Bapu’s Red-Mouthed Banars And Loknayak’s Black-Mouthed Hanumans Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Bapuji’s red-mouthed banars, I mean small and simple monkeys,
Seeing into the eyes,
Small and lovely,
Scratching the hairs
With the bizarre and grotesque red face.

Do not see bad, do not speak bad, do not hear bad
And they are so,
With the hands over the eyes,
The hands on the lips
And over the ears.

This is all about Gandhiji, not Shastriji,
A Sahityacharya, Vyakarnacharya or Jyotishacharya
From a Hindi or Sanskrit Vidyapitha,
A linguistical vernacular university or not,
Which but I don’t know.

Whether read or not, just the degree taken from,
As some just get the degree from,
Many labour it not,
Just get educated and knowledgeable
After teaching.

Oh, what was I saying,
As digressed I a bit, deviated from my point
And lo, I was saying about Gandhiji,
The bandars of his,
Do not see bad, do not see bad, do not hear bad.

But Lokmanyas banars not, but hanumans,
Lokmanys, I mean not Tilak, Bal Gangdhar Tilak, but Narayan,
Jayprakash Narayan,
Wotoo had banars, banars not, but hanumans,
Black-mouthed notorious hanumans.

And he did friendship with them, taming the untamable wild,
Biting and chattering,
Making you afraid of,
Jumping on the rooftops
And the tins and tiles rattling.

If tease you, it may slap and bite
As it keeps grinning and ogling
And even the officer on chair may in fear
May leave it
To ask the orderly to drive it away.

Gandhi, to some extent, friendship can be
With the small breed banars,
Red-mouthed Indian monkeys
As the showmen do it,
But with the black-mouthed,
One can never.

The savage will remain savage,
The wild and untamable,
Bloody, brutal and bestial,
The bests and brutes of the wild,
The call of the wild

And it’s evening descending upon,
Let us be to our homesteads,
The howls and roars
Frightening us,
The small and winking red-mouthed banars
On the cycle sitting and going

But the burnt-mouthed hanumans,
Ram-bhakta hanuman not,
As that was divine,
I mean Darwin’s hanumans
Primitive and untamable
And they will never be cultured
And educated even though take you the trouble of nurturing.