Pandemic
by Gulzar
the pandemic broke
all the artisans and workers scampered to their homes
the machines of the cities were beginning to shut down
because of those machines, their arms and legs had moved
otherwise, life they had sowed in the villages before arriving here
that acre or two of land, and five acres
of sowing and harvesting, they were all there
sorghum, paddy, corn and millets—all
that partition of land, with cousins and kin
skirmishes at the canal, tussles at the drain
musclemen—at times theirs, sometimes other's
those litigations of granny, grandfather and forebears
betrothals, weddings, barns
draught, deluge, cloudbursts—all
they will go to die there, where life is
they had only hauled their bodies here and plugged them in
they yanked their plugs
and rallied, let's go home now and they left, one and all
they will go to die there, where life is
Gulzar is an award-festooned, multi-lingual Indian poet and lyricist. He has previously won an Academy Award for his songwriting (“Jai Ho”, his collaboration with AR Rahman on 2007’s Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack); the song later went on to win a Grammy. Gulzar’s Bollywood smash hits have been praised for their spiritual complexity; for one of his best-known works, “Chaiya Chaiya”, he sought inspiration from a 17th-Century Sufi folk poem. He has also received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002 and the Padma Bhushan in 2004. In 2016, BBC listed him amongst “12 more songwriters worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature”. Gulzar lives and works in Mumbai.
Sunjoy Shekhar has written more than ten thousand hours of television programming for a host of channels across India and Indonesia. He used to head a publishing house in Delhi. He has translated Gulzar's songs and short-stories, which were published by Penguin, India. He divides his time between Jakarta, Mumbai and New Delhi.
