Her Cremation Did Not Face the Rising Sun

One year after

Piari was burned

my father

lay shaking with fever in his straw bed, the heat

rubbing against his skin

like bristling tiger hair. He

spoke strange

vowels. Bugs crawled

over his chest, black and green

Holy men came to the house,

laid their hands on him. Their eyes

rolled back. My grandmother dropped

coins in to their white beards, dirty

tunic bibs

Piari’s spirit is fevered, they told her

Her Cremation did not face the rising sun, the ashes

backward in the earth, so now

she cannot rest

In my dreams I have seen her

beyond the wall

where they burned her

pulling at singed hair, wiping

the green stains from her mouth, so scared

She slips in

to my father’s chest and hides there

cleans the poison still on her tongue

with his blood

Men from the village exhumed the entire

patch of ground that had mixed

with her remains. Turned it

like a straw mattress and set it down again

seamless in the earth. My grandmother

sat cross-legged in her veils, my father

laid out across her lap

and watched the sun rise

I tried to find India in its Poets

I wanted to see a picture of the Punjab

in words, to smell the wood doorsteps

covered with hay

and wild yellow chrysanthemums, the very same

my grandmother threw her wash water on

when she was just a young woman

Souza

Jussawalla

Ramanujan

I tried to find a picture in words

Old stories – Sidhartha, Vishnu, The Black Kali

all dusty statues, huge toes and frozen hair

sandalwood arms

And new stories – Grocery chain stores, airports, catbells and cars

none in between

none that inhabit the space it takes

a yellow flower to grow up around a wood doorstep

I tried to find India in its poets

but I couldn’t

they are too busy

finding themselves

I wanted to see a mango tree

in the center of a field, men

melting sugar beneath it, to smell

the cane bake, iron pot flake

the wooden paddles stirring. I looked

for a word that would tell me

the color of shade

the size of a mango tree leaf, and the length

of its shadow at noon. A word

that would show me the black faces of monkeys

paws outstretched gripping a red fruit. What

do I want with airports, catbells and cars?

I tried to find India in its poets

but they are too busy finding Canada

in me

I’ve never seen her

my grandmother

chrysanthemums the color of lemon rind

around the hem of her dress

tossing the wash water

out of the door

I looked for a Poet to tell me

how she looked then

when her cheeks were smooth like warm sugar syrup

lips red as mangos

how did she look

Piari’s Cremation

Aaj: I was too young when she died

but I remember they always

told you not to look

too hard at the fire, or

the souls of the burning dead would enter

through your eyes

Piara: I must’ve seen her

burning at the cremation site

I can’t remember but I must’ve

they always made you watch

that kind of thing

Untitled

A farmer saw Piari often on the outskirts of the mango grove weeks after she had died. The first time he glimpsed her it was still monsoon, the rain too heavy for his eyes to navigate the drops; he half thought she was a lost bull calf. He swung his head back and forth like a peacock in heat, held his hands in front of him as though he could part the storm. He rode his buffalo toward her blurred image and it was afraid to go.

It was months later that he bolted into the village, eyes so strange it was like they had melted from staring at intense heat, so that the colours began to run, brown into white. He’d been gone for three nights, telling his wife he would sleep under the sky now that the rains had passed. When he came running, Piara and Aaj were walking the wall by the pond. They watched him get closer, his legs kicking up in the tall grass, red tunic sliding off of his shoulders. A piece of iron chain in his hand, swinging. They watched for the thing that must be chasing him to appear – the flash of a long tooth, the wink of a stripe. A forked tongue.

He came to them screaming, rousing sleeping cows. He described her face, her throat swollen with poison, peeking out from around a mango tree. Her eyes beckoning. She curls on my chest in the night, he howled, I wake up and cannot get a breath. It is like so many stones.

The village seers grasped him by the arms, dragged him to Piari’s grave. They meant to beat him with the iron chain to loose her spirit. It is no good, he said. I have already beaten myself. They lifted off his shirt to see the blood, pooling in the link marks on his back. He stayed there, writhing on her grave through the night. Sometimes he called her name, like a lover’s.

The Matter Between Animal and Machine Is

Once a hunter killed a goat and watched

the guts come out, saw the concrete cracks

on the floor of his garage grab at the gore

Puddles move, blood running

like children racing out

to the road. Alarmed

the police arrived to intervene

You can’t kill a goat, not at home

In India, my father never saw

a plane till he was ten. Imagine

if at birth your eyes were bound with black tape

and then at ten you tore it off and saw:

the enormous lightning beast leaping

through distance, white animal growing

with each blink. “Have you ever heard

a tiger as it kills?” says my father

“It is exactly the sound that a plane

makes when it lands.” We crept in to its belly

felt the rumblings as it digested us

Piara:

After only a week of Canada

your grandfather bought a goat

and slaughtered it in the garage while neighbors

mowed their lawns

The belly

of the great white tiger hanging over him

skyless

Two Stories of Mudfish

Aaj:

In the pond by the mango grove were mudfish, slick and dark, long as my arm. We spent the afternoons down there trying to catch one, brown clouds of silt under our kicking legs. That was before I could touch the bottom, when Piara would dive down and come back clutching handfuls of pond weed, swearing he had touched a fin, held a tail. I wouldn’t put my face in then, not even when Piari threw a thin glass bangle in to the water and told me to get it back; I watched dumbly while it slipped below the surface, shining and green

After, when she died, I went back. Dove in again and again, my fingers searching through the thick muck, fish touching me from all around. I found marbles, orange peels, the bones of a dog. Her bracelet was gone, stuck in the belly of a fish or buried too deep

Piara:

Once when I was sick Aaj brought a fish in the house, one of the ones from the pond with the back fins and long whiskers. I remember him standing in the doorway of the bedroom, brown water dripping from his hair, his shorts. Making a big puddle on the floor. He had it tight in both hands, holding it up like a sword for me to see, his eyes bright and serious. Ec tdar orna, Piara, I got one

My mother turned to look and dropped her bowl full of yogurt, screamed so loud that Auntie came running down from the tandoor on the roof. I remember the two of them squealing, feet stamping around like in a dance, jewelry flashing, their hands wild. And Aaj’s laugh, the sound of it rushing through the house like cool water

soothing my fever