‘Apples still
come from Kashmir’
Apples still come from Kashmir
pale pink in crates in winter’s market.
Each grew through the year till it absorbed
the valley’s sweetness and undertaste
and reached its final shape and weight.
They are not dead, but come to fruition.
When you bite them, not blood,
but the valley’s clear juice floods your mouth.
Death of a Bust
Written on hearing the news of Chintamoni Kar’s death
This child came of age years ago;
her eyes, once unseeing, became bright
as irises; they looked at the world.
A flicker of a smile moistened the lips.
The plaits fell behind her, a motionless pair.
They were what was most dead about her
but even they had a bright, obedient newness.
She was sixteen; she looked with a sixteen-year-
old’s composure on the world.
She transcended the small town she came from, but
always remained of it, rooted to its maze.
Then, one day, for no discernable reason, life
left her; she stayed where she was, transfixed, but
was clay only; had turned into clay –
the lips were the same, expression identical,
but we saw how easy it was to reduce, how soft
the material was. Let it take place
somewhere outside our vision. She, whom we’d glanced at
infrequently, was removed from our midst. She was clay;
so we opened the earth and returned her there.
For Sunetra Gupta
Here, in this new house in Old Headington,
with its aroma of new fittings,
it slips from your mind, it is easy to forget
where you have kept
it; in the cellar, down the stairs,
in the small, main corridor,
in the sitting room or the floor of the garden?
Small polished object, in a small house in a clean street so far from home,
in your second life,
it begins to ring, makes that muffled but insistent cry,
and, for a period, you are searching for it
in the cellar, going down the stairs in the electric lights,
or discover it in the bathroom,
purring, whining,
or find that you had misplaced it, that it is nearer you in this place
than you had imagined.
Education
As soon as I could dangle my legs
and sit at table
I learnt to use a fork and a spoon at lunchtime
in the proper way.
They hung from my hands
like limp pincers.
Cornflakes, toast, milk;
the shape of these words
on my palate.
And the mud-like stain on the toilet
paper I’d scrape my backside with
and consult daily: dark yellow,
unlike the pale shit I’d seen left
in the toilets by the English boys.
The Bidet
In my cousin’s mansion in California
my uncle and aunt, tourists
saw it separately.
At first, they didn’t know what it was –
neither basin nor commode
neither bowl nor bathtub
they circled round it anxiously
and silently.
Could it be a drinking-water fountain?
Later, when they knew, they tried
it tentatively; the dwarf-
like jet of water sprang ceilingward
and surprised their secret regions.
Amit Chaudhuri
There has been writing for ten days now
unabated. People are anxious, fed up.
There is writing in Paris, in disaffected suburbs,
but also in small towns, and old ones like Lyon.
The writers have been burning cars; they’ve thrown
homemade Molotov cocktails at policemen.
Contrary to initial reports, the writers
belong to several communities: Algerian
and Caribbean, certainly, but also Romanian,
Polish, and even French. Some are incredibly
young: the youngest is thirteen.
They stand edgily on street-corners, hardly
looking at each other. Long-standing neglect
and an absence of both authority and employment
have led to what are now ten nights of writing