ഇരുനാഴി പയറിനായ് കുഞ്ഞിനെ കൊന്ന ഞാൻ ഈ ഉലകത്തിൽ എന്തിനീ ഞാൻ ഇരിപ്പൂ…

I was about eight years old when I fell in love with these verses, the ones telling the story of a bird who killed its child. It was heartbreaking and yet so beautiful, the art of turning torment into a work of art, agony to romanticized lament – poetry. Amma would sing this to me, and I would keep nudging her for ‘once more’.

Several years later, I roam the corridors of my school on a youth festival day, finding time between elocution and writing contests to see what other kids are up to. And I find myself drawn into the computer science lab where Malayalam recitation is going on. There I hear the lament, once again. The kids aren’t merely reciting out what someone else wrote years ago with childlike expressions. They are singing it, the melody and melancholy flowing across and clutching onto the heart of anyone in its way. Tales of nature, of forlorn love, of regret, of guilt, of everything human, laid bare upon kids barely sixteen.

While novels transport you to a reality no one owns, poetry wrenches one’s soul for a brief minute, passing on all that is and was, eerily like a deathbed confession and flows away. When I leave that room, I am no longer the person who walked in. My soul has been touched, and the world can never be its innocent self again.

But like every profound lament, this too gets buried under the cacophony of the world until last week I heard that a beloved poet has passed away. I heard her verses wail like never before, but to my astonishment, no one was reciting. And yet the wail of the verses loomed over everything that spoke their language, the lament of losing one of their own, one who held them dear, until the rain soothed them away.

They weep, and have always done so, for the ones who created them, adored them enough to keep them close to their heart in a folded notebook, spend the night reading and loving them when the whole world slept and left them here as they passed on as ashes or into dust. Every love to be lost, every parent to be mourned, every path to be astray until they themselves go adrift in time.

<Originally published on Muffled>