A Foray Into Translation: Love, In Four Fragments

I know, I know.

I know I haven't written in a long while, and if this blog were a physical space, this post is just dusting the cobwebs, trying to infuse life into its musty corners.

I really don't know how or why writing slipped from me (or did I let it slip?) For months now, it was as if thoughts shrivelled up at the tip of my fingers, in terror of shape-shifting into words. Maybe I just lost inspiration. Maybe I was too lazy to sit down and coax words out of their shells, when once upon a time they used to tumble out of me like a row of toppling dominos.

I was bereft. 

So when my schoolmate and friend Sulyab posted his Malayalam poem, Pranaythinte Naalu Varnangal, it was with a vengeance that I took it upon myself to translate it, possessed by a faint hope that I could rediscover my love, find purpose again. I'm not sure if I did, but I did have a lot of fun in the process.

With my limited exposure to Malayalam language/literature (something I'm not proud of) and this being my first attempt at translation, I'm well aware it could do with a lot of work. Nevertheless, I'm proud of my baby steps!

If you appreciate Malayalam, find this wonderful, ridiculously self-aware meditation on love here.

And then, find my translation here. (Nothing's stopping you from reading it as a standalone, non-Malayalis! *hint hint*)

Do let me know what you thought of it, especially bilingual Malayalis around here: how did I fare as a translator, and what could've been done better?

Tread

Feet,
tread softer.

Tread on hearts

as you would
across
sterile white floors

with mud-caked caution.

Feet,
tread softer.

Walk through hearts

as you would
through
muted hospital corridors

with clacking heels’ restraint.

Feet,
tread softly

slowly

hesitantly

or even better –
tiptoe.

Tiptoe
until you forget
to clatter through arteries
and veins

until you forget
to leave prints
in heart-chambers

until I forget you

and the world
forgets
me

Poem: Shrapnel

O you who search for songs here,
turn back –
there are none

only screams
drilling through deaf ears
to reach
empty brains and emptier hearts

O you who search for knowledge here,
leave now –
you shall find nothing

but pens
bleeding ink, and children
leaking blood
onto empty notebooks

O you who search for the school here,
you know nothing:
this is a graveyard

where
half-read lessons
and half-eaten lunches

mourn
the unread and uneaten

where
the ghosts
of half-dreamt dreams

haunt
all the tomorrows
yet to dawn

Poem: Beyond

Out beyond ideas
of rightdoing and wrongdoing
there is no field

Only lies –

under the gnarled roots
carpeting
the shifting earth

Lies

beneath the dense foliage
veiling
the eavesdropping sky

Lies

across the entwined vines
curtaining
the whispering tree-trunks

And more lies
sewn into the linings of truth

for the rest of the universe,
if it dares to pry.

I’ll still meet you there.

Poem: Take Me Back

Take me back
to all that I knew
once

To backs of palms
that grazed my forehead
and gauged misery

To smiles that flew
off faces and nested
in my heart

To words strung
on threads of clarity
and worn with pride

Take me back
to what I once knew,
away from what I do now:

Decoding words
Deciphering smiles

Digging for a meaning
that never was
there

Take me back
to the time when
words were words
and smiles were smiles

To the time
when I lived a lie
and lived it well

Dear Best Friend

Here we are.

This day always seemed so far away in space and time, despite its ghost hovering over us for years. But in daylight, ghosts are never recognized for what they are; it’s at dusk that their contours emerge, their presence freezes you veins.

This is the part where tears pool in our eyes, where we hug and sob and sniffle and make each other promise to keep in touch. Where we quash like a beetle the growing fear that the winds will blow us too far apart to let us find our way back to each other.

This is supposed to be the parting of the ways, the last good day.

Now here I am, left with nothing but the realization that I won’t even miss you.


There we were.

Our story didn’t have the best of openings, and I take all the blame for that. I was a walking bundle of pettiness and hatred and prejudice – a girl who wanted the throne and poured acid in the way of everyone, anyone, who dared to come near. Yet you stepped across the grass I’d burnt, the bridges I’d destroyed, neutralizing my acid with your own brand of alkali.

Sometimes I still wonder how we went from all that to one a.m. song recommendations, debating Harry Potter, cursing Rick Riordan, sobbing through How To Train Your Dragon 2 and scouting out the city for college shopping. The Limca Quiz might have been a catalyst, but I still don’t know what I did to deserve you, your kindness, your grace, your empathy. Your love.

You’d always be there, a phone call away, when grief and pain and bitterness banged against the floodgates of my reservoir, demanding to be let out, to consume, to drown me. You’d build that third space where our voices cease to be a bunch of signals transmitted over a network and instead be as they are: air strumming our vocal chords just as a pick for a guitar. A place where, with each spoken word, with each inflection, with every rise and drop in volume, our voices would solidify into us.

It definitely wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. Between the two of us, we had an arsenal of words to detonate charges of anger and frustration, to wound, to make the other bleed, to sow misunderstanding and reap a metric ton of unintentional hurt. There were wedges driven, tears shed, splintered silences.

Every single time, we rose from the ashes of whatever we’d set fire to with more beauty, more grace, more strength. Together, we were a phoenix.


Here we are again.

And this is what it is: clarity, aching clarity, crystallized in a moment as a fly trapped in amber.

I’m in Chennai and now you’re in Kolkata, each of us chasing our dreams and trusting our hearts to take us where we want to reach. In a matter of weeks, we’ll find our feet in these new worlds, inhabit our own new bubbles of academics and extra-curriculars, tremble at the threshold of eighteen.

But all I can think of are colours, a palette of words and memories and gestures and impressions coalescing into each other.

Pastels of well-worn pages and Baskin Robbins flavours. Reds belting out Taylor Swift. Railway-berth blue weaving together bittersweet triumph and carefree laughter. Sombre blacks and greys thrown everywhere – scars of all that has aged us beyond our years, of the steel in our spines, of the weight of all the hopes we bear. Threads of sunshine yellow slipping in and out, reminding us it’s okay to be frivolous, to be the children that we never were.

A patchwork quilt that I can draw around me wherever the world takes me, whenever the cold tries to sink its fangs into my flesh.

The next five years will set the stage for our true metamorphosis, and I don’t even know whether we’ll recognize each other by the end of it.


Here we are, and this much we know: we won’t miss each other.
Because we can’t miss what is already a part of us.

Standing My Ground

I never learn.

I try to run away from the blood and gore every time. I run, run, run as fast as my feet can take me, as far as I can make it from the epicentre of the earthquake that threatens to dismantle my illusion of happiness, of safety, of peace. Away from the nucleus, so I can be a valence electron and break away from the despair that pulls me inward.

But as much as I close my eyes - however hard, however long - I can never see the whites of my eyelids. It is always stained red. A red that refuses point-blank to be washed off, to be bleached.

As much as I run, the aftershocks always topple my rosy bubble.

And as much as I try to break away, I end up in another atom with yet another nucleus of power, of propaganda and poisonous hate.

“Here I am
Deceived into silence.

A silence that corrupts
Corrodes
Corrals me into guilt

And now I learn:
Silence is only golden
Not gold.”

So, from the depths of the place where all things rusty get cast off, I reclaim my voice. Because light doesn’t come from ignoring darkness, but from acknowledging it.

My voice maybe scratched-up and bent now, but it can still make a sound. And it will.

In solidarity with justice. With peace. With Gaza.