Mother, don’t, please don’t,
don’t cut off the sunlight
with your sari spread across the sky
blanching life’s green leaves.
Don’t say: you’re seventeen already,
don’t flash your sari in the street,
don’t make eyes at passers-by,
don’t be a tomboy riding the winds
Don’t play that tune again
what your mother
her mother and her mother
had played on the snake charmer’s flute
into the ears of nitwits like me.
I’m just spreading my hood.
I’ll sink my fangs in someone
and lose my venom.
Let go, make way.
Circumambulating the holy plant
in the yard, making rangoli designs
to see heaven, turning up dead
without light and air,
for god’s sake, I can’t do it.
Breaking out of the dam
you’ve built, swelling
in a thunderstorm,
roaring through the land
let me live, very different
from you, Mother.
Let go, make way.
Translated from the Kannada by A.K. Ramanujan