curls whitely around my head, singing
of a distant field
called Kurukshetra. I lift my hand to it.
Smell of jacaranda. Thorn of the blackwood tree.
What do you see, Arjun?
Only the bird’s eye.
I release the string. And am flung
forward. Time parts for me as water.
Blood. Bone. Wet earth. I am a fragment of sunlight
on a speeding metal tip. But do not think me gone.
When you least expect it. I will reappear
as lightning
into your innocent future.
Note
Arjun: prince-hero and fabled archer of the Mahabharata. Persecuted and cheated of their inheritance by their cousins, he and his brothers were forced to fight and kill them in the battle of Kurukshetra.
What do you see? Early in their training, Drona, the teacher of all the princes, asked them to hit a target, a bird’s eye. Just before each prince shot his arrow, he asked him what he saw. All except Arjun described the entire landscape—sky, tree, leaves, bird, etc.—and, due to their lack of focus, failed to hit the target.
Cutting the Sun
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #16
The sun-face looms over me, gigantic-hot, smelling
of iron. Its rays striated,
rasp-red and muscled as the tongues
of iguanas. They are trying to lick away
my name. But I
am not afraid. I hold in my hands
(where did I get them)
enormous blue scissors that are
just the color of sky. I bring
the blades together, like
a song. The rays fall around me
curling a bit, like dried carrot peel. A far sound
in the air—fire
or rain? And when I’ve cut
all the way to the center of the sun
I see
flowers, flowers, flowers.
Indigo
Bengal, 1779-1859
The fields flame with it, endless, blue
as cobra poison. It has entered our blood
and pulses up our veins
like night. There is no other color.
The planter’s whip
splits open the flesh of our faces,
a blue liquid light trickles
through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs
when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyes
refuse to forget where once the rice
parted the earth’s moist skin
and pushed up reed by reed,
green, then rippled gold
like the Arhiyal’s waves. Stitched
into our eyelids, the broken dark,
the torches of the planter’s men, fire
walling like a tidal wave
over our huts, ripe charred grain
that smelled like flesh. And the wind
screaming in the voices of women
dragged to the plantation,
feet, hair, torn breasts.
In the worksheds, we dip our hands,
their violent forever blue,
in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests
for the East India Company.
Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains.
After that night
many of the women killed themselves.
Drowning was the easiest.
Sometimes the Arhiyal gave us back
the naked, swollen bodies, the faces
eaten by fish. We hold on
to red, the color of their saris,
the marriage mark on their foreheads,
we hold it carefully inside
our blue skulls, like a man
in the cold Paush night
holds in his cupped palms a spark,
its welcome scorch,
feeds it his foggy breath till he can set it down
in the right place,
to blaze up and burst
like the hot heart of a star
over the whole horizon,
a burning so beautiful you want it
to never end.
Note
Paush: name of a winter month in the Bengali calendar
The planting of indigo was forced on the farmers of Bengal, India, by the British, who exported it as a cash crop for almost a hundred years until the peasant uprising of I860, when the plantations were destroyed.
Train
Every evening between six and seven I go to Sialdah Station. No one knows about this. Not even my wife, for how would I explain it to her? It isn’t as though anybody ever comes to visit me. Nor do I travel anywhere. And if I told her that it was a good way of avoiding the rush-hour buses, she would know right away, as she always does, that I was lying.
I never go all the way inside where you need a platform ticket. A platform ticket costs two rupees, and she keeps track of every paisa of my salary. What choice do I have, she says. You earn like a beggar but want to spend like a maharajah. If it wasn’t for me, the children would starve. But it doesn’t matter because from behind the iron railings I can still see and hear it all: coolies in red uniforms and polished brass armlets carrying enormous khaki hold-alls on their heads; vendors pushing wooden carts stacked with everything from yellow mausambi fruit to the latest film magazines with Amitabha on the cover; newspaper boys crying Amrita Bajaar, Amrita Bajaar; the departure announcements, thick with static; the tolling of the station clock whose minute-hand moves in slow heavy jerks. And then suddenly everything is drowned in the shriek of an incoming train.
