came the Hippies,
Flower Power, Make Love, Not War.
They left his flat a mess,
With the sweet smell of Cannabis,
And psychedelic paintings of the walls,
Seminal fluid and menstrual blood
Smeared on the once white sheets.
The Sahuji was plainly perturbed.
‘How could the new sahibs and memsahibs
Behave so inconsiderately?’
Thirty years later,
The grey-eyed Love Parade guests,
Were still lying prostrate on his terrace,
Golden brown baked bodies,
Kissed by the rays of Surya,
The Sun God.
One part of his brain whispered,
‘Oh, it’s delightful,
Where can you see so much exotic,
Eros and tantra,
Except at the bathing spouts of Balaju?
The other half of his mind admonished,
‘These shameless grey-eyed creatures,
Don’t behave like guests in the Nepalese sense.
During the Raj in India,
They came with uniforms, cannons and rifles.
Then with long unkempt hair,
Like Shiva’s ascetic followers,
In cotton home-spun clothes,
With the word ‘Ram’ in Devnagari script,
On flimsy blouses, trousers and skirts,
Became high on marihuana.
And now with designer drugs,
Ecstatic with ecstasy
And techno-music.
‘I don’t have to travel to see the world.
The world comes to me,
In all its splendour,’
Chuckled the ageing Sahuji.
Glossary:
Kuiray: grey eyed, a term for westerners
Sahuji: a term for shopkeepers but in this context der Vermieter (landlord)
Raj: British rule in the Indian subcontinent
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE (Satis Shroff)
My husband is mad
Er spinnt
Er ist verrückt!
Says Frau Fleckenstein, my landlady
As she staggers down the steps.
She arrests her swaying
With a hiccup
And says: ‘Entschuldigen Sie’
And throws up her misery,
Discontent, melancholy and agony.
The pent up emotions
Of a forty year married life.
Her husband is a high- brow, an honourable man
A professor with a young mistress.
And she has her bottles:
Red wine, white wine
Burgunder, Tokay and Ruländer
Schnaps, Whiskey,
Kirschwasser and Feuerwasser
The harder the better.
She defends herself
She offends herself
With bitterness and eagerness.
Her looks are gone
Once her asset, now a liability.
A leathery skin, and bags under the eyes
Her hair unkempt, and a pot belly.
A bad liver and a surplus of spleen
A fairy turned a grumbler.
Tension charges the air
Pots and pans flying everywhere
Fury and frustration
Tumult and verbal terror
Rage and rancour
Of a marriage gone asunder.
And what remains is a facade
Of a professor and his spouse
Grown grey and 'grausam'
Faces that say: Guten Tag!
When it's cloudy, stormy, hurricane.
To forgive and forget
That's human folly.
I'll bear my grudges, says milady.
And my landlord is indeed a lord
A lord over his wealth, wife and wretched life
A merciless, remorseless, pitiless existence
In the winter of their lives.
Too old to divorce
And too young to die.
What remains is only the lie.
Satis Shroff writes with intelligence, wit and grace. (Bruce Dobler, Professor in Creative Writing, University of Pittsburgh).
___________________________________________________________________
MY NIGHTMARE (Satis Shroff)
When the night is not too cold
And when my bed isn’t cold
I dream of a land far away.
A land where a king rules his realm,
A land where there are still peasants without rights,
Who plough the fields that don’t belong to them.
A land where the children have to work,
And have no time for daydreams,
Where girls cut grass and sling heavy baskets
On their backs.
Tiny feet treading up the steep path.
A land where the father cuts wood
From sunrise till sunset,
And brings home a few rupees.
A land where the innocent children
Stretch their right hands,
And are rewarded with dollars.
A land where a woman gathers
White, red, yellow and crimson
Tablets and pills,
From the altruistic world tourists
Who come her way.
Most aren’t doctors or nurses,
But they distribute the pills,
With no second thoughts about the side-effects.
The Nepalese woman possesses an arsenal,
Of potent pharmaceuticals.
She can’t read the finely printed instructions,
For they are in German, French, English, Czech,
Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Spanish.
What does she care,
The hieroglyphs are always there.
Black alphabets appear like an Asiatic buffalo to her.
‘Kala akshar, bhaisi barabar,’
Says the dear old woman,
For she can neither read nor write.
The very thought of her giving
The bright pills and tablets
To another ill Nepalese child or mother,
Torments my soul.
How ghastly this thoughtless world
Of educated trekkers,
Who give medical alms
And play the macabre role of physicians
In the amphitheatre of the Himalayas.
******
GROW WITH LOVE (Satis Shroff)
Love yourself
Accept yourself,
For self-love and self-respect
Are the basis of joy, emotion
And spiritual well being.
Watch your feelings,
Study your thoughts
And your beliefs,
For your existence
Is unique and beautiful.
You came to the world alone
And you go back alone.
But while you breathe
You are near
To your fellow human beings,
Families, friends and strangers
As long as you are receptive.
Open yourself to lust and joy,
To the wonders of daily life and Nature.
Don’t close your door to love.
If you remain superficial,
You’ll never reach its depth.
Love is more than a feeling.
Love is also passion and devotion.
Grow with love and tenderness.
******
ABOUT YOU (Satis Shroff)
To think about you
And to long for you
To see you and to love you,
The way you are.
A beautiful blonde face,
Well-chiselled Allemanic features
Eyes as blue as the sky,
That look at me
And smile
That disarming
And sympathetic smile.
The closeness that I have felt
The wonderful children we have,
Each with its own character and personality
As they fill the rooms of our home,
And our lives,
With music from flutes, violins,
Piano and kids’ laptops.
