ધારાવસ્ત્ર

Everything about this poem is speed. કોઈ ઝપાટાભેર ચાલ્યું જાય — someone sweeps past — and before the sentence can even establish who, it has already given up: ક્યાંથી, અચાનક… — from where? suddenly… — the line trailing off into an ellipsis because the thing has gone by too fast for grammar. What follows is pure aftermath: the sun itself seems shoved aside for a moment, and doors slam — ધડાક બારણાં ભિડાય — the thundercrack rendered not as sky-noise but as the sound a house makes when something huge brushes past it. In five short lines Umashankar Joshi has caught the exact sensory signature of a monsoon squall's arrival: the light suddenly knocked away, the bang, the sense of a presence.

Only in the second stanza do we get the one thing the eye can actually hold: આકાશમાં ફરફરતું ધારાવસ્ત્ર — fluttering in the sky, a garment woven of rain-streams. The coinage does all the work. If the slanting silver curtain of a squall is a વસ્ત્ર, then someone is wearing it, and the unnamed walker of line one acquires a body precisely by never being shown — we see only the hem sweeping the whole creation into its fold, waving ઓ… પણે, "over — there," already far away. And then the heartbreak of the close: the trees, પૃથ્વી-રોપ્યાં, planted in the earth, try to catch it as it passes, flailing their branch-arms — વ્યર્થ, in vain. A tree is the earth's own hand stretched toward the sky, and the rain it reaches for is exactly the thing that cannot be held. Ten lines that begin as weather end as a parable of longing: the rooted and the moving, and the impossibility between them.

Written in Delhi in August 1975 and later placed at the head of the collection it named, the poem shows the late Umashankar at the far end of the arc that began with the enormous cosmic machinery of નિશીથ. The young poet built a Nataraja out of the whole night sky; the old one lets a god-sized presence pass through ten unrhymed lines without ever turning to look at it. The compression is the mastery — and the wet, flailing trees are as human a self-portrait as he ever drew.