The Black-Smith And The Banyan Poem by Hindukush Ojha

There, down this stretch of road
Just off, the manned railway crossing
Right under the big banyan tree
Was a tiny shack,....barely seen.
Behind the dripping roots, it hid...
Away, from the road's sparse traffic,
A simple thatch of grass and bricks
Eloquent of a lost quality.

The grass, it still grows, in the Shivaliks
Whereas the bricks, they dried up in a kiln
Close by, from mud, from the dug up hills
Where now, stands a petrol pump.
Inside this shack, as I remember
An aged black-smith had always worked,
In the shadows, almost surreptitiously.

The banyan breeze: the first whiff of freedom
For a complete release- the very place,
For someone handcuffed...
A striped fugitive, on the run,
From the Dehra jail on to the highway.
The black smith would, such shackles, break..
Joking son, ha! A child's fantasy, this
Just like in the movies.

At a mundane level, he daily hammered
Lustily, with clanging thudding sounds
Iron ingots, upon a steel anvil,
Affixed, like the banyan to the ground.
Axes and saws, knives and sickles
Iron objects straight or round
After completion, to cool them down
Got baptized in water, like sizzler steaks!

The magic of forging happens in darkness,
The metal is heated in a blazing furnace
At which it glows to a bright orange red,
And then, can be beaten to any shape.
In this, his apprentice was his only relation
A river boat had capsized, to drown his clan
But for his mentally retarded little grandson,
He had no one else, at all in this land.

His grandson in the darkness,
Like a good natured fellow, that he was
Working up the leather bellows
Assisted him at the chores
By blowing air into his furnace stove.
Inside which, in a fiery orange yellow
Chunks of burning charcoal glowed.

And ingots of pig iron glistened,
Just the right colour to be forged...
Invitingly luscious, for a slurp and a lick
Like, frightening molten popsicles!
The boy's left leg, got amputated
Just on his seventh birthday,
His grandfather chopped it accidently
By a butcher's knife, being forged
Under his heavy hammer.
It happened so suddenly, they say
That the boy did not feel the pain.

In the peak of the summers,
As hot as hell
By the side of the furnace,
Both would sweat
And the snow on the mountains
Had started to melt,
But the black smith stayed on calmly
At, what must have been, a difficult task.

Beads of his sweat, in rivulets flowed,
Like the sub-montane canals
By the side of the road,
Overflowing and gushing
Through the furrows on his face,
Trickled into the furnace, hissing,
Instantly vapourizing, into a steam.

Not only this, all draft animals
Mules and oxen and male buffalos,
Of the neighboring countryside,
When had to be shod
Like small children, are to a shoe shop...
Were led, up to the old banyan grove.
There among the giant prop roots,
The black smith examined, their hoofs.

Extremely thick glasses, made his eyes appear
As large as those of his animal visitors..
Carefully he looked for a hoof decay.
And then, quickly, he sliced off,
In a jiffy, some grey black dirty stuff,
Into which he hammered U shaped plates.

Mute these beasts stood
As if these hooves, were made of wood
With swear words he cussed,
Very kindly in fact, l
ike only an old man could!

Yet the most gentle of horse would kick
The buffaloes... butt
Even, when restricted with a rope
That stringed the hind legs with afore.
But like it is with animals, son
So is it with humans…

They tie you up, like the animals son
Especially if you can not speak up
And this I learned, that sad day, son
When they cut down that old banyan.
That old black smith, there…
Down the Hardwar Road
Closed shop, for the first time
And, also the last
That ominous hour.

They took not more than five days to bring down
What must have taken five centuries to climb
Yeah son, it disappeared, with magic
Just faded into the thin air,
That mighty fig, was chopped down,
By men in the yellow bulldozers.

They turned upon it, with chain saws,
That twanged rhythmically a funereal gloom
By that workshop where the smith had forged.
A wet saw dust piled up in heaps..
Below, this deepening gulf
Between the tree and the mother earth.

That road, now lay open and bare
So much the more, with no shadows there
Like a leaking still, under the sun
It reeked of something, sweet and dead
Like an open bottle of a flattened beer,
That invites the flies to sit and mess.

But, one had to swallow,
An aching pain
In this cemetery, of a banyan tree.
The place was cleared up, yet again,
For a modern highway,
Where our car would zip.


'But, dad, what happened to
the black smith's grandson? '
Is the question, I have been asked.
I look into the rear view mirror,
I can see the reflection, that is cast.

A very old blind man, bent twice over,
Being towed, by a one legged boy,
Who begs for money, in all that noise
Hobbling on a stick, asking for coins,
Or searching by the side of the road
For a baby banyan to grow up on time.