આંધળી માનો કાગળ

Indulal Gandhi wrote this poem in the early years of the Gandhian era, when a steady stream of Saurashtra's young men were leaving their villages for Bombay in search of wages — a migration that hollowed out families left behind with no way to follow the news or demand an accounting. The poem's entire architecture rests on a simple, devastating device: a blind mother, unable to read or write, sits before the village letter-writer Punamchand and dictates a letter to her son Gigubhai — called simply ગગો (Gago, "my boy") in her mouth — gone five years to the city without a single coin or scrap of paper sent home. The poem never leaves her voice. Everything the reader learns of the son's life in Bombay — his new clothes, his hotel meals, his spending "like water" (પાણી જેમ પઇસા વેરે) — arrives secondhand, filtered through a nephew's letter and a mother's aching guesswork.

The poem's power lies in a rhetorical hinge repeated, with variation, at the close of nearly every stanza: તારે... મારે... — "you have... I have..." Against the son's imagined new clothes she sets her own unravelling wardrobe; against his restaurant meals, her single bowl of buttermilk on the nights the millet runs out; against the city's electric lights (તારે ગામ વીજળીદીવા), her own life spent drinking darkness (મારે આંહીં અંધારાં પીવાં) — a line made literal by her blindness and figurative by her poverty in the same breath. Gandhi writes in the rough Kathiyawadi dialect of Saurashtra rather than literary Gujarati — દા'ડા, કૂબો, ખરચી-ખૂટ — so that the mother's voice never once sounds composed; it sounds spoken, interrupted, dictated on the spot. The poem builds not toward accusation but toward disclosure: only in the final stanza, almost as an aside tucked into her closing greetings, does she reveal that she has sold the house and field, that her grain jar is empty, and that she has no choice left but to beg.

Few Gujarati poems have travelled as far from the page as this one. It entered school primers and radio broadcasts, was set to music and sung by artists including Asha Bhosle, and was so thoroughly absorbed into popular memory that many who can recite it by heart could not name its author — commenters on Gujarati literary sites still argue over whether it is a folk song or a poem at all. Its fame was durable enough to provoke answers: Gandhi himself wrote a companion piece, દેખતા દીકરાનો જવાબ (The Seeing Son's Reply), which finally lets the son speak and reveals him to be as destitute as the mother who pities him — and at least one other Gujarati poet is known to have attempted a reply in the son's voice, though neither has come close to eclipsing the original. Nearly a century on, the mother's letter remains one of Gujarati literature's most reliable instruments for provoking tears in a classroom — proof that a single dictated letter, in the right hands, can outlive both its writer and its reader.