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Sunday, November 24, 2024

Home and Abroad

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Ganesh Khadka

With breast puffed with national song and eyes filled with remote dreams
when everyone has departed
my country has been rendered forlorn
like hapless elderly folks, who ache
in the absence of their young, hopeful progenies
sans their loving sons and daughters.
Once they have sneaked out of home
in search of a money-bearing tree
home aches in strange land
like the heart of the exiled birds
forced to leave their nests by circumstances.

This ditch called Kathmandu
has no idea how big is the nation
let alone the question of its knowing
compatriots scattered all over the world
outside its limits—
it sees mofussil somewhere
and Muglan somewhere
it considers some place a ‘Lahore’
and to some, of late, it has started labelling ‘Diaspora’
In fact, Nepal happened to be no other place
but the valley called Kathmandu;
which is, at present
slicing the rest of the country
and plotting the game of property-division;
by poisoning relations between Mechi and Mahakali
it’s devouring Basmati rice from Madhes
Those young men in Muglan are reiterating the country’s name living on corn-grit,
even as they profess there
the honest talks of bartering labour for cash

Episodes of violence
emanating from imbroglio of inheritance
planned to measure the lengths of noses
roundness of the eyes
and the breadth of the faces
are breaking out in succession;
Kathmandu alone devours with a discriminatory claim
all herbs from the mountains, all fruits from the hills.

Sons, the saviours of the land
who have been forced into Muglan
leaving their ailing mothers back-home
are forced to live the life of living martyrs.
It’s a ruthless land, adopted out of compulsion
when marshy-fields have been rendered barren
for want of ropahar, bause and farmhands

It’s like transferring a fish to the sands
to help it cope with freezing cold.
Oh, it’s killing to see the country deserted.
Bent on filling ditches of scarcity
when one after another, the diamonds of the womb
leave home,
the wretched mother—the country—wails.
Unworthy heirs who claim the same relation of blood
display hypocritical bellows
of sowing elixir,
by planning tendrils of venom in the pious land.
My beloved country
like a stone on deurali
peeks into Muglan looking for its kids.
Those who keep the nation in dark
and yet sell eye-glasses
do not ascertain the citizenship of people
sentenced to death in the lands abroad;
the fools, who clean the glass unmindful of the dust of their own faces
have no estimation
where the wound they inflicted on the nation
actually aches.

Trans: Mahesh Paudyal

[Khadka is a Nepali poet and lyricist. Based now in Victoria, Seychelles (Africa), he is currently the President of International Nepali Literary Society, Africa Chapter.]

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