Poetry:
Ganesh Prasad Dangal
Blackboard and the Brain
Years ago, when I was a little schoolboy
The intermission bell rang 'dong-dong'
And our teacher left the class and exited
Leaving behind pieces of chalk
Rendered into stumps while writing on the blackboard.
Like the cold wind in the bamboo grove
We used to rise, making noise
Run to take the lead
And gather the chalk-pieces our teacher had thrown
Hold them with little fingers, like talons of birds
And mount, combating each other, on the old chair in the class
Where our teacher sat, every day
And scribble many a thing on the blackboard.
The crooked alphabets by beginners
Who were yet to master the art,
The shapeless pictures of flowers and chicken
And meaningless lines—vertical, horizontal and serpentine
Spread everywhere.
The interval was soon over
And another teacher would show up
With a black and crooked pipe in his hand.
He would look at the blackboard we had littered
With those unscrupulous writings of ours
And shout, "Who made such mess with the board?"
Who would dare to answer him?
We kept mum.
At the end, with no way out in hand
He would himself wipe the board
With a white patch of cloth
Rubbing it quite hard
Until he sweated all through from top to toes
And thus, render the board clean again.
With time,
We passed out for the school
And graduated from the university.
I thought: I have transcended the sky;
I thought: I have flown off the earth.
As I consider it today, I feel
Passing out from a school
Or graduating from a university
Are comparable to the way we scribbled
Those many things on the blackboard
When we were kids.
In the name of education,
I had littered the board called brain
With many trivial things—
Unclear, unmatched, shapeless
And thus, mess it up with filth.
I realize: I failed to scribble beautiful letters of wisdom
And failed to draw beautiful shapes of consciousness.
These days, those scenes constantly flash in my memory.
I recall the glimpse of my teacher
Using a white cloth to wipe the blackboard
Rendered filthy by many a thing
We scribbled on it.
I am thinking:
If only this brain
Littered with a lot of worthless things
Could be wiped, like the blackboard,, with a white cloth
Until it is blotless again.
Translated from Nepali by Mahesh Paudyal
