A door leading to another door, but where? An  inner door which we need to open, the inner door of the mind and heart. Opening the door, you can see the night bedecked with the gem-like twinkles of stars. How to keep awake dreaming about love, thinking about the realization of the Unknown Mystical Visitor soothing the dreams of mystical communion?

It is good luck that I have found some of the poems by A.F. Khabardar (1881-1953) after my long search at last. But after reading him, I find how casual we are in prescribing the poems of the pre-independence time poets. There were poets before Nissim Ezekiel and others, but we know them not.  We kind of take it for granted that Indian poetry in English developed after independence and this too is not because they started to publish in the 1950’s and the 1960’s and how could it be that they became famous, stalwarts of poetry since they started to.  

Self-published books or booklets of Indian verse writers in English were not available. Neither the book shops sold them, nor the publishers liked to publish. Even Tagore was under our scrutiny for to be read in our English courses of studies which the conventional universities liked not to include in as we go on talking about now-a-days.  Some considered him still a Bengali poet. But what pains me most is this Tagore was brought out, but they were not, Aurobindo was, but Manmohan Ghose was not. 

Whatever is my acumen or reverie, let us be with Khabardar’s The Inner Door. He was an excellent poet writing in Gujarati, English and Marathi. The inner door is but a motif which the poet has used. Tagore too talks of the knocking of the inner door of the mind as the main purpose of education which but is jnan, knowledge, the knowledge of the self.

What is excellent in him is his superb swaying, glide that he clutches along with his fleeting poetic imagery. There is beauty in his language and description. How does he keep decorating?

The Inner Door is one such poem which can overshadow Jayanta Mahapatra’s door imagery and motifs, the handiwork crafted over the door planks, carved and chiseled.

To open the door of the mind and heart is the main crux of the poem. How to open it as for to revel into the mysteries of life and the world? How does one door lead to another? How the idea of love and its dreams? For whom does it wait for the heart and the soul? Where the Heart of hearts, the Soul of souls? The waiting and restless waking all through the night leads to the innermost recesses. Finally, he finds himself awakened into a strange widening and broadening of the inner self held with mystical experiences.

It is love which takes to there. It is the mystical experience of it which but leads unto. Love is the key to all which can but lead to illumination. A sonnet, it really strikes us with its thought and imagery.

I thought and thought of thee: the day-long hours
Crept slowly to the gathering evening’s glow;
And Venus with her child-star, like lost powers,
The twilight-blooming West repair’d below.
 
I gazed and gazed through all the skiey deep
Till Night before me stood a growing gleam;
And, though the sky was moonless, still my sleep
Was there illumined by a dawning dream.    
 
As though the soulward door of my dull sight
Were open’d  by  a passing angel’s hand,
I saw thy soothing face before me stand
 
Wafted on Love’s all-spanning dream-lit flight,
And found in pride I loved thee not in vain,
Till pitiless Morn that door closed once again!