A tree outside the district hospital. The patient had no idea what the tree was called, or what tree was like in its youth, its lifeworld during spring, the launch of its leaves. Neither did the patient have any knowledge of what exactly ailed him. He did know the name of his village. One day a girl asked me if I had noticed the strangeness of the tree outside the hospital—I said I had. We were now participants in this shared vision. I had always wanted to believe that the tree was either a folly or an incursion upon an already busy street. The girl’s question, though, had made me delay my thoughts on the matter, if only by a few days.
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Lack of lubrication. Things were starting to grate against other things. Like my mother’s knee cap. Between every first and second thing, there was a lack of a third. An abrasive friction could be felt in the blink of an eye. People were fixated. Everyone walked around with a deep, compulsive gaze. A dry gaze bereft of blinking. Some thought the condition was treatable. When the element resting between the eyelid and the eye finally disappeared, it became impossible to cry, to shed a tear. The lack of tears got everyone worked up. Dams, crocodiles, and agents found themselves equally in this mess. A doctor sat next to the strangeness of the tree and started handing out prescriptions for lubrication. The cure was called: Just Tears.
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With much gusto, I started selling this new cure for weeping.
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Crying helps with the deficiency of lubrication. I started yearning for a cry. Like dams, crocs, and agents. I started wishing I was a dam. Bhakra Nangal, Hirakund, or Rihand. If I were a young dam in Nehru’s time, I would have been celebrated as a national treasure. My construction would have piqued national interest. I would have been fortnightly inspected by Pant-ji, and by Pandit-ji himself each month. I would have displaced hundreds of human lives, given shelter to an equal number of marine lives, and I would not have needed Just Tears to shed a tear for those displaced. An endless lubrication. Something would have transpired between myself, and those displaced by me. Within me, I would have carried large amounts of water, large amounts of electricity, numerous jobs, numerous gates, abundant diligence, abundant trade unions, frequent strikes, frequent arrests, and a great deal of disobedience.
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I could not be a dam, there were no funfairs mounted on my cremation site, I started working at the counter of the pharmacy and had almost started acknowledging the tree’s strangeness as a folly, an intrusion onto the busy street, almost, until the girl asked me if it weren’t true that all that is behind is forward and all that is forward is behind, instead of replying I thought to myself, life is extremely Vinod Kumar Shukla, and then immediately concluded that if Vinod Kumar Shukla was passing by, instead of saying I am leaving, he would have said I am approaching, and then, I thought to myself, if the opportunity ever presented itself, I would learn something from Vinod Kumar Shukla, something other than just the craft of syntax, and soon thereafter I discovered life to be quite less Vinod Kumar Shukla.
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Lubrication, like Vinod Kumar Shukla, was in deficiency. Things were grating against other things. A tense friction. Rusty manuscripts were breaking down after rubbing against each other. The manuscript of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi’s Saraswati was in tatters. The files of Bhartendu’s Kavitavardhani Sabha and Harishchandra Chandrika had already been done and dusted. Acharya Ramchandra Shukl-edited Hindi Shabda Sagar had been illegally pawned off by the caretakers of the ‘Sabha’ to websites such as ‘Department of Education’, and the US-based ‘South Asian Dictionaries’. Thus, the dictionary was no longer in India but in the US. But as is true for all kinds of Americanisation, there is some pleasure to be derived from this displacement, i.e., Shukl’s rare dictionary can now be accessed on the internet at almost no cost. Even though the dictionary has not been updated in the last fifty years, nor will it, but at least it can be seen and examined. There is another pleasurable dimension to the whole exercise. Between the first and the second there is a third element. Between us and the Hindi dictionary is America itself. And what a lubricant America is!
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Note: Just Tears Eye Drop is a lubricant. It works similarly to natural tears and provides temporary relief from burning and discomfort due to dryness of the eye
Poet-critic-translator-Director Choreographer Vyomesh Shukla was born in 1980, in Banaras. He has translated the works of Noam Chomsky, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said and also the works of Mahasweta Devi and K. Satchidanandan. Two books of poetry by him are published. He received the ‘Ankur Mishra Memorial Award’ in 2008 and the ‘Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Memorial Award’ in 2009 for poetry, ‘Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad, Kolkata’s Jan Kalyan Samman’ for cultural work. Recently, he has been given the ‘Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar’ of the Sangeet Natak Akademi for theatre direction.
Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, currently based in Oxford. His debut collection, Glitchwork (the87 press), comes out in Spring, 2026. Further details on his work can be found here.