“Grandma” by Bhuwan Thapaliya
Bhuwan Thapaliya is a poet writing in English from Kathmandu, Nepal. He works as an economist and is the author of four poetry collections. His poems have been published in various International Journals and anthologized in numerous books worldwide such as Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic Initiative(Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University), International Human Rights Art Festival, Poetry, and Covid: A Project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, University of Plymouth, and Nottingham Trent University, among many others.
Word from the Author:
This poem is about my grandmother and her struggles in the village of Nepal, her determination to give her children a good education despite all the odds, and her ardent love and affection for Nature and animals. She was very fond of trees and used to talk to them daily. Every morning she used to wake up before dawn and used to walk miles to get the fodder for the cattle from the forest and come back to cook and feed her children and send them to school before engaging in her other heavy day-to-day household activities. To be precise, this is a poem about all the grandmothers in the villages of Nepal and their sacrifice to make their children what they are today.
She rose from her makeshift rustic bed
and strained her eyes in the morning sun
shining through termite eaten windows.
Drank a glass of basil water and then made
her way up a trail on a tough terrain
to the forest overlooking the Sunkoshi River
to collect fodder for her cattle.
An old kerosene lamp hangs in the window
of an abandoned building and carved wooden deities
flank a rickety gate. Poor eyesight, back permanently bent
from the burden of heavy loads, feet deformed
and ravaged by walking barefoot on rough terrain,
she looked older than her ancestral deity on a hilltop nearby.
Dry corn leaves rustled underfoot. She picked one
and rubbed it in her palms, smiling at herself
and kneeled down to quench her thirst from a
little burbling creek neighboring her path.
Thereafter, she hastened her pace humming
her favorite song, sung by her mother
when she was young.
“Plant a tree, then another, then many more.
Maybe we will be able to cleanse the world.”
Every time when she hums this song,
she feels her mother humming it with her too.
Whistling, she walked deep inside the forest
and soon her doko was fully fodder crammed.
She looked at the deep blue sky and grinned
as a little girl with rhododendron flowers
in her hands high up in the Himalayas
and then sauntered slowly down the hill,
carrying heavy doko on her back with the namlo straps
on her forehead smiling at her neighbors
showing her uneven teeth, as they prepare
to spread animal fertilizer on their fields.
On the back of her polka-dotted cow,
there was a little bird.
The cows mooed loudly after seeing her.
She fed the cattle and then went inside the kitchen
to cook dal, bhat and tarkari.
In the adjoining room, her hungry children were
already getting ready for their school.
