–By Guest Blogger Diwas Kc
As a visitor from Nepal, I am sometimes baffled by the optimism and sense of progress at the Jaipur Literature Festival. There is more to it than the congenial, celebratory sort of affair that is ordinary to festivals. Somehow to me the euphoria here appears directly connected to the wretchedness I hear expressed often in Kathmandu.
There is neighbourly feeling at the festival – a gathering of intellectuals from various parts of the world, sharing their worlds, getting to know each other. There is, in other words, an air of tolerance and empathy. But I also feel sneaking in me the other neighbourly feelings: envy and annoyance. Experiencing this neighbour country through the exhilaration of this festival tends to nag and disturb me. It has a way of underscoring exactly those moods and modes of life – the various walls of economic and cultural circumstances – that broadly separate India from my home country. These differences are what I frequently find myself pondering about here in Jaipur.
These differences though, I have come to realize, are the results not of great disparities but in fact of unalterable closeness. This is an epiphany I reached here at the festival at one of Gulzar sahab’s Hindustani poetry recitals during which I sat moved profoundly. Distance that arises from too much proximity, strangeness that results from familiarity – these are themes that play out remarkably in some of Gulzar’s poems and which I find so appropriate to my own thoughts on Nepal and India. I am daring below to rise above my station and offer a meager translation of one of his poems, whose title I do not know but which I have called “Neighbour”.
NEIGHBOUR
As long as there is light in the house across from mine
the shadow of that house creeps on the wall of my room.
One wheelchair gets shoved left and right, it keeps turning.
When the pet birds of that house fight, they collide against my wall.
A cage hanging in that house now looks like a cage in my house, one window shuts close and its mesh casts a prison door on my wall.
Now everyone who passes by seems like a prisoner to me.
A naked, suspended bulb sometimes rocks back and forth
and the people start flying around in the air, like in a circus.
After some while the window is open once again. A light is on.
Two swaying shadows in embrace come to stillness on the balcony.
Perhaps they are looking at my courtyard.
Sometimes the smoke of that house makes a shadow on my wall.
Then it feels as if both houses are on fire.
Gulzar in Jaipur has left me with the two sides of neighborliness – intimacy and intrusion.
Gulzar’s ‘Neighbor’ –Link to the audio of the Hindi version of ‘Neighbour’
[Editor: For poetry from another neighbor see Bol! Bol! Bol! from our archives]
For other blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.
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-By Guest Blogger Diwas Kc
As a visitor from Nepal, I am sometimes baffled by the optimism and sense of progress at the Jaipur Literature Festival. There is more to it than the congenial, celebratory sort of affair that is ordinary to festivals. Somehow to me the euphoria here appears directly connected to the wretchedness I hear expressed often in Kathmandu.
There is neighbourly feeling at the festival – a gathering of intellectuals from various parts of the world, sharing their worlds, getting to know each other. There is, in other words, an air of tolerance and empathy. But I also feel sneaking in me the other neighbourly feelings: envy and annoyance. Experiencing this neighbour country through the exhilaration of this festival tends to nag and disturb me. It has a way of underscoring exactly those moods and modes of life – the various walls of economic and cultural circumstances – that broadly separate India from my home country. These differences are what I frequently find myself pondering about here in Jaipur.
These differences though, I have come to realize, are the results not of great disparities but in fact of unalterable closeness. This is an epiphany I reached here at the festival at one of Gulzar sahab’s Hindustani poetry recitals during which I sat moved profoundly. Distance that arises from too much proximity, strangeness that results from familiarity – these are themes that play out remarkably in some of Gulzar’s poems and which I find so appropriate to my own thoughts on Nepal and India. I am daring below to rise above my station and offer a meager translation of one of his poems, whose title I do not know but which I have called “Neighbour”.
NEIGHBOUR
As long as there is light in the house across from mine
the shadow of that house creeps on the wall of my room.
One wheelchair gets shoved left and right, it keeps turning.
When the pet birds of that house fight, they collide against my wall.
A cage hanging in that house now looks like a cage in my house,
one window shuts close and its mesh casts a prison door on my wall.
Now everyone who passes by seems like a prisoner to me.
A naked, suspended bulb sometimes rocks back and forth
and the people start flying around in the air, like in a circus.
After some while the window is open once again. A light is on.
Two swaying shadows in embrace come to stillness on the balcony.
Perhaps they are looking at my courtyard.
Sometimes the smoke of that house makes a shadow on my wall.
Then it feels as if both houses are on fire.
Gulzar in Jaipur has left me with the two sides of neighborliness – intimacy and intrusion.
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