Translated by the author
With the cutting edge
As I finished translating a retelling of a translation of a retelling from Sanskrit to Bengali, then to English, then to Russian— the Ramayana for children— they say it's four times longer than the Iliad— I sometimes tried to imagine how many modern airplane hangars the epic armor would occupy— staying in a city of white gold by the waters of Homer’s wine-dark sea, in the hospitable corner of this desolate, as they say, cosmos, out of which, they say, Rama and Ravana received all their deadly astras and chakras, just a few days before the celebration of the next anniversary in memory of the great martyr Demetrius, who fought with whatever God sent him, I listen to the deadly fighter jets flying back and forth over the city of white gold, chiseled with the cutting edge of technology, and think of all those who hear this daily in cities once made of different golds, and I also think about how fighter pilots are always, they say, all without exception as handsome as Rama, as Achilles, and try to picture a scruffy, acne-pocked, hangnail-bitten fighter pilot. And then I imagined a bomber pilot. There’s still such a profession in the world. Valmiki, do you hear?