Keki Daruwala

Curfew in a Riot-torn City

Blood and fog
are over half the town
and curfew stamps across the empty street.

A thinning drizzle
has smeared the walls,
giving moss and fungus a membrane of bile.
Your headlights rake the walls,
barracuda-eyes
searching for prey
among nocturnal glooms
gears shift and change with the streets.
Wild eyes track you
from behind shuttered doors :
fish-eyes following you from a reef crack.

The starch on your khaki back
turns soggy; the feel of things is queer.
You wish to forget it all,
the riot, the town, the people:
that mass of liquefied flesh
seething in fear.

The town is tumour-growth,
mud-brick and concrete,
houses back to back, streets
back to front, walls bulging
towards each other in a half-embrace.
Lanes branch tentacular, you prowl,
an octopus on its beat.

At the crack of dawn
you enter the reef.
Above, a ledge of black light
turns its overhanging limbs
towards the first embryonic fingers of the sun.
A scurry of footsteps,
a jungle of walls interchanging shadows
announce that dawn has come.

A gunshot scatters
the silence and the birds.
You rush there, pistol cocked,
search the lanes and scan the walls for blood. Weak with relief you praise the Lord,
the bullet hasn't claimed a corpse.

You know what waits on the rooftops,
brickbats, soda bottles
and acid bulbs.
‘Get on to the roofs!' you shout.
Lanes swarm with khaki;
reluctantly they move up over crooked stairs.
No one wants acid running down his face,
and spend a lifetime
trafficking
with bizarre mirrors.

Night slips gingerly along the cleaver's edge
in butcher-street. Red meat hooked to the cambrel,
red meat hanging on the jowls.
Strange, death and curfew have not stampeded here.
Behind the forehead is the pit your fear.
They are the sick tribe, if they lose their heads
others will lose theirs.
Theme for a nightmare:
carting headless bodies in a burning van.

Two days have passed
without turning up a corpse.
Knuckles return to their original brown;
tomorrow you may come out with a press communiqué!
But the war has spiralled out.
Two men climb into a rickshaw
and drive into the dusk
where the town
dwindles into mudhouse and machan
over maize-fields. They get down,
one pins the rickshaw-puller's arms behind him,
the other takes a brick
and excavates his brains.

Trailing the siren comes the iron law;
you clamp the curfew on the outskirts now,
on the outer fringe,
the outward striae of this whorl of madness.

What the hell is it, you wonder;
Curfew or contagion?

Easy and Difficult Animals
( To Khurshid )

You have no problems such as mine.
You do not cower
from your own thoughts.
It doesn't frighten you
the iron egde awaking from its rust
the crawl of oxidised dreams
in lonely hours.

Where do you get your insights from
and your simple words?
Teaching our daughter that day you said
some dreams are animals
some dreams are birds.

The moonface was either
turned towards light
or away from it
dark fruit, incandescent fruit.
Your distinctions were a knife
that went cutting to the root.
You divided in two
this animal delirium that we call ‘life'
into ‘easy animals', ‘difficult animals'.
All that moved on legs
flew on wings
crawled on the belly
inhaled through fins
hedgehog and weasel and polecat
all that went to the taxidermist
marmot and buzzard and bat
you lumped together as ‘easy animals'.
And pitched against this menagerie
one solitary cry
the one ‘difficult animal'
that was I.

The Round of the Seasons
( In the footsteps of Abhinanda and Yogeswara )

Vasanta ( Spring )

I tire of superstitions:
the asoka blossoms only
at the touch of the beloved's feet;
the bakula must be splashed
with rinsed wine from her mouth;
the tilaka must be hugged
and the amaranth should get a glance from her
before the leaf turns green
or the petals colour.

I quicken into flower
at the memory of your touch.

2

I is the season for illusions:
night mists turn to dawn haze,
frost becomes dew, though sharp.
The night-jar still coughs.
The black-bird is heard sometimes
but she hasn't been seen.
The scent of the mango-blossom is there
but not the mango-blossom.
A bird alights on the leafing lotus bed
thinking it is an island.
Bathing on the ghats,
shawled in mist, she finds
bees moving towards her breast-tips.

Grishma (Summer)

Kama, in this torrid simmer
Let some things remain cool:
her eyes, reflecting the waters,
the smell of jasmine in her hair,
her body dripping with the cold river
as she steps out on the ghats.
If you need tapers at your altar, Kama,
let her ardour burn.
Let thoughts burn within the cool forehead.
Let the cheeks be cold
but the tongue within all fire.

2

From the mountain's shoulder to its groin,
from nether regions
to the lip of the escarpment,
forest fires rage simultaneously.
Bark and bud crackle and rain down as ash.
The trapped antelope does not know where to run
as the four directions, wrapped in smoke,
converge on him.
Such is my fate, beloved,
in the forest of your limbs,
under the black rain of your hair.

Varsha (The Rains)

The rain gods betrayed us last night.
The thunder woke her parents,
lightning showed her stealing from my door.
Such a commotion there was
that despite disturbance in the skies
I heard wooden doors unfastened
on neighbours' doors,
and saw women peeping out.
The rain has stopped today
but the village drips with her escapade.

2

They are all there,
the paddy-straw covered by a cotton rug,
the white smoke-tendril
uncoiling from an incense stick,
the air outside sharp with drizzle,
the night sharp with the moorhen's joyous cries.
Only my flank is empty,
only she isn't there.

Sharada (Autumn)

Shrawan has gone with its singed
smell of lightning,
and the jasmine flowers
are not starred upon the trees
but are a crescent upon her dried hair.
Is lightning necessary
for those smitten by lover's lightning?
Is rain essential
for those wet with each other?

2

The water-lily bleached
under a septembral sun.
The paddy-straw crackling
under the fires of their love.
A bangle breaks as her arms
pummel his back.
Who says lovers must move
only to the beat of rain?

Hemanta (Early Winter)

It is a season for departures:
the clouds have gone
like wild geese from the lake.
Lightning stirs now
Only in Yogeswara's verses;
And the flood waters have left with the boatmen.
Yet it is a season for arrivals:
the lover comes to your door
like the night heron.

2

She, who caught her
stealing back at first light,
said, ‘there is mustard-flower
on your back, be careful,
it is getting to be winter.
You may catch cold.
The peasants who spend their nights
with scarecrows in the fields
are already warming their hands
on chaff fires.'
‘You don't know the fires of our love',
she answered.
‘For us it is still shrawan.'

Sisira (Late Winter)

There was some coming and going
on the machhan that night
during his vigil over sugarcane.
The wooden platform,
spread over a fieldbreak,
creaked on, disturbing
the night owl on his perch
and the lapwing in its shrill concentrics.
He never shouted even once,
but wild boar kept away
from the phalanxed cane
while the stars wheeled round them.
His envious friends said later
that the wild boar never came because
his machaan creaked through the night
with their love-making.

2

There was no din in the guava grove
except at first light when parrots
raised a curve-billed cacophony
over half-bitten fruit.
He still slept soundly. The rope
tied to a can perched on a tree fork
lay in his hand, gently clutched,
as if it were a braid of her hair,
the one that had slipped from his string bed
light as a dawn breeze,
the colours of the east
streaking across her love-bitten face.