Lonesome Moon

Chaand Tanha



The moon is lonesome
The sky lonesome
Wandering from place to place
The heart too is forever forlorn

Desire turns to ashes
A star sinks out of sight
Only a lonesome smoke spirals up
To touch an empty night

Is this what they call life then?
Lonesome bodies, lonesome souls
And if at all you find a partner
Two lonesome people walk side by side

Beyond this flickering light
There is a dwelling place in sight
I shall leave this lonesome world
And bereft the centuries will gaze on

Ever, forever forlorn


Note on the Trans-creation: While the original poem is in a two line stanza format, here I have used four. Also the urdu word tanha is the only one used in the original to convey myriad states of loneliness, but to capture it in English I have used a few additional ones (empty, bereft, forlorn) in addition to lonesome, which I have repeated often to create for the English reader a sense of the original’s rhythm.

Desert Storm

Aablaapaa Koi


Only a frenzied madman
Blisters on his feet
Would venture into this storm
And light a lamp in it

Bringing alive particles of dust
With his prostrations upon the sand
Turning disused idols of clay
Into gods once again

Quenching the thirst
Of the thorny cactus
With the gift of water
From his cupped palms

Finding, perhaps, a golden stone
And holding it to his heart
Knowing that of his own soul
It is but a broken part.


Note on the trans-creation: The word ‘dasht’ can be translated variously as ‘wilderness’, ‘ruins’, ‘deserted place’. I have picked a single image, that of a desert, and taken it forth in the transcreation. The original is thus more fluid than this interpretation of it.

Walking Past Your Street

Yuun Teri Rah Guzar Se


You saw me as you walked past
I too saw you as you walked by
You lost your heart
But I lost my life

Walking past your street now
My tread is heavy
I walk like someone
Carrying their own tomb

Devastated I wait at corners
The remains of me adorned
Hoping you’ll walk by
And it will be spring again

Tears flow unchecked
The edges blur
Hoping you’ll step into this river
Hoping you’ll walk across


Note on the transcreation: The concluding stanza of the original has been used as the opening stanza in this version.  

My Past

What Is This Light?

A Beginning Without An End

Aaghaaz Toh Hota Hai Anjaam Nahin Hota



There can be a beginning but there can’t be an end
To the story of my life without your name in it my friend

If you can drown your days in the dark river of my hair
You can fall into disgrace but never into oblivion descend

Why shouldn’t I laugh and scatter the pieces of my heart?
That happiness is given equally to all let us not pretend

Unchecked the tears flow, the eyes beg them to stop
He is not a true drunk who to mere alcohol will bend

The days are sinking, my boat of dreams is drowned
The shores they are unmoved, no grief do they expend



Note on the trans-creation: In this version I have focused on being faithful to the original form of the poem. Mostly, I am of the opinion that the ghazal and nazm forms don’t sound natural in English and prefer to do translations which are free flowing and do justice to the rhythm and the emotional timbre of the piece under consideration.

Since You Ask

Puchhte Ho Toh Suno


If you really want to know how I live
Then listen, I’ll tell you how it is

Every night I am a mendicant for sleep
Till dawn tosses a few alms at me

Simply to breathe is not to live, my friend
The heart is in pain, the sleeve is wet

Dreams, like shattered glass, glitter
In my always wide open eyes

If you must know, then know
This is how the lovelorn spend their nights

Grief is my enemy, yet grief I always seek
Even a moment’s separation seems an eternity

I am an essence in search of its centre
Am I at the end or have I just begun?

Broken Days, Scattered Nights

Tukre Tukre Din Biitaa


Fractured days, nights in shreds
That was all that was given to me
For each receives in accordance
To the size of their plea

When I try to understand myself
I hear a laugh taunting me
“Don’t even begin to try
You are sure to lose again”

What is loss, what defeat when
We must each live out the allotted hours
I found at last a partner after my heart
But alas, his heart was restless too


Note on the trans-creation: “For each receives in accordance/ To the size of their plea” is really a very poor translation of “jiska jitna aanchal tha usko utni hee suagaat milee”. Aanchal is the fold of the sari or skirt stretched out to receive alms or benediction. Some images are so culture specific that to try and capture them in another language is to render them false.

On Why I Translate

According to a quote credited to the Roman Emperor Charlemagne "to have a second language is to have a second soul". Many Indians are multilingual from early childhood but going by my own experience I don’t think it gives us many souls, just that one soul fragmented into many pieces. As a child I heard Punjabi from my grandmother, Urdu from my father, Hindi from my mother, the UP Dehati (is Awadhi the correct term for it?) from the servants in the house and their children who were my friends and English from the nuns and teachers in my convent school. As an adult I picked up basic reading and speaking skills in Gujarati and the ability to listen in a few other Indian languages if I immerse myself in them for a spell. So what does that make me?

Multilingual? Yes, perhaps, sort of. But also confused and compartmentalized. Punjabi to me is the language of nostalgia, of a lost past, since my folks were refugees who when they moved from West Punjab after Partition to Lucknow also found it convenient to more or less drop the mother tongue and to pick up the threads of their young lives in the language of their adopted town. Urdu to me is the language of poetry and news (since my father loved poetry and heard the AIR’s Urdu news bulletin), Hindi of literature (since my mother read a great deal), awadhi of fun and games and being looked after and English the language I work in and make my way around the world in. And Gujarati is the language I talk to myself in inside my head when I need to distance myself from a situation and look at it objectively.

Over the years English has become by far my most dominant language. I read, write, speak and listen in English more and more. While my spoken Hindi is good, the reading and writing skills have fallen into disuse rapidly after the school years. And when I am in the presence of fluent Urdu or Punjabi speakers feelings of great embarrassment and regret overcome me – that I should know these languages better but don’t. Only my fractured Gujarati and smatterings of Bangla and Tamil (the languages I know least well) give me some happiness because these are not inheritances I whittled away but treasures I discovered on my own.

So to go back to the original question – why do I translate? To put it fancifully – I do it to construct a bridge back to myself - for however proficient I might be in English, culturally and emotionally I am still an Indian (part Lakhnawi, part refugee Punjabi, part adopted Gujju-behn, part all the places I’ve lived and worked in, in this vast and beloved country). A phulka to me does not feel as halka, in any other language as it does in my own. And while I like and admire the poetry of many English and American poets it simply doesn’t touch and move me in ways that the poetry of Faiz, Ghalib, Kabir, Shiv Batalvi, Nirala or Gulzar and so many other Indian poets does.

“Even one’s own tradition is not one’s birthright,” AK Ramanujan wrote in his introduction to his translation of the classic Tamil poets, “it has to be earned, repossessed. ...One chooses and translates a part of one’s past to make it present to oneself and maybe to others.” And that really is why I translate – to reclaim bits of myself. Call it a dialogue of my mind with my heart – my mind thinks and comprehends in English, my heart feels and relates in the parent tongues and when I engage in the process of translation I bring the two together for myself. A poem feels more my own after I have trans-created it than before.

I do not know if these trans-creations I post here will work similarly for you.....but I post them on the off-chance that they just might.....