Parasnath

(A Poem Written Aboard the Purushottam Express)

“A low temple keeps its gods in the dark.
You lend a matchbox to the priest.
One by one the gods come to light” (Arun Kolatkar, “A Low Temple”)

The train rails him back after a long absence—
That clerk of maudlin railway chronicles—
An emergency ticket was procured at dawn,
From the globe’s largest democracy’s capital
To Jharkhand’s unkempt forested heart …
On the way, a quaint apparition rises
As a painted, emerald, sacred hill—
Parasnath, stitched by pilgrim flags,
Makes a scripture of the misty afternoon air
While platform laborers cement bricks for pillars,
With hands red like ochre, smeared by earth
People move about their workaday affairs
Only he feels centuries shudder through him
As he remembers a delayed train, twenty years ago
His father beside him, admission papers trembling
Station lamps like forlorn lotuses afloat at dusk—
So much paper became of his journeys
Through the plains, astride tardy compartments
That breathed like the rhythms of slow village rivers
Crossing bridges between time’s starlit slivers
While Parasnath has bowed from monastic caves
Nodding ascetically to pilgrims and brickworkers
And onlookers who halted for ounces of meaning
Eons have slithered beneath the sleepers as earthworms
And coughed out miniscule temples of contentment
Enlarging the foothills of the holy peak