a poor jogi’s song..

Lankesh’s Neelu poems are a part of popular culture in Karnataka. They appeared for over two decades in Lankesh Patrike, the celebrated tabloid that he edited.

Neelu is the feminine alter ego of Lankesh. She is steeped in memories, longs for love and is fickle as the wind. She is capable of achieving an incredible depth of feeling and a profound insight into life often in a matter of few lines. An enigmatic literary character, her spontaneity and sweep of vision continues to astonish and enamour a new generation of readers.

Neelu Poems are probably Lankesh’s answer to the grandeur and simplicity of Nature itself: that human nature could be just as enthralling and luminious as the morning sunrise is something that we discover in Neelu again and again.

1.
Millions of people
who crave for pleasure
need money, land
and gold,
some need love;
only a few long
for the flower in the backyard
of a remote hamlet,
a poor jogi’s song.

2.
Between the spaces
of creases, left
on the cheek of my
adorable darling
by a villain
called Time,
I write my poem of memories.

3.
The saint who
convincingly tells
the bitter truth of life
had learnt a lot
from the art of lying.

4.
I who grow a plant
cannot make
a flower bloom-
is my helplessness.

5.
The serious, beatific
patience and gentleness
of a Guru too
is a trick devised for love -
is one of the theories of Shakespeare.

This Translation © 2006 Ankur Betageri