A poem by Amitava Mukherjee

Simika, The Stranger in the Machang House

Simika, a stranger within the machang eaves,
holds the Panchchuli mountains 
with an innocent, guileless love.

Near the peaks, an idol of sunlight rests;
the meandering bends of Kausani’s hills draw a veil
across the distant horizon.

Panchchuli does not prevaricate.

Through the doors open arch,
Panchchuli takes the spirit’s restless reach,
bold as the untethered wind.

In the mountain’s cold, indifferent eye—
its vast and endless lie—
Simika reclaims the names she shed.

She stands in a salt-streaked stillness,
a quietude worn like the silence
of an ancient, wordless man.

Under the Earth’s spectral violet hue,
the simple faces of innocent’s gleam
soundlessly upon Panchchuli’s slopes.

Her heart’s own drumming falters
beyond her hearing.
Within the mountain’s quiet love,
a fear ascends in Simika—
a stranger still,
she dwells beneath the machang roof.

A Shinga (stag), wind-sounded,
breaks the brush,
its voice a challenge to the 
mountain’s unyielding weight.

The drifting smoke of a life 
spent in devotion gathers,
a cloud at the archway of her mind.

In the burnt gunpowder Chiaroscuro 
of the Panchchuli peak,
Simika’s forty years of dead seasons sleep soundly
in the mountain’s stone courtyard.

In the absolute stillness of that height, 
Simika’s straying vision sinks,
a stone alongside those vanished seasons.

Near the sky, unseen,
the day bleeds colorless
into Simika’s moist eyes.

Even the spectral violet silence
of the Earth,
the wish of her childhood, shatters.

Simika,
the stranger in the machang house,
a final, corporeal guise of melting ice.