by M. Jay Dixit
Here’s my hand I know the way. After all, it is my homeland. With many a-curves in history, it has fret and with many a-caves, lakes and forests King Bhoj has set, brimming with snapshot heavens, a fairy foreland — Bhopal, known as the city of lakes, the brimming-beating heart of Madhya Pradesh, the heart of Heart of India.
Sail with me on a little boat, watch the Moon rise silently over the Upper Lake and play hide and seek with the clouds as we do some powwow, about the facts and folklore, about the curves — some sharp and some only apparitions in its long history.
King Bhoj build Bhopal in 11th Century along with the Upper lake, the oldest human-made lake in India upon which our boat babbles on this silent night. There’s an old wives’ tale, that the king constructed this lake to cure himself of a skin disease.
From our vantage point in this little boat, you can see the cable bridge in the east, its sparkling neon cables casting a reflection in the rippling dark water of the lake. Across the bridge, the upper lake or the Bhojtal, named after the King gives away to the Lower Lake, together known as Bhoj Wetlands. There are many lakes here in Bhopal, criss-crossing the city like blood veins in a human body. In the west stands a 32-feet huge statue — Raja Bhoj standing triumphantly over a pedestal with a sword, overseeing the Bhojtal.
Hold on tight now, my dear, in the history of Bhopal, there came a jarring curve, shocking the whole world. Misery and Death poisoned the blood veins of the city in December 1984. A gas leak incident killing people by the tens of thousands at the night of 2-3 December 1984. A city build and lived-in by kings and queens for thousands of years fell into ruins and became a ghost town.
Most of the people left Bhopal and those who stayed, they inhaled the dangerous air and lived in an eerie atmosphere and when they lay in their beds on those winter-nights they believed every dog in Bhopal was barking at the moon, they listened to it, to the ghosts roaming in the streets of Bhopal and they prayed.
The world has moved on since then, sorrow and terror of 1984 have just become ghosts of the past.
On this lake I once witnessed the most beautiful sunset of my life. It was from this very splendid spot itself, from where now we are now gazing at the radiant Moon hanging in the night sky filled with stars and its silver shadow shimmering in the black rippling water of the lake.
Setting Sun
had swum upon the lake
raging fire beneath the water
it had painted the sky with burning colours
but before it could paint it red
the golden lake washed it at the horizon
candy coloured in the afterglow of sunset
M Jay Dixit is a 21-year-old student and aspiring poet from Bhopal, India.
His poems have appeared in Terror House Magazine and The Drabble. All his work can be found at septemberhearttohearts.wordpress.com. On Twitter @MjayDixit.
