Eagam Khaling
Black and long hairs
Extend down from the top of the head,
Up to the buttocks; big eyes,
Like wine from a thousand-year-old barrel can be served
For anyone pouring ‘Nasha’ all over.
The eyes are the mirror of the mind,
Anybody can see ‘Nasha’ in it, opening one’s heart
Out to hear without words and acts.
That’s why she is alive with everything
And without anything.
She wants the hair
To grow strong and long,
Sometimes, even longer than her own age,
So, she could do anything with the hair.
Not only that,
If possible, but she would also cover and hide
The whole world with them.
She is satisfied
With the growth of her hair,
But she hates hearing the childhood story of the beautiful princess
And beast.
She wants to keep the story incomplete
Because she loves the beast more than the prince.
Life is really an incomplete journey—with this belief,
She has been able to escape from herself.
It’s not a search for the end of the story.
She fears
That the end of the story would bring an end
To her sorrows.
With life,
She has learned to give her own meaning,
And the interpretation of that childhood heard the story.
Otherwise, He would become like a king,
And, every night, a body would melt on fire.
So, she hates a king
Because a king has no such meaning in her life.
Wants to kiss a lip,
A lip,
That lip,
That’s why she burns like a candle without any flame,
Touching her everything.
No doubt,
No regret, but only sweet pain rules.
Nobody knows, she survives living from the heart to heart,
And eye to eye,
Being orgasm before a dressing mirror.
She screams,
And laments before the mirror leaving a question—
Can that self-created mirror return her beast?
If she gets him,
She would never watch
Her naked body,
Again.
A beast is a man,
A man is a beast, in her.
Though she can’t believe it,
And suffer a memoir of the man,
Who had hideously watched deep within her body.
That’s why she has started hating the mustached man
Who hunted her ego,
And hurt her dignity.
Because such a man doesn’t bear any race, humanity,
And respect.
In fact,
She has never seen her God,
And that’s why she wanted
To see an image of Him
In her bare body,
With nudity,
In the mirror.
She always wishes
An artist to draw an image of her motherhood,
And two breasts, full of milk.
She knows that she will never be able to feed the milk to a baby,
To pour the milk into a glass,
And to write a poem.
But she wants to die like a poet,
Proclaiming her own death,
And also wants to walk silently in her funeral procession.
She has experienced a group of savages
Who enters her garden and destroy her fruits;
Without eating the one.
She couldn’t burst into tears,
And since then, It has become her irony of fate.
When she extends her desires
To search for a fruit eater,
A man,
Like a beast.
She suddenly sees Adam in her garden.
Later, she knows Adam was crucified on the cross
Without biting her fruit.
She cries for Adam and herself, piercing through
Hell and heaven.
For her God,
She eats her own fruit
But before the mirror keeps swimming
In the pond of Bathurst,
Being sex, an image, and a poem,
Without any liberation!
At last,
She runs so fast that she gains the speed of light,
Escaping herself from the creation of her image,
In the mirror.
[Eagam Khaling hails from Darjeeling. He has published an anthology of poems in 2001. Since then he has been publishing his poems in local, national and international journals (and e-sites). He is a teacher and also a research scholar at the Department of Philosophy of North Bengal University.]