Translated from Hindi by Pallavi Paul
She woke up to see
yesterday’s dream crawling on the floor.
It had on its back
The remains of dream from ten years ago.
That dream had stayed alive all these years
by licking blood from the open wounds of Christ.
Holding the dream like a cat between her palms
Cynthia fell asleep again while playing
A quiet bundle, that ten year long dream
Spread over her
Like a limp cover.
She keeps searching without touching
She keeps asking
What occurred in these ten years ?
A storm of disappearing words…
Lives suspended in a storm of words
After ten years instead of people
A people shaped emptiness remains
And along with it anatomies of unclaimed dreams
Encircled by these dreams, Who is Cynthia?
—–
On the outer wall of ward number 7
There is an old clock
It has stopped chiming
But is alive on the inside
Inside the clock there is an invisible time
Stuck to that time
Are three million seventy thousand five hundred and twenty one
Ants
(Cynthia counts everything)
Ants are chewing the wall away
The wall knows this
It dreads but does not move
However, it appears to have moved with every sighting
There are many such spirits trapped in this wall
That came here after the country was partitioned.
Under the shadow of this wall
They wove a displaced death and disappeared
Did Cynthia come with them?
—-
Different voices rise from all directions
Pulling the fragile veins of sleep apart
There is a call in every voice
A call
Like the blunted fire of stars shining
In the dust filled night sky
Millions of dreams have crowded into one dream.
The flight of these infinite voices hover over Cynthia’s head
She tries to touch their wings
They escape her
Voices keep flying in the far distance
On the surface of dreams
Flights don’t break on Cynthia’s shoulders
Everyone speaks in her dreams
They cry, they howl , they giggle
But they never call out to her.
She lies on a dripping wet bed
Falling through a deep unending swap
Her restless eyes , tightly shut
Who are these people who never call out to her
Why don’t they know her?
With everyone
But deprived from everyone
Lonlier than lonliness
Dreamier than a dream
More intoxicated than sleep
More fictional than life
Cynthia is the oldest catalogue of voices.
—
In the long corridor of the public hospital
There is a limitless crowd
Innumerable people
Unaccountable fear
Boundless hope
The enormous conflict between hope and doubt
In the melting stream of countless people
She stands at the far end
On the verge of being left behind
Like a word being laid to rest
She fixes her blank eyes on the damp floor
Making space for the unhindered gaze of the others
Drenched in sweat
She stands.
The cold of the hospital floor creeps up from her feet
to her knees
Meanwhile the crowd has moved ahead by just three inches
To escape the delusional voices of the crowd
She digs her nails into her shirt
And pulls it down her waist
Just then, a bomb goes off in her head
How could she forget to wear her skirt ?
Hastily her embarrassed hands
Try to cover her nakedness
It is a wonder
That no body notices
Her trembling nakedness
When will the doctor arrive?
When will the crowd move?
She wants to go home
Home…
Her home is far away from the wet hospital floor
Her house
Millions of miles away
Roads, buses, street corners have to be crossed
To reach her house
“Will Roshan make it?
How will I go back without him?”
She senses her voice drowning
In Roshan’s diseased breaths
Blood has dried up inside the body
Veins are aflood with cold water
It moves with immeasurable speed
Suddenly she screams, unworded
Cynthia!
Perhaps Cynthia was the name of a spirited girl.
—
Cynthia’s house is surrounded by countless houses
The ghetto feels like a honeycomb
Outside it are roads
Any road can lead to any house
And take the house with it
Cynthia’s house is an exception
Only her own sleep laced feet can reach here
Her feet are surrounded by houses
Again that order
Paths everywhere
Again those consequences
People everywhere
Again that hesitation
On the slowly solidifying foundation of liquid doubt
The colorful buildings of truth and make believe
Changing shapes
People of changing shapes
Advertisements everywhere
But no one knows Cynthia
She hears everyone in her sleep
Moving lips
Perhaps they smile
See…see she is talking
To the wind
With the speed of wind
In the direction of velocity
She speaks to directionlessness
No..never
Cynthia is ravaged by hiccups
Caught in wordless retribution
Panting suffering
Dreaming about words
Trying to rip the dream from its sleep
She is drowning and losing herself in hiccups
Cynthia does not talk
Her scream is unable to
Pierce the rocky wall of sleep
That is why she just runs
With tremendous speed
Look there…
She is picking
Under the bench of a public park
Roshan’s long fingers
Buried in sift mud
She has goosebumps on her breasts
The trees around her bear witness
To Cynthia’s mission
Cynthia is on a mission
In the bushes behind the public toilet
She finds Roshan’s mud stained shirt
She wraps it around herself
She can feel Roshan’s diseased heart beating
Like a dog’s dry tongue on her chest
She can feel the smell of urine
Wafting from between her legs
Once with Roshan
She had kept looking for a public toilet
Those were ‘terrible days’
There was no toilet to be found
Now the smell of urine is everywhere
Lava bursts out of the mind
The shirt is now as light as cotton
Roshan’s heart is melting
And dripping away little by little
His eyes are melting in the sun
The heart and eyes have evaporated
And become one with the air
Cynthia tries to grab the air
She wants to snatch back Roshan’s melting remains
From the winds and the sky
But the sky offers her
It emptiness
This emptiness gets equally distributed
Amongst everyone
A desperate Cynthia wants to cry and weep
But Cynthia is a mute girl
That is why
She cries slowly, wordless
She cannot shout
How can sleep break then?
