Publishers, newspapers
And the whole world-media,
In conspiracy against the truth of the epoch,
Have suppressed the important information
Which everyone deserves to have:

At last, I repeat, at last,
After mountains of resistance
To the wish of my phantom-masters,
I,
At the creative age of forty-two,
With the wistfulness for life,
Have blasted myself;
I have insulted my life—
At an age at which
Artists produce their masterpieces—
I have disgraced my age…
Because I have debts to repay.

Every suicide-bomber
Blasts himself
In obedience to the wish of
His phantom-masters—
Nation, duty, custom, religion,
Vulture culture, fashion, fiction…—
Because every suicide-bomber
Has debts to repay.

The prime of my youth:
The cold-war years,
The Stalinist bureaucratic capitalism of the East,
The simpleton general Western servitude
To their Gods, their masters
Inebriated the air with nuclear arsenal,
Mountains of tensions, war-alliances, weapon-supplies,
Conflicts, plots, murders…
Death looming upon every head…

Those days I stood wondering,
Thinking, reading and working for
Unmasking the dictators,
Unmasking the democrats,
Uniting the East and the West
To restore humanity’s trust in a better future…
I couldn’t consent or surrender
To the practical power
Of any beast’s or any idiot’s
Having the right to slaughter me
Or anybody else in the world:
I refused to be a castrated goat
Growing and fattening—
Wagging its dog-tail—
To the pleasure of its masters
In this world-animal-farm.

I couldn’t be docile
And let them remain unchallenged
For all times to come
In their practical brute right
To slaughter me;
For their pleasure or needs,
I couldn’t agree to be maimed;
I didn’t want to be crippled for nothing;
No person of bestial faculty,
No idiot or vanity-ridden self-righteous animal
Should consider himself
The epitome of all exploration and research
In sociology, philosophy, science,
Psychology or history
To point me out
For the legitimate target
Or collateral damage
And declare to public that history
Shall continue preserving
Under her hatching wing
The addled eggs like himself…

Such was my concern two decades earlier:
While working inside the twin-towers,
Nobody should wreak his revenge
Or ever be sent to think of
Smoking me out
Like a rat
And having the whole edifice
Crumble over my head.

I wasn’t a suicide-bomber;
I wasn’t a dead soul,
Nor a living-corpse.
I had flesh and bones and blood,
Whatever time was mine I utilized
Towards my concern
To the displeasure, disappointment and non-satiation
Of the concerns of
My mother, sister, brothers, relatives,
Well-wishers, friends, colleagues
As well as bosses—
Whose greatest nobility of life,
Regarding me, seemed to be
To induce me to shave off my beard,
Iron my clothes and polish my shoes;
To eat more food and fatten myself,
To seek every way to glut myself,
To apply cream and powder and beautify my face—
Such was their grace!

All those things I could do without,
Therefore,
I disobeyed, I displeased;
When pestered I hardened;
When ordered I rebelled;
When influenced I refused…
Thus flowed on my solitary way of life!
My friends, well-wishers, relatives, bosses…
All advised me
To change my manners
And bow down my head
To the contemporary negligible world
In the unlimited cosmos;
To the majesty of this petty epoch
In the infinity of time.

I refused.
“You will come to ruin!”
They warned.
I laughed and mourned
In my heart of hearts
About their cowardice,
About their disheartening
And demoralizing me
From my human aim.

They sought selfishness, and compromises;
I sought humanity, purpose and striving.

Today they are respected;
I stand despised.
They have houses, cars, bank-balance,
Shares, capital, wives and children;
I have nothing—
I have not paid my house-rent
For several months now—
I’m penniless and sunk in debt.
They are in a good health;
My body has became a reservoir
Of precious stones for the doctors,
And the harbinger of
Further penury to myself—
I have already lost
All my fats and some flesh too—
Thirteen kilograms exactly—
All my clothes are now too loose for me,
And I have no new ones
That could fit upon my emaciated physique…

I’m sunk in debt,
Because,
My twenty-two years’ continued refusal
To my becoming a suicide-bomber
Saw me turn a writer
Against suicide-bombing,
Saw me rebel against
All the phantom-masters—
Nation, religion, duty, custom,
Vulture culture, fashion, fiction—
For poor me knew not
The publishers now need only
The pornography and incantations
To the phantom-masters.

Though, since many years,
I have vanquished the fear of death,
The prospect of having to die
For want of a petty surgery
Is still revolting to me;
Some better way,
And I could embrace infinity,
Without wreaking my revenge
Upon any earthworms
For the doings of the cobras.

I know that
In order to tackle Cobras
One has to acquire
The capability of an eagle,
A peacock or a mongoose,
And becoming a woodpecker
Consuming earthworms
Is no address to the situation.


Under the pain of these disturbing stones,
Under a mountain of petty debts,
Which all I mean to repay
As long as my last breath
Doesn’t slip off my physical being,
I learnt:
Ironing the clothes, polishing the shoes
And trimming my beard
Will bring me more wages.
In the honour
To my creditors, therefore,
I started thus insulting my time.

On the day of the display
Of ingenious terrorist genius
In the land of:
The jugglers of democracy,
Every type of idiocy
And fountainheads of world-misery,
I fancied
Some beloved friend of mine,
With unpolished shoes, unironed clothes…
Stood buried under the rubble.
I wished, ah how sorely I wished!
To dig him out!
In my dream or nightmare
That night, I wept
Over the rubble
And the deluge through my eyes
Washed off the debris:
“Here I come out safe as you see!”
Said my alter-ego,
“Thanks to your tears!”

