Raju Solanki

 A poem about man

How often has this man

Tried to cover his face

And dissolve into the crowd?

He no more thinks it odd.

Did he know

That he was destined to be exposed each time?

He changed his job,

His name,

His address:

Yet he could not find a place to hide on the earth.

Each time

When he drew out his ostrich-head from the sand

And looked up

No manna fell from the skies.

There was only the apparition of his father

Smiling at him with his toothless gums.

The trees sitting cross-legged on the floor murmured:

“not for you, not for you.”*

The crowd rushing out from offices in the evening

Pushed him aside

As they ran to catch their buses.

Of course,they had little time left.

He drooped his head again

And peered into the eyes of some animal

That walked on four legs.

Neti,neti, the classical chant of denial


A monologue

You can call me a dirty scavenger 
To my face. 
I will never get mad at you. 
For I know well, how empty words are. 
I will only pity you 
As I pity the poor buffalo knocking its head against the stone wall. 
It is as clear as daylight to me: 
The thorny weeds of hate 
You have grown in the garden of your mind 
Will be swept away by the floods of time. 
But on the day of reckoning, 
When hate, injustice and exploitation 
Are wiped out from the face of the earth, 
You too will have to go. 
That is what troubles me.

To the young martyrs of Navnirman

You too had sometimes

Stood in the queues in-front of the theatres

With your diaries clutched under your arms.

The illegal five-star hotels on the strand

Had not mushroomed yet.

Of course, like the pot-belly of the shethiya

Who sat in his sari store on Manek Chowk,

Slums had spilled over into the riverside.

The cacophony of shady deals

Drowned the roar of the traffic.

Bulging suitcases crushed to death

The ‘voices of conscience’.

Then in the blackout of  political power

You came marching with your blazing torches of rebellion.

The Navnirman agitation of 1974 , led by students, which  unseated the then Congress government of Chimanbhai Patel in Gujarat

Forgive me, my honourable friend

Forgive me, my honourable friend.

Not for me the wild, ecstatic dance

With the Sakunthala balanced on my head.¹

What a ridiculous thing to do

For a shit-shifter in a god-forsaken village!

The molten lead they poured into my young ears

Still burms me.²

Don’t blame me if I get hallucinations of

Chopping your monstrous alphabet to bits.

Forgive me , my learned friend,

It was a series of unfortunate births

From Mohan-jo-daro

To Bombay’s sewage manholes.

For all your toilet papers of ‘golden age’ vintage

The stink is there to stay.

No castles in the air for me.

None from among my people

Will ever  rise to be navaratnas of your court.

The garbage heaps on the outskirts

Of your ‘golden age’ is the limit.

1.Goethe , it is reported ,broke into an ecstatic dance when he read a German translation of Kalidasa’s Sakunttala.

2. Sudras and untouchables were forbidden to learn the Vedas, offenders being punished by pouring molten lead into their ears.