—
City
A flowing sea of colourful shadows
Along with all other shadows
Cynthia’s shadow too sniffs the ground
The path continues without sensations
Cynthia continues without a path
She counts silently in her mind
Three million fourteen thousand
Sunrays which burst inside clouds
She counts the weight of clouds melting in the heat of those rays
The shadow of that weight
Has covered a long stretch of land
It has also covered the lazy staleness of buildings
Cynthia’s weightless darkness
Has also covered paths
Those leaves that swing in an enveloping darkness
Look in the direction
Of disappearing light
“If the flow of light produces a direction
what can be begotten of the dark?
Where else remains undiscovered?
Cynthia can never find out
Crushed under the weight of ignorance
Caught amidst the violence of words
Like a helpless poem
Cynthia finds herself becoming one with
Her shadow
She is pushed not to the ground
But thousands of feet deeper into
The gorge of impenetrable questions
Cynthia is crushed between the labyrinthine intestines of this unending abyss
Discerning light at the bottom of a swamp
And directions at the bottom of light
Cynthia pants as her blood flows
She collides with a flood of darkness
But doesn’t shout
Unsettled by injury and terror
Pushed under the weight of all she doesn’t understand
Of language
She is an unheard scream
Wretched Cynthia only understands love
Love that doesn’t stay
Only leaves behind the memory of its end
She can only love
But no one loves Cynthia
Why?
Is it because she is ‘ugly’?
Cynthia of pointed chin
The ill Cynthia of dry disheveled hair
Whose front teeth were knocked out
By Roshan when he slapped her
She wonders at the crack that has replaced the teeth inside her mouth
She can touch the wound by running her tongue through this crack
Love can reach her stomach through a twist of this tongue
For whom?
Why doesn’t she understand?
Like a child she digs her face in Roshan’s chest
Roshan, who had broken her teeth
She clings to him
She holds the two intensely white teeth in her tightly clenched fist
A little blood
And over two thousand gallons of tears in her eyes
These tears can wash away all disappointments
And tortures of life
Then why?
On the other end of the flow
Trembling with her tears in the cold winds
She lets her tireness rest against a lamp post
Alone
There is a curfew on the road
The city is aflame with riots
Bathed in sickened light and terror
Cynthia keeps roaming these streets
She silently asks questions of
Burning houses
Burning cars
She makes up answers for herself
Then suddenly a wall comes up in front of her
Cynthia gets raped
She still doesn’t shout
Not because she is mute
She doesn’t shout
Because she doesn’t understand rape
She slowly wipes
Wounds left on dreams
She stitches fragmented dreams
Engrossed in arranging them
In the ‘right order ‘
Engrossed in statistics and incidents
Trying to sift dates
Plagued and dismayed
She plays with terror
Stuck between two dreams
Cynthia is the name of a strange girl.
———
After getting his lungs fixed in the hospital
Roshan left for America
He left for forever and ever
He left behind
A caravan of dreams stranded in a desert on one end
And a turbulent vast ocean on the other
Dreams always always pay a visit
On borrowed flights
Roshan is usually there
He appears and disappears amidst shadows of buildings
Lying on train tracks
Submerged in rain water
Beating inside the old shirt
Lying in the toilet yard
She doesn’t get letters anymore
Only dreams
Dreams of dreams when there are none
Cynthia does not wait
She watches the partition of these dreams
And tries to distinguish between the sleep
That begets these dreams
Which dream belongs to which sleep
“Now I have to make a catalogue”
I can’t remember sleep, dreams
Cynthia a memory
A prolapsed memory
Anish Ahluwalia 