This is my favorite moment, when a train pulls slowly into the station, the engine’s black cylinder sweating, the wheels’ chugging rhythm cut off by the hiss of brakes. The smoke billows out one last time over the waiting faces on the platform. A whistle shrills, the doors open, and a man in dark glasses swings down from the first class compartment, a Pan Am flight bag slung casually from his shoulder. Someone in a sun-colored rayon shirt helps a laughing young woman down the steps, his hand on her bare upper arm. Her salwar-kameez is printed with orange butterflies that flutter as the couple races towards the gates. The clock strikes seven. A coolie shoves past me, swearing. A spat-out wad of betel leaf stains my pant leg. I remember that just before I left my wife called down the stairs, Do you think you can keep your head out of the clouds long enough today to not forget the baby’s cough mixture?
At night I lie in the airless bedroom that smells of diapers and her hair oil. If I stretch out my hand. I will encounter the dark mound of her body. She is waiting. If I pull her to me, she will hiss, Stop it, you’ll wake the children, but I know her blouse is unbuttoned, her sari loosened and ready. The streetlight has thrown the shadow of the window-bars against the peeling walls. They look a little like railroad ties. I lie chewing the inside of my cheek, the salt taste of blood, to hold down the feeling that spirals in my chest like water being sucked down a drain. If I stay very still, surely her breath will slow into sleep. Somewhere the night trains are flying across glistening tracks, their headlights spearing the dark. And suddenly it comes to me again, that pounding hot magic smell of iron and steam and speed. I remember that tomorrow evening the Pathankot Express arrives at 6:45, and I don’t mind too much when my wife turns and puts a damp arm over me.
Moving Pictures
Poems Inspired by Indian Films
The Rat Trap
To Mrinal Sen, on Seeing Bhuvan Shome
The Tea Boy
I, Manju
The Makers of Chili Paste
The Widow at Dawn
The Rat Trap
After Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Elippathayam
At night we sleep with the windows bolted
in spite of the sweat,
in the women’s quarter, elder sister and I.
The old house settles on my chest
like the grinding stone she uses each day
to make chili paste. My pale hand
s
burn my body.
Outside I can hear the Kaju trees
growing, green poison, toward the house.
Today, again, brother refused an offer
for elder sister’s marriage: Not good enough
for our family name.
Now from the main room, he frog-snores,
while night leaches the black from her hair,
cracks open the edges of her eyes.
I wait for the rat. In the passage
the coconut sliver I hooked into the trap
is a thin white smile, moon
to my dark nights. Soon, the clatter
of the wooden slat falling, the shrill squeaks,
the frantic skittering claws. Then silence.
In the morning, the huge eyes, glint-black,
will watch me as I carry the cage
through palms whose jagged leaves
splinter the sky.
Monsoon mud sucks at my feet. The pink
hairless tail twitches. The green pond
closes over my wrist.
The cage convulses, quiets.
A few bubbles, stillness. I know how it is.
I open the trapdoor. The limp brown body
thuds onto the ash heap
next to the others. The red ants swarm.
I cannot stop looking.
After bath, in front of the great gilt mirror,
Grandmother’s wedding dowry,
elder sister combs the wet dark down my back.
I press on my forehead, for luck,
vermillion paste like a coin of blood.
Check my white teeth.
They look smaller, sharper, rodent-honed.
Our eyes meet, glint-black, in the smoky mirror.
Red ants swarm up my spine.
To Mrinal Sen, on Seeing Bhuvan Shome
The man wanted to shoot birds, as men have done
from time to time. So you brought him
to the heart of the land.
In rural Gujarat
you faced him with the silver flight
of wild ducks across dunes
vast beyond human understanding.
The rush of their beating wings took his breath
so that he could not pull the trigger—
almost.
In this world of sand, it is easy
to lose ourselves. All we need
is to lie down, let the grains sift their gritty silk
like childhood promises through our hair.
Wrinkle our eyes against the wind’s
unpredictabilities. Look how the clouds
progress across the sky
with endless amoeba movements. Trust. Sooner
or later the birds will come.
Here where always beyond the last dune rises another
so we wonder, despairing, will we ever
reach the sea,
time is a sudden feathered flash
falling in midair,
the sharp red thread of its cry
cut off by the dull thud
of body hitting ground.
