And yet, and yet, and yet even the poorest among us welcomes the cooling rain, even the most deprived of Bengalis enjoys the interludes between cloudbursts. What would Bengal be without rain? Monsoon clouds racing and wheeling across a brindled sky like a flock of startled pigeons, the heavens opening up, the sound and light show rocking at maximum amp. Or it can be something almost invisible, ilshiguri, lines of charcoal slanting very finely over paanshops, rooftops, windowsills, a thing of gauze like an Edwardian poem. Naked children in the streets; the light inside fish markets murkier than usual because the sun's been half-strangled, a slaphappy muck and mud everywhere. And inside our small homes the smell of wet clothes on clotheslines strung inside green-latticed verandahs, all mixed in with the starchy smell of rice cooking.
And if you venture outdoors:

Splish splash
I'm taking a bath...

And so any wonder that Bengalis have written, and continue to write, almost obsessively about rain. Here are these three translated poems by three quite different poets, two very famous, one far less so. I wish I could have printed Shaheed Quaderi's 'Brishti, Brishti' but that one proved to be a tough nut to crack (maybe one of these days!). These translations, of course, are nothing compared to the entrancingly onomotapoeic originals. Still, should you find yourself reading these poems in Dhaka on a rainy day, then why, all you have to do is lift your eyes from the page to the window and see it gently falling, or briskly beating down, or hammering on the sill with barely contained fury. And then all you have to do is return your eyes to the page and see yet more rain, a vivid downpour, with 'all of time lost in its dense fall.'

A Rainy Day

Buddhadeva Bose, (translated by Khademul Islam)

Since morning it's been the rain's turn
On this sky-hiding, darkly-wrapped day,
As if today wet Srabon's promised
To repay all of bright Boishak's debt.
Rim jhim sings the endless blind cascade
All of time lost in its dense fall.
As if the earth knew not days or nights;
Its inhabitants fused together in an incredible dream.

Smoke rises from the pavestones
Trees bow their heads in silence;
The day is dissolved matter, a liquid rush
Perhaps it is for the better, let everything vanish!
Still, it's now nine o'clock! I grab my umbrella
Sit in a tram for my tete-a-tete with the office
And through the bars caging a clerical life
Something very wet touches me tenderly.

On this lost, hidden, unearthly day
The whole city, busy-faced, at work
Men in a ratrace inside a cage,
Whose ravenous jaws are wide open even today,
And under whose steady, unrelenting pull
Innumerable umbrellas have blackened the lane,
From whose grasp not even the rich are free
As preoccupied, they zoom on the motorway.

I melt invisibly into the crowd
Walk singlemindedly, one of the faceless.
Someone has squeezed the marrow out of my bones
My frayed shoes slap on the sidewalk
And signalling my failed life:
A two-day stubble, my unlaundered clothes.
When this life-drowning rain descends
On this timeless, dreamladen day,
With lightning chasing away Srabon
A thousand sighs in a rudely bolted home
Tied in debt against tomorrow's loan.

The day comes to a close; a rain-ending trance
But the stilled clouds not yet spent,
A trace mix of yellow, green and gold
As a false twilight weighs the chances of more showers.
Ah, this beautiful world, this life!
A priceless gift given so freely,
My daily grind, a bitter poverty
Yet no matter the body's sorrows,
In the still, unsounded depths my soul is free.
Whenever the agony of a workday ends
Then Srabon wreathes my breast
With garlands stitched gold and brown.
How fortunate I am to be alive, to be alive!

Tired, free, wounded, eager,
I retrace my steps back to my humble fort
Never again shall I see this day
Its last traces still etched in the sky!
The lane is disgusting, slippery, winding,
Stone chips await the unwary,
And twisting up like an endless argument
Is the wet-coal smoke of a rainy day.
A silent melancholy fills my soul
Snatches my breath away
And wipes away the world from my mind
---Only for the spell to snap when I step through the door!

Sweetly holding the door partly ajar
She stands clad in her bright sari
Partly veiled,
Her face sideways, partly hidden in the shadows.
Ah, all is not lost,
There is the night, there is yet something left.
And in the hollow spaces of my mind
Fulfillment awakens along dreamlines
And the evening's promise glows
Like a lamp held in a slender, bare hand.

I think I know her; and yet I don't,
I don't understand all that I say
While through the million holes of poverty
An endless, restless, vast Srabon pours,
In that kodombo-blooming, blind alley.
I have nothing with which to gladden her heart,
No tuberose or jasmine or jui,
All I can do is stand and look at her
And touch her two black eyes with mine.
An invisible, all-too-familiar tryst
Having leapt over banal deceptions
Now whispers in my ear 'my promise,
I will not forget, never ever will I forget.'

Rain

Amiya Chakraborty (translated by Buddhadev Bose)

Dark is this noon as it rains on the soil of my heart
On the dry fields it rains, on the long fields of sand,
On fields a thirst for far horizons;
Falls on the forest the rain, seeps through the veins of the earth,
Deep down in rapturous green, falls the rain on my heart.
On the soft earth of rice-fields, on the unpaved village path,
Falls the rain at noon in an endless monotone.
Drenched, I move in the grass, among the heavy leaves,
Through the still pond's water, in the folds of earth and sky.
Dark is this day as it rains in waterfalls.
Ceaseless in movements of dream and waking.
All through the clouds' commotion and the trembling earth's
response,
On brown stones and fields, on the top of billowy forests,
Back to the earth from my heart, and down within the sea---
It rains.
Harmonic hour of field and cloud---
In flames
In lightning
And whirlwind
Falls the rain on the darkness of creation.
Beyond this pictured rain: the blazing day, the distance,
Impassive fields and sky's muted chanting.

Rain-1

By Masud Khan (Translated by Fakrul Alam)

It's raining abroad now, in countries close by or far away.
Occasionally a cold wind from some other land blows this way
This summer evening brings with it sadness and beauty
Blowing this way from some distant land!

A cold, cold wind keeps blowing
Slowly stirring desire, fomenting longing
For alien rituals on such an evening.

In the distance, in a riverbank ruled by beauty
In another land, wonderfully wet in the rain,
Lightning flashes time and again
Stirring desire for one's lover steadily
Inevitably, on such an evening!

Towards my homeland!
The cold wind keeps blowing
O my alien lover
Where could you be staying?

Rain-2

It's raining, Over
distant lands
Over Brahma's world
Over Rangpur and Bogra's vast expanse
In alluvial plains,
The rain veils Burma's evening fields
And keeps streaming down.

And below these lightning flashes,
At the rain-formed night's third quarter
Radiant races
Spring up at home or abroad
Like hyperactive frogs leaping
Into the unknown.

Provoked by thunder and lightning's violent outbursts
Allured by their promises,
In the thick veil
And swirling stream,
In the darkness or the wet wind,
In the eastern expanse,
Underneath the sky
In vast and empty fields
Under the vast spread-out arum fields of the east
Incredibly, unformed new nations emerge
Innumerable unsteady chaotic nations,
Restless, perturbed, incapable of standing up,
Lending themselves to grotesque maps,
Forming unstable, quivering, permeable boundaries
Governed by ill-defined laws and impotent ombudsmen
And armies marching past unimpressively.
They spring for no good reason
And seem destined to be doomed.

The night draws to a close. The rain too appears spent,
When day's first light breaks out,
Those nations that would thrive and grow
And glow with innumerable rituals and fast-spreading religions
Feel their bodies disintegrating
And disappearing
Under the vast spread-out arum fields of the east.

Masud Khan is one of Bangladesh's younger poets. Fakrul Alam teaches English at Dhaka University.