Almost by Marria Khan
For Meena Kandasamy
How full of eyes your five fingers
Blindly sighting a roused creature
Your arrows as sharp as your ears
Piercing the voice of the darkness
Forest and you were each other’s
Skin and each other’s kin at night
You did not need the moon’s help
To unleash the magic of your arms
The animal you silenced in haste
Was preparing you for intruders
As warriors of conceited lineages
Took shelter in your sacred space
You were fated to perform a task
That raised your guru’s eyebrows
He was no more an inspiring idol
When he spoke in flesh and blood
No one found idolatry more futile
Than you, Ekalavya, naïve disciple,
Your guru preyed on your thumb
With the eyes of a skillful vulture
When the guru asked for your thumb
That shrunk him before the princes
He penalized an apocalyptic disciple
For his severing all genius from birth
The thumb’s daring was its nemesis
A thumb for a thumb being the rule,
Your thumb hurt the guru’s idolatry
Of his own self in Kshatriya mirrors
Your thumb was not only your thumb
It was the thumb of a forest dwelling,
Where thumbs learnt art and armory
Without nature’s hymn of disapproval
You, Ekalavya, displayed prickly irony
When you honoured king Yudhisthira,
Not with gold, copper, horses, flowers
But with your shoes not shorn of pride
Even today the heart of a forest defies
The invaders with a thumb’s boldness,
And while ironies are lost on invaders
The dark pride of your people remains
~ Manash Bhattacharjee
Manash Bhattacharjee is a poet and a political science scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His poems have appeared in ‘The London Magazine’, ‘New Welsh Review’, ‘First Proof: The Penguin Books of New Writing from India (Volume 5)’, ‘The Palestine Chronicle’, ‘The Little Magazine’ and ‘Coldnoon’. His first collection of poetry, ‘Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems’, has been published recently by ‘The London Magazine’.
