Arts & Letters September 7 Thursday,2017

Tribute
Before going to the saloon
August 28 marked the poet’s first death anniversary
Editor
Zafar Sobhan
Editor
Arts & Letters
Rifat Munim
Design
Mahbub Alam
Alamgir Hossain
Shahadat Hossain
Cover
Syed Rashad Imam
Tanmoy
Illustration
Syed Rashad Imam
Tanmoy
Priyo
Colour Specialist
Shekhar Mondal
Shaheed Quaderi
(Translated by Shawkat Hussain)
My hungry hair flies wildly in the air
Not easily tamed.
Many times, many times,
Have I tried to feed it well
And put it to sleep. “The monster is coming…sleep my baby,”
But nothing works.
My hair stands sleepless
Like a santal sardar with his lean muscular body, unclad;
Or like some motionless, unblinking rebel
Unbent by storms or bowed down by the rain,
He stands for ages, for ages.
This mad, black horse
Terrifies everyone, threatens to disrupt
Afternoon traffic, injure friends and relatives.
Everybody says the same thing,
“It’s grown too long, cut it down to size,”
It’s grown too long, past the ears,
Down to the shoulders.
There’s nothing to do.
It’s my hair, but not within my control.
It grows on its own, moves and scatters,
Flies like a rasping crow,
Invades someone else’s sky
Like its own, uses it with reckless abandon.
My hair is like some truant schoolboy’s
Covered with dust from head to foot,
Obsessed with the dream of possessing a football;
It is like some maverick player
Dominating the field
Like a stubborn monarch,
Heedless of the referee’s whistle.
So this is my hair, my ruffled, unruly hair,
Somehow sticking to my perplexed skull.
Suddenly, like a traffic signal,
My wild, disorderly hair will be tamed
When the barber’s firm, active scissors
Snip them off—And so I would go to the best saloons,
To discipline my hair.
The arrogance of my hair
Is not acceptable to members of civilized society,
It has to be cut, shortened.
My head has to be like ten other heads,
Like ten other heads in society,
And so it must be cut down,
Trimmed and flattened, silenced over my skull,
It must lie quietly plastered over my head
Like a cold mat.
Still, it is my hair!
Blind, silent, and deaf,
It springs up again
Like an injured horse
Even before the month is past.
Shawkat Hussain is a writer and translator.
to this squalid frontier town:
a one-legged rickshahwallah takes round
to a six-by-eight room, the best in the best hotel.
But instead of crossing over you lie dreaming
of the woman, and the border:
perfect knife that slices through the earth
without the earth’s knowing,
severs and joins at the same instant,
runs inconspicuously through modest households,
creating wry humour – whole families
cat under one flag, shit under another,
humming a different national tune.
The border
Kaisr Haq
You lie down on the fateful line
under a livid moon. You
and your desire and the border are now one.
Let us say you dream of a woman,
and because she isn’t anywhere around,
imagine her across the border.
You raise the universal flag
of flaglessness. Amidst bird anthems
dawn explodes in a lusty salute.
You travel hunched and twisted in a crowded bus,
on a ferry through opaque night
lacerated by searchlights,
[From Published in the Streets of Dhaka, published by University Press
Limited. Reprinted with permission. An enlarged edition of the book will
be launched at this year’s Dhaka Lit Fest.]
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ARTS & LETTERS DHAKA TRIBUNE | THURSDAY, September 7, 2017