The Ripened Crops Field

The Kharif stands tall and strong

Along the winds of bold and wrong,

A brisk husk here and a straw there,

Grasshopper chirping grow loud and trem,

Ane and Abo busy chasing them

With mosquito nets bound to fail.

As dawn departs into dusk,

The oiled lamp wrestles with matchsticks,

The greasy smell of kerosene lingers,

Making me redolent of those evenings.

Mom drifts into sleep,

While Dad whispers stories of ages,

When ancestors were mystic and sages.

The bamboo floor of the hut

Makes me change sides with a grunt.

The furnace slowly settles down,

Smoke whizzing, curling around.

I glance through the sky,

Where pulsing stars reveal their presence,

And fireflies swirl along the fence.

With drowsy eyes I reach for a blanket—

Only to find myself wrapped

In Ane’s warm lap.

SYNOPSIS

For most of my poems I’m now not writing out summary/synopsis as I want the readers to interpret their own thoughts and meanings out of my poems. But this poem is born from a memory that still lives vividly within me—a fragment of my childhood that continues to glow, like the fireflies I once watched on harvest nights.

During the harvest season, my parents and I used to stay in a small hut (Naķum in our dialect) in the middle of our jhum field as our fields were far away from home, to look after ripened crops from being damaged by wild animals we used to stay there. we used to cultivate small patches of land by slash and burn method during monsoon season (that’s why Rice/paddy is addressed as Kharif in the first stanza). My mom (“Ane”) and dad (“Abo”) would sometimes chase after grasshoppers with mosquito nets (haha there were edible grasshoppers during harvest season that we sometimes munched on during dinner time and also to protect crops from them), though they never quite succeeded to catch them. At dusk, my father would light a kerosene lamp, its smoky, oily smell filling the hut because there was no electricity. That scent still lingers in my memory as something strangely comforting, tied forever to those nights.

After dinner, Ane would often fall asleep early, tired from the day’s work, while Abo would stay awake with me. He would tell me stories—legends of our ancestors, about two brothers named Tani and Taro. Those stories were more than bedtime tales; they were threads that connected me to my roots, to a past where mysticism and wisdom shaped the rhythm of life.

We slept on bamboo beds laid above a small furnace. As the night deepened, the fire would fade and the smoke would curl lazily beneath us. I would shift and turn on the uneven floor, listening to the soft crackle below, while my eyes wandered toward the vast night sky outside the hut. The stars shone brightly, fireflies danced around the fence, and I felt the world alive in quiet whispers.

In those moments, half awake and half dreaming, I would reach for a blanket. But instead of pulling it over myself, I would discover Ane’s arms wrapped around me, her warmth and lap sheltering me more than any blanket ever could.