The Low-Born

(Translated from the original Assamese by the writer)

A moment, oh, it’s just a moment
that has made my heart overflow
with the divine glory of your beauty.

You are a happy dream of the brush–
some god’s own child, some princess,
some foster-daughter of a great hermit;
Your beauty is chiselled in the lines
on the rocks of the Ajanta hills.

But, oh, the shadow has fallen upon you:
the curse of some by-gone life:
mud-like penury,
hatred heaped upon your class by discriminating society,
darkness that has accumulated through centuries
in this filthy, unknown corner of the earth.

What abundant store you possess of beauty:
long tresses of hair flowing freely,
black, shining like a serpent’s tail,
a well-shaped nose like the clear outline
of a hillock across the horizon,
your blood beaming like unalloyed gold
below the subdued azure of your skin,
two lips of pure coral peeping beside the fingers
you are biting in bashfulness,
your neck bending a little under the burden
of the flesh-flowers of the breasts,
the thin loin like the middle of a vina,
trembling with the steps,
the buttocks bulging out like a wave of the brush,
the petals of your feet turning red like alakta
at the strokes of shingles and prickles.

This beauty that thus burns in your body
is only kindled by the dirty rags,
painted black with poverty.

I know not what vision of love divine
Apollo is dreaming in his seven-horsed golden chariot,
enchanted by the magic of your beauty.

For, you can be no mean morsel
that the hungry mortal millions can accept with hands,
soiled with the pettiness and sin
of this sphere’s dirty squalor.

A moment, oh, it’s just a living moment of the forgotten past,
which flashed upon my sight a snap of your beauty
through an open window of the running train.

Yet, that moment still lives in the sub-conscious of my mind,
And its light scintillates at moments like all start,
or peeps like moon-beams through the fog.
You are a lovely dream of the little hours of winter night,
enmeshed in sorrow;
a lotus in the mud of reality;
Lakshmi Devi without the gift of treasured vaults.