ANAND

जमुना के तीर / Jamuna ke Teer

There’s no wisdom in being a good swimmer, you must simply drown

It may sound good in a poem but that’s no excuse to not learn how to swim

Since you’re from a respectable class, you can enlist at a DDA Sports Complex

You did finally get Aadhar, tucking the tail of resistance, wagging it even

O yes, your auditor told you, y’all know we needed an excuse, those last to fall

Soon you’ll link it to everything there’s to know about you except your empty heart

Unrelatedly, talking to an Uber driver about life does not bridge the class divide

What if there’s no river you’d ever need to cross, it’s just a metaphor flogged to death

But no saying when the withered river will flood again and cut the city’s pride to size

It’d be a cool way to spend the summer, and while at it learn a lifesaving skill

Do anything, but do not knock up a hundred lines about Jamuna ke teer as a dare

The river’s dead and stretching its name across Bhairavi will slake no known thirst

Let the song about waiting by the river for a love who never shows not be an excuse

What if rivers have run dry as have our tears, you’ve made words your pastime

Be then the poet who touches with words but finds a way to stay beyond grasp

Watch a herd of buffaloes midday-lazing in the river’s toxic bosom

There’s no darya in Daryaganj, so you may cross this river without getting wet

What use has a boat when trains can give you a quick ride across what is not there

What would I, who’s always bathed under taps, know about the guile of a river?

This is the shore by which Nizamuddin Auliya saw Amir Khusro shirtless the first time

It was soft and green and bore sequins and Amir had wrapped it around his tilted head

History leaves out details that make love worth knowing in words worthy of love

To those that love words love is but a word to love, so he taught him words for love

Sing away, you’ll have no one listening but yourself, and this grief of not having me

Is another song to you, and I’ve nothing but the memory of your hand on my breast

Is qadar pyaar sey ai jaan-e-jehaan rakha hai

Dil ke rukhsaar pey is waqt teri yaad ney haath

And the way, my love, the memory of your hand

now caresses my tender breast with such desire—

I’ll give up all these words and music from you for you to never leave my side

The what could have been between us is a nameless sprawl of wilderness, dasht-e-tanhai

We may yet get to the shore of meaning without knowing all the words of the song

While I lay waiting here, dying to know the meaning of a touch that does not forsake

The river’s just a spent metaphor, swimming/drowning, shore/boat are all just fictions

What’s real is this song we sing seven hundred years after Auliya had said of Khusro:

‘Bury him by my grave’, and the sharia was damned, and this love found fulfilment

Khusro arrives late, and pounds his head on a wet grave, wailing and weeping

And he breaks into a song that bears the sadness of the whole world in one broken note

Har shab manam futada, ba-girde sarai e tou

Har roz ah o nala kunam az barai e tou

Every night I fall at the threshold of your tavern

Every day, I wail and weep for you, for you, only you

All those who have loved and all those who have lost flock these graves to praise love

And in another land in another raga another song was unfurled along the same river

I looked for you in Gokul, I trudged shoeless to Bindraban too

I chased every shadow that the moonlight cast, yet you never showed

The wind sounded like your flute, the river bore the dark of your eyes

In the forest where do I find the one that wears a garland of wild flowers?

When I sleep, you’re the wait I dream of, you’re the dream I wait for

Another dead poet called you lotus-faced lotus-tending lotus-loving lotus-eyed lover

It’s only that you’re never there though you appear in everything, everywhere

And so you are in these words, these lies about the truth of not being there

dahr meñ naqsh-e vafā vaj'h-e tasallī nah huʾā

hai yih vuh lafz̤ kih sharmindah-e maʿnī nah huʾā

In love’s domain, the art of constancy offers no comfort

Confronted by meaning, it is the one word that does not blush

It is your touch I crave, and love is no exact art like music or poetry, it is graceless

Love craves the assurance of touch, love is not some word meaning will betray

Nor is love a youtube link to another version of the same song about a once-loved river

These breasts cannot have enough of you, come once as the night without end

Should every union end in separation, let each union be with you

Anand, don’t just stand by a river that needs no crossing, resolute in your solitude

Don’t think you can make the time for words of love without letting yourself in on love

An effort at making up words for जमुना के तीर/ “Jamuna ke teer”, an authorless thumri made popular by Abdul Karim Khan (1872–1937) whose 78 rpm record Bhimsen Joshi legendarily heard at a restaurant in North Karnakata and ran away from home to roam the breadth of this land till he found a guru (eventually Sawai Gandharva) who’d teach him to pour life into a song like Khan did, and following Khan, Bhimsen barely articulates the words of the song, both merely cling to the refrain “Jamuna ke teer” and improvise, making up for all that has to be said but is left unsaid about the customary wait of Radha for Krishna by the Jamuna, set in the all-encompassing raga Bhairavi, and the pull of this thumri was such that the nimble genius of Kumar Gandharva could not resist as we may see in this undated video, a delectable fragment of seven-plus minutes, where we get a glimpse of a seriously appreciative Bhimsen in the audience around the fourth minute at the annual Sawai Gandharva festival Bhimsen organised in Pune in his guru’s memory, and since we seem to have time on our hands without being sure of how we play into time’s hands through YouTube’s algorithms, we click on the same thumri by Roshanara Begum, who had the fortune of learning it from Abdul Karim Khan, and we take in all that she has to give for there’s nothing that the Jamuna offers us now in Delhi, and since we are adrift on the undying river of Bhairavi, we’re led to the rendition of Ghalib’s ghazal, “dahr meñ naqsh-e vafā vaj'h-e tasallī nah huʾā” in the same raga by Munshi Raziuddin and his nephew Naseeruddin Saami and Bardi Qawwal Party of Karachi, and thereon diverge towards a live rendition of Amir Khusrao’s Har shab manam futada set in the forever-migrating raga Yaman by the of qawwals Fariduddin Ayaz, Abu Mohammed and their troupe enriched by Ayaz’s spontaneous and illuminating commentary. Among others, Faiz, Annamayya, Jayadeva, Priya, Mira, Kabir and Sowmya contributed to the body of this poem.

Anand is the publisher at Navayana. He writes poems in English and Hindi, translates poetry from many languages, and sets old Indian poems to ragas. He's a student of Dhrupad with Ustad Wasifuddin Dagar.