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Fond farewells
Bhanubhakta Acharya (1814-1866) used poetry to win a release from jail and land litigation. King Mahendra wrote a non-poem to bid farewell to then prime minister BP Koirala who had gone to meet him in his sawari camp before going on to his first prime ministerial visit to India after getting elected in 1958. The poem is banal but meaningful. It goes like this in my translation:
“BP, you’ll go now leaving us behind here/You’ll visit big cities, in the foreign land/You’ll have fun/But we will languish/In these very rivers, valleys,/the banyan-shaded platforms/And miss you/Don’t forget us/And we can never forget you either/Tired, when we will wipe sweats sitting on Chautari/At that moment/I will remember you.”
Mahendra never met Koirala again as predicted in the poem. Though Koirala’s party lingers in power with a coalition partner, that poetic episode leaves an important dent even today when parties visualise the future of this land on a chequered screen.