The Voice of Assam

The Brahmaputra meanders through your songs

            The silt on it’s banks to which the voice of Assam belongs

You webbed the people confluencing a musical instrument’s string

            The flow knitting the common people and cascaded through the words of your wing.

The intrepid wanderer will precipitate in all watery streams

            The Indus, Danube, Amazon, Murray, Orange, Mississippi . . . in a river of dreams.

How far is death from birth?

            Why does music pulsate in my heart?

We are in the same journey of life and eternal rest

            Surging the waves of the sea of emptiness in our breast.

Your name will resonate in the dews of our mind’s boat

            And the cymbals in the cloud of misty grief will float

Engraving forever the lyricist, poet, singer Dr Bhupen Hazarika’s name

            The one who steered Assam to the world map of fame.

I hear a girl cry

The voice of a girl cries inside her mother's womb

which is the safest place on earth

or is it her final resting tomb?

Is this the land where Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati is worshipped?
 Or, do we live in an age of Kali to whom blood is sacrificed for appeasement?

Doesn't the mother weep in her heart

before she is forced to weed out the remnants of the white blood?

*** Save the girl child. Save our daughters *** 

A Tear Drop Rain

O rain, kiss me too, now that you have touched my love
  Make me an oasis of a  desert where my beloved will quench his thirst.

The nomads will pluck the date-palms
  and their camels will graze on my green body

The moon winks sweet good night over the sailing clouds,
  My dreams will not be an illusion if only I dream of him tonight ...

A tent by the shore will be our haven
  on a moonless night we will unite

But the sun will shine, shine bright and chase the clouds away
  And the wanderers will not stop to rest
   You too will move on like the others
     and what will remain is only my
      invisible, silent tears.

The Wait

My shadow swirls in the moonlight,

the watery reflection in the Ganga by the ghats at prayag,
breaks into the shattered petals of memory.

I am the Yaduri that men desires
 melting in me like the summer snow of the Shivaliks.

I too have a soul, a wandering cloud
 that empties and pours, that fills and recycles
  like the holy waters that gurgles and gushes.


I am the Ganga- pure in the prayags yet polluted in the plains
I journey alone in this life . . . like the bird I saw in the Valley of Flowers,
  soaring high above the mountains in its search for 'the nest'.


I am gentle in my flow but could be wild with raze
  the time and tide reigned by the seasons.


I comfort the beggars, the out-castes, the homeless and the widows,
  sucking in their pains and tears in the veins of my tributary.


I wait for the Yavana to embrace me before my sojourn in this life ends
impregnating me with another life into a distant timeless and spaceless world.