Melquiedes’Soliloquy (Rupam Kalita

Melquiedes’ Soliloquy

I strung out a dithering filament from an enchanted bulb and blew it across the skies Which travelled for a hundred days. Old though I am, my hands feeble and my eyes feebler, I could see the filament fly through dusty clouds and sealed skies And finally spark into electricity like a fine gold-cased thread that has been stretched out infinitely By a pair of powerful hands, The owner of which had fled a haunting ghost And found a land that never was, That had no dead for a hundred years. His was a failed propitiation that preceded my awaking from a delicious slumber That had stolen into and immobilized my constitution. The pride that moved me was ancient in origin Bred on a hundred years of magic, gold and silver, and destitute. And I decided to lurch forward to make and destroy history In order to write my name in history. A hundred year old wisp of a man with an untamed beard and sparrow hands Stirring a cistern that smelt of thick canvas clothing, mosquitoes, gold fishes And a hundred acres of banana plantation and dreams of houses made of ice, My tribe calls me Melquiedes and I have wandered around arid topographies Like the Catalan plateaus Where I saw a stray bull mowing down a brave matador When he was taking his afternoon siesta in a gooseberry garden, And I have arrived at houses half-eaten by red ants And overgrown incorrigibly with moss and lichen Like the one where a hundred year old Buendia pored over my parchments. I fed on a palette of thriving sadism while my brethren The Sintis, the Doms and the Romas Egged me on to find a roof under the sky. Nay, it was never a lust for the circle of immortality, But the instinct for a hut to receive my people from the assaulting rain. And one day I climbed a cliff with a hundred rivers And let loose a hundred sluice-gates. The water tumbled down like a mountain waterfall that had shorn its roots with Its parent river and had transformed into an autonomous body That had no control over itself. Like an uncertified legislation that could spell disaster for the populace, Like a revolution that devours its own children, Children like the gallant colonel who fought countless civil wars Lost all and ended up as a relic locked up in a decrepit room

Whom the government hounded out a hundred times To honour him with a medal of shame, And his poor relative who was a fellow traveller in a train carrying The three thousand dead corpses of his fellow townsmen Who had to maintain silence for the sake of an avowed project To rewrite history, And a defiant patriarch who spent half of his life Tied to a tree in his yard And never died. The rains took four years, eleven months and two days to embark on What the killing of three thousand people could not, Till a yellow sun took over for a blast of militant heat And forced my deathless anatomy onto the pleasant window sill of A fate-smitten, meditative Buendia, wondering who the last casualty of the thankless revolution was.

- Rupam Kalita, English (2009-12)