How Else, Sanyal?

The end.
How else, Sanyal?
Lying in coughs
in a bed your foe spread for you,
your eyes still on the setting sun?
Or
Listening to the death’s tunes
the pipes and hones of your nine pores raise?
Or
By the bullets shot from the sidelines of an evil world
where no one knows anymore who’s friend and who’s foe?
Or
Eating the excreta
discharged by the ever open mouths
of those white washed and never-sweated ones?
Or
As a martyred clown?
Or
As an ex-naxal with all his dolorous grieves?
Or
As a stork babbling on the ridges
of muddy channels of chatter?
Or
By eating back with added salt
what once you’d discharged from your own bowels?
How else, Sanyal,
must come your end?

This is how and
This must be how, Sanyal.
As a fruit of fire borne by some last nightmare,
hanging from the lone undried bough of the world’s
largest tree of maladies.

As a drop of rain,
As the earth’s own truth
beyond all bio, chemi and gene labs.
Like a stream of water fibre-thin in rivers’ eyes
getting filled with sand.

As the imprint of a blood-soaked hand
on a yellowed pane of glass flashing in decayed memories.
As a question mark that likes so to slip away
as not to come up again.

Hang and swing you must, Sanyal
and thus and thus must come your end, Sanyal.

*****

(Translated from the Malayalam by K.V. Subramanian)