Stones Speak
images/ajayan-image7.jpeg
Stony river; oil on canvas painting by Ajayakumar, P. P. (2020)

I am a stone now
Hard and brown
Tended by none
Pushed to a side
No longer a rock
Water flows over me, no more.
Once, the bubbling waters
Played around me
Played with me
Covered me
Hugged me
Hid me from human eye.
I heard the joy
Of childish laughter
As fresh streams
Gushed over me
Reveling in its power
But it could not displace me.
Then, I felt the cold drops
Droppings of the sky
Strong and harsh
Muddy waters of slush
Pushed me at its will
Set me trembling at its will.
I lost my home
Under the cool waters
Broken and torn
I am helpless
The embrace of clear waters
No more.
Left destitute
I call out
No one hears
No one sees
I stand exposed
Dry and parched.

—Jameela Begum

Colophon

Title: Jugalbandi.

Author(s): Jameela Begum and P P Ajayakumar.

First publication details: Sayahna Foundation; Trivandrum, India;; 2021 December.

Deafult language: en, English.

Keywords: Poems and Paintings, Jameela Begum, Ajayakumar P P, Jugalbandi, Open Access Publishing, English, Sayahna Foundation, Free Software, TEI XML, PDF, HTML5, TeX.

Digital Publisher: Sayahna Foundation; JWRA 34, Jagthy; Trivandrum 695014; India.

Date: December 24, 2021.

Credits: The text of the original item is copyrighted to Jameela Begum and the paintings to P P Ajayakumar. The text encoding and editorial notes were created and/or prepared by the Sayahna Foundation and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License (cc by-nc-sa 4.0). Commercial use of the content is prohibited. Any reuse of the material should credit the copyright holders and the Sayahna Foundation and must be shared under the same terms.

Production history: Typesetter: C V Radhakrishnan; Paintings by: P P Ajayakumar; Encoding: C V Radhakrishnan.

Production notes: The entire document processing has been done in a computer running gnu/linux operating system and TeX and friends. The pdf has been generated using XeLaTeX from TeXLive distribution 2021 using Ithal, an online framework for text formatting. The tei (p5) encoded xml has been generated from the same LaTeX sources using LuaLaTeX. html version has been generated from the xml using xslt stylesheet (en-tei-html.xsl) developed by CV Radhakrkishnan in combination with the free home edition of Saxon processor for xslt v. 10.5.

Fonts: The basefont used in pdf and html versions is Cormorant Garamond developed by Christian Thalmann, a type designer based in Zurich, Switzerland. The title and headings are with Cormorant sc; the catchline and the footer make use of Cormorant Upright developed by the same designer.

Web site: Maintained by KV Rajeesh.

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