Winter in Stockholm

By

Balachandran Chullickad

     At the beginning of winter,

At dusk, O cold,

In Stockholm, at Drotningartten,

I saw Death rummaging through some woolens 

At a second-hand clothing stall-

I fled in fear.

At  the  Reed berg Restaurant 

On the table, two candles,

Two rosettes of  flame

 To be snuffed out by a breath

Framed on the wall,

Marilyn Monroe,

Her skirt raised by wind

A fatal beauty raped by death

It was then that I spotted

 Strindberg's ghost and old Ingmar Bergman

Supping together at one table,

Adjacent to mine.

I  asked Bergman,

Sir, why did you let decrepit Death

Roam the streets of city?

You could've trapped it neatly 

In a celluloid frame.

In a sepulchral tone,

Audible only to the poet and the mad,

Strindberg asked me:

Did you visit the last of my homes?

Did you see the bed I died in?

Meekly I answered:

I live in a hotel that bears your name.

I sleep in the bed where you 

Breathed your last.

Strindberg said:

In the royal playhouse

Tonight my drama will be on.

Go see it ,

Stop disturbing the old and the dead.

At the royal theatre hall,

A possessed Chryster Henrickson

In the frail humane voice of the actor,

Truth as Strindberg learned,

 And in vast despair,

Boom on and on.

"Man has no children,

Only woman has children.

The future is theirs

While we die childless,

O' Jesus meek and mild,

Look upon this little child."

Strindberg, you trap forty years of a disorderly life

Into a dimlit rectangle for two full hours.

I sense it throbbing. can your grip,

Contain it? I sense it's tumultuous throb.

At this darkend auditorium,

Oceans and oceans away,

I remember my wife, my son.

Strindberg asks:

Are you sure your wife belongs to you?

Are you sure you begot your son ?

I reality, who owns anyone, friend ?

I rise and roar:

You're insane totally,

And I hear his guffaw from nearby.

Perhaps it wasn't laughter

Perhaps it was the Baltic Sea

Reciting its moody verse ?

A breeze blew in

chilling clusters of the archipelago.

My heart is pyre,

Nearly burned out,

Warped in embers.

In a coat pierced by bullets

Death sits nearby warming its hands.

Translated from Malayalam by Kamala Das