Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 5, Number 1. May 2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
A Black Bird’s Silent Monologue
– Mandarapu Hymavathi (Telugu original)
[Title of the Telugu original: Oka nalla pitta
svagatam]
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| Image courtesy: quora.com |
In the beginning, oh man, you were, of course, one
amongst us.
The bullocks that plough the fields, the milch
animals,
The green trees and the flying birds were all your
companions.
I was the heroine in the many tales and anecdotes
That you heard or read in your childhood.
To denote a dense forest, the Telugu idiom says
‘A forest too thick even for the ants to crawl
through,
And for the crows to wing through.’
Contented to live on scraps you throw
I pick them up and clean the surroundings.
I treat every crow as my own family,
And I look upon you–the humans–too the same way.
That’s why I caw to herald
The impending arrival of your kith and kin
That you have no inkling of.
The avian calls at the noon time in the blazing summer
Are like wordy chimes in a street of silence!
The moment you place a morsel of food
On the boundary wall or the parapet of your house
As an offering at your parent’s death ceremony,
I happen to fly from nowhere
And alight and nibble at the offering.
The sight makes your eyes sparkle like a rainbow.
But if I happen to come into the scene with some
delay,
Every moment of wait for you is like a frozen boulder
And you feel it too severe a punishment to bear.
Thank you for giving me importance
At least on rare occasions like this
By looking upon me as a living link
Between the living and the dead.
When you see any person with a black complexion,
You draw a derogative comparison with me,
And it pierces my heart like the stone from a
slingshot.
Our race is free of any caste or communal divide;
Yet when it comes to the raven (a part of our larger family)
Which has a darker shine than us the crows,
You call it ‘Mala kaki’ with a casteist slur
And
it sears my heart like a ploughshare.
[Mala
kaki: Though it denotes the raven; it literally means a pariah-crow. Mala
is a subaltern caste whose members were considered untouchables.]
***
Every patch of greenery has been turned
Into plots by your real estate dealers.
You’ve turned the land even here
Like the far-off African Sahara. With that,
We are now left with only the summer season
Instead of the original six of the Indian geography.
You, people, have boiled the earth into a fiery globe!
What a chain of harmful results have been set off
By your wilfully greedy
and myopic acts!
What can we, the little short-lived avian souls
Do to reverse this frightening fallout?
It’s well beyond us, you know.
You, the humans are endlessly hectic in amassing
riches
To provide for generations several of your families.
Seeing your toil, my heart bleeds for you, oh humans!
It pains me even to think of your fate, caged as you
are
In the flaming winds blowing on day and night.
Bother not to raise a few trees for us,
The wretched birds, to survive;
But do make it a point to plant
A few trees at every home of yours
So that you can breathe clean air, the life sustainer.
And the timber of those trees would eventually
Come in handy for two milestones of your lives –
To make the cradles for your new-born children;
And to provide the fuel for your cremation
As soon as you breathe your last, so that
You can eternally lie in your earthen bed.
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