બચપણ

"Bachpan" opens with a startling declaration — everything in the house has died — before the poem reveals that nothing has actually gone anywhere. The furniture stands exactly where it always stood; it is only the boy who once animated it that is missing. Kailas Pandit, writing as a grown man returning to his childhood home, finds the rooms unbearably intact: the curtains still, the table drawers shut, the toys, in the poem's own phrase, 'રોઇ રહ્યા છે' — weeping. It is a poem built entirely from absence rendered as presence, grief disguised as an inventory of furniture.

The poem's power sits in two audacious metaphors dropped early and never repeated, which is precisely why they land so hard: the clean-swept walls compared to a widow, 'લાગે જાણે વિધવા થઇ ગઇ', and the bare bedsheet to a mother whose child has been taken from her, 'બાળ વિહોણી માતા થઇ ગઇ'. From there the poem shifts into pure memory — pockets stuffed with pens, marbles, chalk stubs, old railway tickets hoarded for no reason but love of them, afternoons spent splashing in cold water and drinking the sea's salt just to taste it. Pandit's Gujarati here is plain and conversational, almost spoken rather than composed.

The poem's final trade is its most devastating move: take back the cars, the mansions, the વૈભવ (wealth) — give me instead a pen, a marble, a broken piece of chalk. It is a wish the poem already knows is impossible, which is what makes Manhar Udhas's recording of it so enduring; decades after Pandit wrote it in the margins of a working life spent on a factory floor in Mumbai, listeners still hear in it the exact shape of their own emptied-out childhood homes.