Laughter and tears,
Screams and hurrahs.
Oh, I miss everything
When you are not here.
THE SEA SWELLS (Satis Shroff)
The sea shells on the sea shore
Suddenly the sea swells.
Ring the church and temple bells.
All is not well.
The sea has gone back.
Brown-burnt Tarzans and Janes
From different continents,
Wonder what’s going on.
A man from Sweden
Is immersed in his thriller under the palms.
A mother and daughter from Germany
Frolic on the white sunny beach.
Even the sea-gulls stop and listen
To the foreboding silence.
The sea swells,
Comes back
And brings an apocalyptic destruction:
Sweeping humans, huts and hotels,
Boats, billboards and debris.
Cries for help are stifled by the roaring waves.
The sea goes back.
Leaving behind lost souls,
Caught in suspended animation.
I close my eyes.
Everything dies.
Tsunami. Tsunami.
Shanti. Om shanti.
LIKE PROMETHEUS AND ICARUS (Satis Shroff)
Up and up we flew exultantly
Towards the Himalayas.
Kathmandu, Bhadgaon and Lalitpur
With their palaces, pagodas, shrines,
Brick houses and hotels ,
Lush green fields in the outskirts
Of the valley,
Were becoming smaller and greener.
For a moment in my mind
I was the dragon that rides over the clouds.
I was Prometheus,
The saviour of mankind,
Who gave mortals fire.
I was Icarus,
Flying away from Crete.
As I peered at the majestic silvery Himalayas,
I felt my insignificance in the vastness that unfurled below me.
How many climbers from the West and East,
How many Sherpas and other ethnic porters
Still lie in the crevasses and Himalayan glaciers?
The earth is below us,
And receives us.
I have a feeling of smallness,
Humility, as I alight from the jet.
I’ve seen and felt the spell of the mighty Himalayas,
And what’s beyond the clouds in the sky.
A strong, deep, religious experience,
For I had trespassed the Abode of Snow,
Himalaya: The Home of the Gods.
------------------------------------------
THE NAKED HILLS (Satis Shroff)
A young Nepalese woman
Sits in front of her parents’ thatched home
In the Middle Hills of Nepal.
Her two hands caress her shoulders.
It’s cold in the hills of Nepal,
Where the hills are naked
And its sons have left
In search of better pastures,
For the hills are barren.
Governments and kings
Have come and gone,
But the poverty has remained.
There’s no flour to bake one’s bread.
The mothers seek and pluck Brennessel,
And call it sisnu,
To make a soup
In the frugal hills of Nepal.
In Maghey Sankrati we eat
Stems and roots,
Tarul and sweet-potatoes.
There’s no wheat, maize, rice or mustard
In these naked hills.
Everything has become bitter.
What remains is love and attachment.
A Nepalese bird still sings:
Kafal pakyo.
The berry’s ripe
The berry’s ripe.
THE GODS HAVE LEFT (Satis Shroff)
I walk at a snail’s pace
Study the statues and works of art
From my homeland in the Himalayas.
I discover the Hindu pantheon
The bodhisattvas and exquisite tantric figures
Meditating or in ecstatic poses.
Such a long journey have they made,
From the Himalayas to Freiburg,
Brought by Hippies hagglers out to make a buck.
Incense sticks, temple bells,
Printed Tibetan and Hindu prayers
On fine cotton cloth.
Stacks of vedic verses, sutras and upanishads.
Is it a museum?
A monastery?
Or a temple in Europe?
No, it’s a stall at Freiburg’s potato-market.
The Gods have left Kathmandu Valley forever.
To decorate the living rooms of Europeans.
For them they are conversation pieces,
For us they are Gods and Goddesses,
To be revered and worshipped.
THE NEPALESE REALITY (Satis Shroff)
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Could not put Nepal together again.
Nepalese men and women
Look out of their ornate windows,
In west, east, north and south Nepal
And think:
A decade long war between the Maoists and Royalists
Has come to an end
We have suffered so much.
So many innocent men, women, boys and girls
Have been slain by bullets,
From both sides.
Kal Bhairab seems to be pacified,
For Vishnu has crept to his bed of serpents.
He peers at the unfurling scenario:
A new interim government,
A new constitution,
More amendments.
He hisses with a sulk:
‘What can they do better than I?’
When aristocrats, chauvinists, egoists and phallocrats
Were in power,
The underprivileged castes and tribes,
Women and children,
Went always with empty hands.
A new revolution and democracy is in the land,
But have the people changed their minds?
Or are they still conscious of their caste, birth and tribe?
Of their earlier prejudices, hatred and malice
Towards the dalits, the have-nots?
Our fervent prayers have been heard.
The people are rejoicing in the streets of Kathmandu.
May there be ‘everlasting’ peace again in Nepal,
Though ‘everlasting peace’ has become inflationary.
We have no choice,
But to lay our hopes on the fragile signatures
Of two protagonists,
In the Shadow of the Himalayas.
Rejoice and take reality as it is.
-----------------------------------------------
‘Since 1974 I have been living on and off in Nepal, writing articles and publishing books about Nepal, this beautiful Himalayan country. Even before I knew Satis Shroff personally (later) I was deeply impressed by his articles, which helped me very much to deepen my knowledge about Nepal. Satis Shroff is one of the very few Nepalese writers being able to compare ecology, development and modernisation in the ‘Third’ and ‘First’ World. He is doing this with great enthusiasm, competence and intelligence, showing his great concern for the development of his own country.’ (Ludmilla Tüting, journalist and publisher, Berlin).
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