Wonder in the oil canvas

Lucky smiles....

Hamlet and Romeo

have come to join Didi and Gogo

under the tree.

A song...

 ‘Under the greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,’

Portia looks at lady Macbeth’s hands

just arrived,

they look at the new entrants and courtesy.

Portia tries to listen to the song...

‘Noh’, she says, ‘it’s far from a greenwood tree

in the middle of a desert deforested...

fiction is overpowering reality

this is not true, not real

what preposterous impertinence

it doesn’t in the least, make any sense’.

She concentrates on those pardon-seeking hands

counting numbers in fingers!

Suddenly they all see

Joan of Arc, Emma, Elisa Doolittle

in the team,

how horrid

for they do see

Shylock, Hitler, Black Peter, Peter Pan...

the children which took away the Pied Piper

all playing in the never-to-be-lost field

unworried.

With them, are those two famous shepherds

there is no cattle though, no herd

the lover boys look so much the same, are they twins!

Only the hands of Van Gogh know

zoom...splash...screech...

in the chaos, characters statue...

their eyes getting bigger and bigger

they see a hollow

in those helping pairs of hands

amidst a clutter of sand...

they finally look at the world

... a zero land...

And in there they see

All the other characters

Victims and victors once

Now holding hands

Synergised with fusion

Floating around

In the oily canvas

Amol* is fascinated, as always

Spoke to these newfound strange travellers or passers-by

about the King’s arrival

Doesn’t understand what on earth

In the tableau happened, or is still happening

He only wonders, never questions, not any more

He’s thus destined, created through sense

With an out-of-the-world confusion

(Looks at Lucky and says)

I am in between

Could it be that or this

If ever I have to ask

I know there’s always my Sudha*

Lucky smiles

(Amol covers himself with the quilt...Olympus moves...hooosh... he goes to sleep, is sure to meet the king tomorrow... he found her Sudha in all the characters in the tableau... she will surely bring him flowers and he won’t die...he chuckles

“Pray, do not mock me:

I am a very foolish fond old (child),

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;

And, to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”)

Note:

I must admit that this poem comes from a failed attempt of writing an inter-textual play. In the play I wrote, or tried to write, there were these characters from very popular plays belonging to different literary movements; viz. classicism to existentialism, talking to each other from their own fixed, created positions. I found it difficult to continue and, therefore, have scrapped it, or should I say shelved it. The theme behind this inter-textual nonsense was to bring out the sickness from society and banish the disease once and for all.

About Amol and Sudha

There are only two characters Amol and Sudha, which many readers, especially those outside of Bengal or of India, wouldn’t know. These two characters have been created by Tagore in the play ‘Dakghar’ or ‘Post Office’.   

Summary

The Post Office (Bengali: Dak Ghar) is a 1912 play by Rabindranath Tagore. It concerns Amol, a child confined to his adopted uncle's home by an incurable disease. W. Andrew Robinson and Krishna Dutta note that the play continues to occupy a special place in Tagore's reputation, both within Bengal and in the wider world. It was written in four days.

Amol stands in Madhav's courtyard and talks to passers-by, and asks in particular about the places they go. The construction of a new post office nearby prompts the imaginative Amol to fantasize about receiving a letter from the King or being his postman. The village headman mocks Amol, and pretends the illiterate child has received a letter from the king promising that his royal physician will come to attend him. The physician really does come, with a herald to announce the imminent arrival of the king; Amol, however, dies as Sudha comes to bring him flowers.

W.B. Yeats was the first person to produce an English-language version of the play; he also wrote a preface to it. It was performed in English for the first time in 1913 by the Irish Theatre in London with Tagore himself in the attendance. The Bengali original was staged in Calcutta in 1917. It had a successful run in Germany with 105 performances and its themes of liberation from captivity and zest for life resonated in its performances in concentration camps where it was staged during World War II. Juan Ramón Jiménez translated it into Spanish; it was translated into French by André Gide and read on the radio the night before Paris fell to the Nazis. A Polish version was performed under the supervision of Janusz Korczak in the Warsaw ghetto.