INKPOT - To the roots of pain, poetry : Kaberi Kachari Rajkonwar

When we were in Dhaka, a girl
died in a grenade blast.
She was selling flowers. I was
overcome with grief after the
death of such a little girl

Many people ask me whether I wrote anything during the years I was underground. I do not have a correct answer to this question. I will be wrong if I say I wrote or I will not be right if I say I did not. Yes, I did pen some poems but I never sent them to the mainstream newspaper organisations. I knew that they would not be published. A few of my poems appeared in the souvenirs brought out in memory of the ULFA martyrs from time to time. There was a time when our very handwriting or names struck terror into the hearts of people. 

So, seeing my poems in print would have been a very brave act. Thanks to the efforts by some plucky colleagues of mine, the first edition of my poetry book Xonali Xuryar Xugandha (Fragrance of the Golden Sun), however, came out in 1996 and the second version after a long gap of ten years. Another collection of my poems, Xari Xari Mritodeh (Rows of Corpses), was published in 2006. Many advised me to contribute poems to mainstream magazines under a pen name. I did not like the idea. Under the pseudonym of Rubi Singha, I had written letters to various journals till 1996 or so, but I did not enjoy doing that either. Like many others, I then drifted away from the world of poetry in Assam as I lived sometimes in jungles and sometimes amidst a sea of humanity.

Kaberi Kachari Rajkonwar

I was in Bhutan till 1996-97. We once stayed in a rented house near a cemetery in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. On opening the window of the house, we would see wild flowers and the graveyard on the other side of a river. At that time, my hair was quite long, flowing down about a cubit below the waist. I had loved to wear my hair in plaits since my childhood. In Bhutan, except the queens, no woman is allowed to grow long hair. The family with whom I lived were apprehensive that it would be an extremely shameful matter if the king sent the 'tekela' (barber) to cut my locks. Six months earlier, I had already had my tresses pruned back by about half a cubit. That was what kept upsetting me. After coming to Thimphu, I became very angry, thinking that I, like the Nepali women living in Bhutan, would have to tie my hair tightly in the style of ‘ungalkopa’, if not ‘Bhutia chat’. I had sought refuge in Thimphu just to live with my only daughter. The very thought of getting my hair cropped just because I wanted to stay there made me feel extremely insulted, and I still feel so.  A strange country and strange laws! I decided not to stay in Thimphu and returned to our camp. I wrote several poems expressing the resentment I had felt in Thimphu. An unpublished one among them was ‘How many more days...’:

Golden childhood

Fading adolescence

Everlasting youth

Yellow future

One plus one, gave you two lips of mine

My long black hair

And all the moonlight

A clear morning, autumnal evening

A colourful kite of dreams on the banks of the Luit, cottony evenings

Gave you my breasts, sumptuous thighs, slim waist, vagina, all sensual organs

What more do you want, India?

Come and take away my identity, my selfhood if you dare...

The source of another poem comes to mind. I had almost lost the notebook containing my poems, including this one. Fortunately, one of my associates, who came back from Bangladesh, returned it to me. None of us wants to be implicated in the tragic incident in Dhemaji in 2008. Time will judge who were responsible for the political situation where children were pushed into a killing field. At that time, I wrote ‘The green burns in Dhemaji’:

For long now I have not seen

Night jasmines on the dew-drenched dubori grass

Nor have I seen an earthen lamp under a tulaxi plant

What warmth the winter sun brings

How pleasing a breath of summer wind

For long now, I have not seen small children

Walking to school in groups

In Russia’s Beslan or Assam’s Dhemaji

The green burns

The green burnt

Possibilities burn, young dreams burn down to ashes

When we were in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, a girl died in a grenade blast. She was selling flowers.  Flowers bring one a good feeling during the famed traffic snarls in Dhaka city. Wherever there is a traffic jam, little children come scurrying to sell flowers to commuters. They sell all kinds of seasonal flowers – gulap, rajanigandha, podum, bhet, togor, krishnasura, xunaru and even the monsoon flower kadam. Garlands of bakul, xewali, beliphul and kharikajai are also popular in Dhaka. I was overcome with grief after the death of such a little girl.

Then I wrote ‘Flower’:

Come and give me a gulap,

A red gulap rupees five, rajanigandha rupees two; so much fragrance for rupees seven

Come give me a child, I will give you motherhood

Give me a home, I will give you two hands

Give me a country, a country of children

I will give you my life

The girl selling flowers died when the grenade burst

So many young girls die like her

In Iraq, Beslan, in the foothills of Bhutan, in Dhemaji

Somewhere they protest, somewhere they don’t

In the political bargain, gets lost

Every child’s delicate flesh

In Dhemaji, they protest against the sky

Against freedom

We do not need a freedom where the children don’t speak

After many deaths, the smell of freedom in the young girl’s flowers

In the arithmetic book of the school going boy…

The flowers have turned to ashes in the grenade blast

The arithmetic book is still on fire!