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ABHIMAAN
Yesterday's India,
I remember you.
Inexplicable, daunting exile
clutches at culture not mine.
Inner flashes grope for meaning:
Three blind men define Elephant.
The edges of my mind
flanked by Hindu myths
grasp life-shaping images.
Devout Prahlad cannot save an Unbeliever
devoured by a raging, ravaging Lion
God's alter ego fastens its teeth
tearing at flesh.
The Unbeliever is Prahlad's father.
The disciple cobra refuses to even hiss
and bleedingly succumbs to stones and rocks
and his guru's musing
"Yes, remain nonviolent, but surely
you can stand up for your rights?"
Hinduism molds me.
I question what I see,
hasten after what I cannot.
I defer to greatness reduced to ashes.
Desperate pounding rhythms
distanced from days filled
with anguished cries caught
between reality and dreams
give no succor to the heart.
Heart beats rival
perilous rhythms,
desolate measures
of silent depths.
August 1994
Manjusree Sen (c), Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dedicated to my parents, the late Sri Hari Keshab Sen and Srimati Kanika Sen
Published in Kala Magazine, October 1997
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The word "abhimaan" in Bengali has a poignant meaning that is very difficult to translate into English. It describes that bitter-sweet emotion when feeling left behind, forgotten, overlooked, and neglected by the object of our desire, our Beloved. Many years have passed, a few decades even, as I look back at India, wondering why I've been forgotten; wondering why India remains so remote, aloof from me; why no
tangible Indian earth or soil grounds me and gives me daily solace; wondering why so much sea and sky separate us?
Am I an exile as I have often felt myself to be? Although I've lived in the US all my life, my first memories were shaped where I was born. Even as I began school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I drew pictures of the last sceneries vivid in my child's imagination, the mountains of Jaipur and the palm trees in Calcutta, both drawn together in the same painting. Even the Bengali I speak harks back to the India of my
parents, as I've been told.
I was mentioning to a Bengali friend of mine that try as I might, I have not been able to formulate a "lifestyle" in America. Yet, I know I have a lifestyle. It is the lifestyle that is prevalent still in more rural India, I think. At least, it seemed so to me when I was last able to visit back in 1993. An evening walk before dinner, a visit to friends and extended family members, the pampering that soon ascends, or descends to heated discussions about how best to spend our times, since no one among us adult cousins requires "upbringing."
Then, the inevitable tears when departing for our homes. I remember very fondly how it wasn't my cousin who cried, saying "Monjudidi, that just isn't me, I'm sorry!" It was her husband, overcome by the closeness, the arguments, the rushed sight-seeing in Jaipur, a city we have all seen many times over, but which attracts by its many-faceted splendor.
The most intriguing feeling, to me, was landing in Delhi that October of 1993, and having an uncanny sense that_I_had_never_left! What then happened to the years in between? Perhaps India had not forgotten me after all.
Four years after writing my anguished poem above, I realized that I had come full circle in how I really felt. Being born in India gave me a "head start" in its 6,000 years plus of history. Living in America gave me a "head start" participating in a blending of cultures with the added advantage of having a heritage whose richness and depth sometimes defy explanation. Thus, no longer feeling the pain of being an exile, I now enjoy the extraordinary gifts of a unique birthplace and an opportunity to share my perspectives in a New World, for America, to me, is still very new.
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