Masud Khan/Poetry
Custard Apple
This is that fruit
That miracle
Hanging like an emblem over many a shadowland.
It looks a bit like a green-colored grenade
Or, at times, like a heart too—
Interior filled up with the tantalizing smell of gunpowder,
And its taste—inexplicable!
The place where we used to live in childhood, there was a haunted house nearby, full of ancient trees and creepers and moss. One evening, starting up from his siesta and in the manner of a detective protagonist, my grandfather took me with him to that house. A forlorn place swaying in the breeze. From among a cluster of trees he pointed to me one. It was an ordinary tree with a few fruits hanging from it, which looked like grenades to me. It was the mewa. Custard-apple mewa. My grandfather said — These are fruits of paradise. The only heavenly fruit allowed to be exhibited on earth. Look at them closely and keep it quiet. No sooner had he said this than our bodies shuddered like fire-crackers. Engulfing me along with my thrills, my grandfather’s pox-spotted fair body and dusk-colored long beard blew in the sporadic draft.
The sun is setting on the other bank of the clear-streamed Harabati. On that horizon, a distant banana plantation begins to appear. A guerrilla boy emerges from the plants and wanders all alone as if in a fairytale—
Without his cohorts, cut off from his group forever,
Whirling about and always getting lost,
A guerrilla boy all by himself
With a custard apple in his right hand, a grenade in his left,
On the left ear a little ring, a Kalashnikov hanging from the shoulder,
Wearing a steel-colored jacket, a bullet necklace on the neck
With his heart in the middle—all kept in place with a lot of pins.
In the distant, sunset-smeared banana plantation, an outlandish guerrilla boy.
Talks nimbly—in precise terrorist terms.
There is neither other language nor idiom among the vegetation than this—
And against terror—frequent, wonderful little acts of terror…
Having accomplished each one of them, cupping his hands he drinks water
And whirling about and getting continuously lost
This guerrilla boy becomes a solitary terror artist.
And this is that fruit
That miracle
Hanging like an emblem in many a shadowy land
The sunset-polished, dismal grenade fruit
With the tantalizing smell of gunpowder inside,
And a taste—inexplicable!
The grenade, on the other hand, is a wonderful earthly fruit,
A bit tangy, but still a delicious earthly fruit,
Hanging like an emblem in many a sunny land,
Full of the addictive smell of an exotic fruit inside.
This evening the mingled smell of custard apples and grenades are driving alien forests insane.
An outlandish guerrilla boy
With a custard apple in his right hand, a grenade in his left,
And his heart in the middle. Thus balancing the fruits
He staggers across that perilous bridge on the road to heaven,
Knocks at heaven’s gate with news of a yet more exotic, symbolic, earthly fruit…
A long way behind him, the queued up pilgrims of virtue wait for their turn,
They are an alarmingly long way behind…
This is that fruit
That miracle
Hanging in many sunny lands of the earth like an emblem.
Custard Apple in Original Bengali – ‘Ataphal’
[Ataphal; Translated from original Bengali by Subrata Augustine Gomes, poet, writer, translator]
About the poet:
Masud Khan (b. 1959) is a poet, writer, and translator who emerged as an important poet in the 1980s, mostly supported by counter-cultural little magazines. Over the past two decades or more his poetry and essays have featured in magazines in Bangladesh, India, USA, UK, Belgium, Romania, Malaysia and Canada. Sajjad Sharif writes about Masud - The poetic language he uses is also multifarious – “tatsama” (Sanskrit root) words are often paired up with vernacular or colonial English, a constant slippage of nouns and adjectives shining up old-fashined sentences. In the end, language sets up like trap a network of sound.” Masud Khan’s poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies including Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton Anthology, New York/London), and Padma Meghna Jamuna: Modern Poetry from Bangladesh by Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature. Presently a resident of Toronto, Canada, Masud Khan works as an electrical engineer.
[ Extracted from the Kaurab, a literary webzine & reprinted with permission: