Travel Diary - Amrita Pritam

(autobiographical sketches excerpted as 4 poems)

I

From the water of the Ganges

to vodka - this

is the travelogue of my thirst.

...

Those days,

I used to work in the radio.

One evening,

I was sitting in my office

when Sajjad Zaheer came to meet me.

For a while, he remained quiet

and slightly fidgety, then

with some hesitation, he spoke:

"A delegation of Indian writers

is going to Russia, I want you

to be among them.

At yesterday's meeting,

no writer - of any language - had a problem

with this, but the Punjabi writers

put their foot down...

they said - if Amrita goes with this delegation

then our wives won't let us go..."

II

...

There is a strange sense

of loneliness in the pages of my diary.

As I look out of the air-plane window,

it is as if someone has torn the sky into two.

It is as if I have lain below me

one sheet of this torn sky,

and the other over me.

I don't know how long it will take

to reach Moscow.

III

28 May, 1966

This evening,

I saw the preserved houses

of Bulgaria's greatest writers:

Ivanov,

Peyo Yavorov

and Nikola Vaptsarov.

Several years ago

I had translated Vaptsarov's poems

into Punjabi.

That Punjabi book is now kept in

his house.

Today,

when I touched

his table

his pen

his tea-kettle

with my hands,

my eyes teared up.

It was as if

when all those years ago,

I had translated his poems,

those lines had fallen on my ears,

those lines, which have stood there since,

and now singe my ears -

"Tomorrow, this life will come of age...

this belief stirs in my heart

and that which can come and strike this belief,

there's no such bullet in the world...

there's no such bullet in the world...".

These lines, he wrote in 1942,

a little before he was murdered by the Fascists.

It is as if, that belief,

which makes this world,

which remained untouched by bullets,

I touch it today.

IV

14th June, 1966

...

160 kilometers from Tbilisi,

on our way to the Borjomi valley,

there was the Gori town, where we saw Stalin's birthplace...

Writers have come from all over the world

and this evening in Borjomi

is theirs.

Writers

of all countries spoke

of the wish for a better life, but

when the poet from Vietnam, Che Lin, got up,

all our hearts were heavy.

Today, his words are -

"Our poem swims in a river of blood.

Today, it speaks only of guns so that

one day it can speak of flowers.

When our soldiers go to the battle-front,

our people write poems and put it in their pockets.

We pray for the pockets which

carry poems in them.

Today, if we can save those poems,

then know we have saved the man..."

And there were tears in my eyes,

when this poet from Vietnam

came near me and said, "You are Amrita?"

I was stunned, then he said,

"As I was leaving Vietnam,

the poet Svan Jiyao told me

that there would be a woman from India,

and her name will be Amrita,

do remind her of me..."

A prayer is rising from my heart - I hope

that all the beautiful poems in the world become one

and protect Vietnaam..."

(tr. from Kulwant Kochad's Hindi tr. of Amrita Pritam's Punjabi prose)

Amrita Pritam