Shantipura This is Shantipura. Our quaint old Shantipura With roads unpaved An inconspicuous speck on your frayed maps Our Shantipura of dim lights and long power cuts Where the jackal’s howl mingles with the parrot’s long ti-ti-ti even at midday Where you hear the rustle of bamboo leaves as you curl up beside your hearths Like a baby in its mother’s womb Our Shantipura wakes up to the crows’ call We too wake up to the whiff of our mother’s steaming rice-pot As milk-white Mangala fidgets impatiently in her shed We skip down to the pool where the buffaloes bathe Grey-black giant rocks that wallow in the sun while a heron balances itself My little brother tries to catch tadpoles that stare blank-eyed among the reeds With a shallow dish smuggled out Eager to enjoy our weekend’s holiday to the hilt Look how he at first impatiently then playfully flings the limpid water Making it rise like a wave semi-circular Droplets of wave sprinkling me as well As I stand almost knee-deep Anxious lest he falls We scamper and shout all day long Till we hear our mother call The sunset resounds with the twitter of the sparrows Bare-bodied shepherd boys whistle for the stray calf As the shadows grow thicker and darker over our quaint old Shantipura. (This poem is the winner of the December 2011 Poetry Writing competition of SH College Writers’ Forum)
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