It stuns us, that hard, blunted sound. No one said
it would be like this. The weight of sand
settles itself around our ankles like a chain.
We squeeze our eyes to will away
that limp whiteness, that twitching. But
it lies there, waiting, relentless.
Like Bhuvan Shome
we must finally lumber
towards those frantic eyes. Must hold
in our hands that terrified moistness, its meaning,
must wonder
what we should do, for the rest of our lives,
with this bird we hunted down.
The Tea Boy
After Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!
All day I carry glasses of tea
down streets full of holes or feet
waiting to trip me. Above summer is singeing
the feathers of black pigeons
that circle and circle. Gopi carries a knife
with a twisted snake handle.
Each time a glass breaks
Chacha cuts my pay.
Dark windows.
Women with satin eyes calling me. The tea
thick and sweet in its rippling brown skin.
Downstairs pimps play cards
all day. I take a sip from each glass
when no one is watching.
Broken-horned cow, chewing garbage
in the alley where we sleep.
Rain soaks my yellow shirt, turns the tea to salt.
The cinnamon smell
of women’s brown bodies.
When you can’t stand any more
the pavement is soft enough.
I am hiding my money behind a loose brick
in the bridge-wall.
First thing to learn: melt into pavement
when you hear
police vans.
Sometimes my skin
doesn’t want
to hold in all these bones.
Chillum sells hashish
to tourists by India Gate.
It pulls you out of your body, flings you
into the sun. The night Gopi mugged the old man
he bought us all
parathas at Bansi’s Corner Cafe.
Footsteps follow me, a muffled cough.
My soles are turning to stone. I must
lie down. The night-dust
is warm as Shiva’s ashes.
When I have five hundred rupees
I can go back
to my mother in Bijapur.
Till I fall asleep I watch
that fierce glistening,
the sky full of scars.
I, Manju
After Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!
I
The bed smells of crushed jasmine,
my mother’s hair, the bodies
of strange men.
All day she lies against the pillow’s
red velvet. Smoke rings fly up,
perfect ovals from her shining mouth.
Sometimes she tells me
shadow-stories, butterfly fingers
held against the light.
On the panes, silver snakes of rain.
The curtains flap their wild wet wings.
My friend the tea boy brings us
sweet steaming chai from the shop below.
She lets me drink from her glass,
wipes the wet from his hair.
Turns up the radio. A song
spills into us.
She claps in time and laughs.
We dance and dance around the bed
as though the rainbow music
will never end.
II
From the balcony, my waiting
probes the swollen night.
Like light down a tunnel
she disappears into the room,
each time with a different man.
My fingers squeeze the rails
till rust scars the palms. The door shuts.
The curtains shiver with the silhouettes.
My nails are cat-claws
on the panes. Tinkle of glass, a sharp curse,
thick men-sounds like falling.
After a long time my feet find the way
to the street-children.
They let me lie with them on newspaper beds,
do not ask why. My face tight
against the tea boy’s cool brown spine. My arms.
I, Manju.
All the dark
burns with the small animal sounds
from my mother’s throat.
The Makers of Chili Paste
After Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala
The old fort on the hill
is now a chili factory
and in it, we the women,
saris tied over nose and mouth
to keep out the burning.
On the
bare brown ground
the chilies are fierce hills
pushing into the sky’s blue. Their scarlet
sears our sleep.
We pound them into powder
red-acrid as the mark
on our foreheads.
All day the great wood pestles
rise and fall,
rise and fall,
our heartbeat. Red
spurts into air, flecks our arms
like grains of dry blood. The color
will never leave our skins.
We are not like the others in the village below,
glancing bright black at men
when they go to the well for water.
Our red hands burn like lanterns
through our solitary nights.
We will never lie breathless
under the weight of thrusting men.
give birth to bloodstained children.
We are the makers of chili paste.
Through our fingers the mustard oil seeps
a heavy, melted gold. In it
chili flecks swirl and drown.
We mix in secret spices,
magic herbs,
seal it in glowing jars
to send throughout the land.
All who taste our chilies
must dream of us,
women with eyes like rubies,
hair like meteor showers.
In their sleep forever our breath will blaze
like hills of chilies
against a falling sun.
The Widow at Dawn
After Satyajit Ray’s Ghare-Baire