But dreams have lost
Their right to serve any purpose;
Next morning,
In homage to my alter-ego,
In love to all those living children
Whose parents lay buried,
I saw myself
Walk for an interview
In ironed clothes, polished shoes…
I looked as handsome
As the world’s most powerful politician
Or the mouthpiece and waiter of robbers,
Who stood fretting, fuming and weeping.
I stood calm and laughing:
“Were his eyes borrowed from
A crocodile for that day?”
I cannot say;
But my laughter had descended
Directly from my tragedy.

“Am I a man?” I wonder sometimes;
“Are all those people around me in the world
Men and woman?”, I can’t make a reply.
Three months ago
For their mutual effacement,
India and Pakistan
The bickering brothers,
Invited Hell into their heads:
War stood looming,
And I stood alone
Engrossed in counting, encountering
Feeling
The orphans, the widows,
The destitute old people,
The wreckage, the maimed, the gagged,
The gangrened, the dementia…
Poverty, wretchedness, prostitution, crimes,
Terrorism and all consequences;
The possible nuclear tussle
The annihilation of all reason, values and hope…

Restless I stood
And wrote articles
That no paper did publish—
Freedom of expression they call it!
Then,
Despite my dire economic constraints,
Various cities of India
I walked through
To search a foothold for myself
And start a campaign:
To oppose the war;
To create awareness
And avert the catastrophe;
To fight against the prospective massacre
Even when butchery be the days’ order.

Of course,
I turned out a miserable failure;
Many a Hindu fanatics
In the trains and elsewhere
Sought it fit to
On purpose
Insult and humiliate me—
They took me for a Muslim.
I didn’t show distress
For, in the world-culture,
One can’t afford to feel distress
When attacked or insulted by one’s contemporaries
Rich or poor,
Young or old,
Well-educated or ill-educated,
“Secular” or fanatic,
Nationalist or “internationalist”…

Hindus believe all the causes
Of their fatal diseases
Since the last three millennia
Lie in nothing else
But the Muslims:

“Since upon the funeral pyres
Of their dead husbands
The wise fathers burnt their live daughters;
The living brothers, relatives, cousins,
Neighbours and friends
Burnt dead their loving sisters
Or daughters of humanity:
So Muslims are the culprit
And Hinduism is great!
Since there is complete wretchedness
Widespread all over India…:
So Islam is to blame
And Hinduism is great!

“Since after 3000 years
Of abject surrender
And animal psyche
Of the lowest rungs
In the caste-scenario of India,
A change in the approach
Seems taking place,
So Muslims have sown dissension,
They are rebellious,
They are disloyal to the country—
Because they too are the low-caste
But they submit not
And they oppose their lot
Of humiliation-facing,
Submissively,
As the low castes did
For millennia three.

“Islam is worthy of being ridiculed
For the simple fact that
We are superior Hindus,
We are supreme people,
Brahma, the Creator, was one of our horses,
And therefore,
If any low-caste or Muslim girl
Marries one of our boys
She must always suffer torture
At our hands,
She will never accepted be
As one of our own;
But look at these Muslims
They marry others
And accept them as equals:
How uncanny this Islam is!...

“There should be the war
Between India and Pakistan
Once for all
Anyone who dares say
Anything against this proposed genocide
Is a Muslim…

“India belongs to the Brahmins.
And high-castes only have
The right here to live,
Others must surrender
Or get annihilated—
Muslims first of all…”

Such were the gems of Indian wisdom
Sounded vociferously into my ears
By people young and old
In whom I saw nothing
Save the cowardly suicide-bombers—
For none of them stood ready to
Lay his life for this mission.
And I stood measuring
The devolution of all those:
The dementia, the maladies, the wretchedness
Associated with the extreme old age
Of any organism or society
Dying barren
For having through ages
Worshipped lies, vanity, cowardice,
Celibacy and sterility…
I stood imagining what the future
Held in store
For their progeny:
For the designs of
“Cultural” preservation and conservation,
To worship the rotten past,
And regress the history,
And drag their society
Centuries back in time,
Will yield its crop.
The dead reason and living insanity
That the grisly bones’ phantoms
Keep busily manufacturing and adoring
Will bestow its fruits!

Such were my concerns,
Huge was my worry
When my mother
In a relief camp at Jammu
Well within the jaws of the just-to-begin war
Portrayed her motherly concern
Towards blackening my hair,
And blackening my beard too—
My grey hair and beard
Seemed to her
A huge dishonour
In her relief-camp-milieu.

Devil only remembers
How much I suffered
Due her suggestion!
But three months on now,
When a savage war of communal violence
Has erupted in India
And is taking its toll—
Physically and mentally—
When people of all ages
Have been burnt alive
Or stabbed—
Amidst claims of progress
And inhabitancy inside
The promising new millennium
Of the most civilized world—
When Andher Nagari and Chopat Raja
Have left the negligible space of fiction,
And become the real life of India…
Helpless,
I don’t hang my head in shame,
Instead,
Today,

I have blasted myself at last,
I have insulted my life,
I have disgraced my age,
I have blackened my hair,
I have blackened my beard too,
I have made a chimpanzee of myself,
I have become a useful animal of entertainment
And slaughter,
I have surrendered,
I have become a suicide-bomber
Like all my contemporaries,
The born suicide-bombers,
The good boys of culture and fashion,
That iron their clothes, polish their shoes,
Shave off their beards, apply cream or powder,
Blacken their hair, dye their beards...
And accuse one another’s
Nation, religion, duty, custom,
Vulture culture, fashion, fiction...
And repay,
By suicide-bombing,
The debts to their own.

Today I did blast myself!
Like you all, today I turned a suicide-bomber.
Publishers, newspapers
And the whole world-media,
In conspiracy against you and me,
Have suppressed this important information:
After mountains of resistance
To the wish of my phantom-masters,
I,
With the wistfulness for life,
Have blasted myself—
I have insulted my life,
I have disgraced my age,
Because I have debts to repay!