Santahar

No, I've never been to Santa Fe.

And I haven't been to Santahar either.

Two hallowed syllables in common,
and a gently curved line
twelve thousand miles long
to link and set them apart.

Santa Fe conjures up
Wild West reveries
on muggy monsoon afternoons,
ghost towns, rattlesnakes,
rustlers, barroom brawls, 
gunfights at sundown, 
raiders on horseback
ambushing a train,
the sheriff's glittering tin star,
all in Cinemascope and Technicolor.

And Santahar?
Not a name to conjure with.
Perhaps my fascination
is just a private vice.

All I know is that Santahar,
a small-town around 
a railway junction,
its braided steel
forged in the furnace
of the Raj, and stained 
with the blood of history,
is just another place
where everyday life goes on,
people get off and get on
and go off in another direction.

Santahar, I sigh,
yielding to the magic 
of "ah", the primal vowel,
repeated three times
between delicately poised consonants,
why, it's only fifty miles,
and I'll need no visa to visit. 
I must go there one of these days,
I say to myself, and lazily
Google it on Youtube

and find an amateur video:
trees, rough roads, jerry-built 
offices, schools, homes,
hospital,  ponds, railway station, 
bazaar, crowds in lungis,
just what one would expect,
with a sentimental tune playing
and an abrupt end 
with the scrawled legend:

"We love it, miss it, 
& wanna die in it…"

Unawares,
a catch
in my throat.

Now I know what Santahar means:
it's any place you want to go back to
so you can die in peace.

Kaiser Haq has received the Sherwin W. Howard poetrt award for 2017 from the journal 'Weber- the Contemporary West" for the poems reprinted here. He is professor of English at the University of Dhaka.