My Dying City

Sri N Srivatsa

Bio: Chennai-born Sri N Srivatsa is a retired banker living in Noida. Over the years, his poetry and translations mostly from Tamil to English and vice versa plus a handful to and from Hindi, have been featured on several journals and platforms. Ten volumes of Tamil poems by ten different poets and one volume of English poems translated by him into Tamil of yet another poet have been published so far. A collection of his English translations titled "Modern Tamil Poetry: A Miniature Canvas - Volume I with a poem each of 153 poets has just been released.

My city was alive with horse drawn tongas

that lent a rustic look to the metropolis,

Phat-phatis once fitted with Harley - Davidson engines

modified since to run on diesel engines

and double decker buses

which crawled on the roads and

which a brisk walker could overtake.

It had only one flyover, actually a bridge over the not-so-popular circular railway

but called a flyover anyway.

It also had giant trees a century old

whose trunks could not be

hugged by even two people

with their hands stretched wide.

It had ponds, vast open tracts of verdant green, streets lined with trees

mostly for their shade

and quite some for the jamuns they bore.

It encompassed so many villages

that remained uncorrupted.

It had green fields which

turned into a sea of yellow

when the mustard bloomed.

Parrots and peacocks were everywhere.

And then came development,

a budget motorcar, fast bikes,

wider roads and flyovers

which required trees to be felled,

arenas and multistoried buildings

multiple metro rail lines and more.

The ponds have dried up and fields have become malls.

But for the omnipresent pigeon the birds too have disappeared.

Tongas, Phat-phatis and double deckers are history now.

A concrete jungle stands now stands in place of my city of yore.

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Special Edition: The Dying City :: Setu, November 2024