Bakul Dev
 
 
 By Vijay Phanshikar :
“Shaam utari fir ahate mein
(The evening descends on the yard)
Jism par roushani ke ghaav liye”
(Carrying the hurt of the light on her being)
– Bakul Dev,
new genre Hindi poet  
 

 

HOW often does evening absorb the day into her being and waltz into darkness ! That jurnal (daily) journey is very absorbing, very engaging, very inevitably inviting! From dawn to dusk, the day travels, collecting memories good and bad in its basket -- eager to melt into the evening waiting demurely in distance ! And the moment comes -- of the evening opening her arms to embrace the day rushing, gushing to melt into her being ! The journey, now unified, goes on -- travelling into the domain of darkness, to the end of the clock-day at the mid-night hour ! The darkness, however, is unbearable for the world that lights up innumerable lamps, each of those dots, blots and blobs of brightness piercing deep into the evening’s jism -- being ! Each of those dots, blots and blobs hurts, sometimes only on the skin, and sometimes deep inside ! She is hurt -- the evening, yet keeps rolling on -- in turn to get absorbed into the night’s arms-spread ! But the hurt hurts ! For, each hurt has a story that pushes itself deep into the evening’s eternal memory ! Like the black-hole in space, the evening veiled by night keeps collecting countless moments from the day’s hang-over -- and getting embedded into an unconscious consciousness ! That even light hurts the evening eager to melt into the domain of darkness of the night, may surprise some ! To the poet, however, the illumination that light stands for may even be a pin-point of enlightenment that may come once one endures the hurt -- and gets elevated in spirit ! The metaphysical message is clear: As one travels on in life -- through the day, through the evening, and into the night, one collects memories good and bad ! Those dots of memory one needs to join to decipher the metaphor of life ! Some hurts really hurt ! Some, however, are inflicted to build something beautiful -- like the chiselling of the rough hewn marble stone into a statuette ! Some hurts also have an exotic value -- in the sense those awaken a slumbering soul into enlightenment -- like what happened to the Buddha ! An evening -- the evening -- carries all these possibilities, often immense, often as distant as the horizon, often as close as one’s soul ! So, as the dots and the blots and blobs of light mark the passage of the evening into night, life offers different shades of meaning ! -- -- and the poet captures those possibilities in just those few words !