Families like ours from the plains who think ‘plains’
is a naked howling word, a treeless stony word.
We could get killed – casually – and all our reading
(fat books, fragile wisdom squeezed from intersections
of English and feeling, encounters on the page that
shaped, quickened, instigated) would come to nothing.
We could get hurt and it just wouldn’t be meaningful –
our suffering – no blow equal to a sentence of history
but just someone taking graffiti literally,
someone who thinks of giving and receiving pain
in ways far too primal for literature’s kind of cunning.
So families like ours steeped in recollection and
private wit, in shopping bags, records, curtains, letters,
our things – in lieu of, to fill in, give weight to.
And then the thingless families who nevertheless
move solid through the suburban air:
the straw-haired children who build
their make-belief home in a disused jeep trailer,
the bare-footed woman who pulls clothes
from the line and goes inside quickly
when the clouds come down.
Maybe at night the woman’s mouth softens when
she sees the children asleep, their dusty legs
entangled with each other’s on the narrow bed.
Maybe she just sits like that for a long time
in the one-bed empty house, not thinking of much
though the frogs start up a harsh croaking
from the ditches, and drunkards pass by in pairs,
explaining things to each other on the wet road.
The man who runs the sports goods store
that also sells old unopened books and
board games in faded boxes, sits with his
tattooed arms folded in the sun.
He drinks a lot of beer and doesn’t ask
stupid questions. His friends loiter
around small music shops all morning,
in slippers, with their shirt-tails out.
The distant air lights up the furrowed edges
of the hills. Sometimes he wants to describe
the smell of brown oaks ageing in the sun
and bakeries where boys in dirty aprons
lit their ovens in the early summer morning.
But the tattooed man dozes on when
his friends talk and the sun whitens the spines
of pale detective novels and books full of
blond-bodied girls and cross-stitch designs.
When a man is killed in the afternoon,
knifed and left to die with his face down
in a drain, the tattooed fellow has an opinion.
But he shuts his door and sleeps on a wooden
plank behind the counter that smells of cigarettes
and stale tea, till rain cools the streets. All the
furthest sounds of the city wake him up slowly,
till he hears the rain on his own window
and thinks of the dirty water running below
the dead man’s face.
In the evening when the rain lets up for a bit
his friends might return and joke about it.
He switches on the lights at five. People drift in
with damp trouser-cuffs and notice the Chinese
dragons on his arms. They talk and again the cool
air outlines each noisy car and softened tree.
It’s Saturday. He rests his elbows on the cracked
glass counter and watches a girl across the street
scrubbing a couple of neat stone steps till they
gleam in the clear blue evening.
First published in Chandrabhaga (New
Series, Number 1, 2000)
saw waxy red flowers in the pomegranate trees and a man
pegging brilliant white napkins on a clothesline against the wind.
We didn’t live there and those who lived there didn’t care about
the buses passing through at all times of the day, right up against the
mauve beef hanging in its pockets of fat, and the shops with shiny strips
of tobacco showing through shadows, and the new houses and the
old houses where the same sort of people lived, or at least that’s
how we felt, passing through in buses for seventeen years.
But we won’t be doing it anymore – looking out of a window
at a patch of maize in its copper earth, eggs in a wire basket,
hand-painted signs near open doorways that remind us
of sunlit drawings in children’s books about places that grow
sad in their unreality with every passing year, simple signs in
white paint – hangne ngi die tiar, hangne ngi suh jainsem.
We’ll forget what they looked like, the rough golden clapboard shops
with their unwrapped cakes of soap, the windows in houses no
bigger than a man’s handkerchief, and it will be difficult to remember
where each of the cherry trees stood because they flowered so briefly
before lapsing back into their dark green anonymity.
The graveyard on a gentle slope, the fence weighed down with roses!
We’ll want to urgently tell someone, if we ever happen to return,
that we knew this place, passed through in a bus for seventeen years,
but having said that we won’t know what else to say about Mawlai
because we never really got off there or bought things from its shops
or stepped into someone’s boiled-vegetables-smelling house
to watch the street through the netted curtains. We’ll keep quiet then
and try to ignore that sense which is not pain but has pain’s cloudiness
and its regret and its way of going and returning.
My friends from the vast city drive
to a dirty town at the base of a hill
on a weekend at the fag end of summer.
Good, says everyone. Excellent.
They take their luggage up to their rooms,
wash the grit from their hair, humming.
The town is as old as a stony hill and large
as one decrepit neighbourhood. Night fills
it like a slow water thick with crude secrets.
My friends never have to choose between
logic and excitement. They plan the hours,
then walk in the morning to where fifteen
empty buses sing love songs while their
pilots sleep among the vacant seats,
forever condemned to dream of flight.
Precise late morning shadows mingle beneath
the feet of small town tourists: shirtless men
holding baby boys, families the size
of wedding parties, married girls so blank-eyed
they might have left themselves in that other
hot and ochre town where they were born.
My friends slowly turn brown or browner,
full of a careful happiness among waterfalls
and sensuous boatmen who wander,
oar in hand, half in dream and half in hunger.
Good, says everyone. Excellent.
The night smells of fish and old granite cooling.
Of pineapple, garbage and rivers.
My friends drink in their hotel room at night
and
they presume to touch the heart of things.
Places
they see yield their light, their memory,
for
what would these still green trees be
if
they were not trees for them?
And that is the holiday at the base of a hill
in the town with the white-haired waterfalls.
The city is untidy, complex, full of lies
and defeat. My friends will disappear into it,
their car joining twenty others at a murderous
red light. We have seen them for this short while
only because the town was tacky and little,
and they were in their brightest summer clothes.
First published in Chandrabhaga (New
Series, Number 1, 2000)
The deep hills where sunlight moves and dark flies everywhere – in the restaurant
overlooking the green river and ghat where sadhus darn their clothes or sleep;
religion is touched with the mud of poetry: the fresh pink lipstick on the mouth
of the Japanese tourist eating in the restaurant with flies everywhere and striped Coca Cola garden umbrellas, shit on the cobbled beaches and sunlight moving on the water and the hills. Every belief is tentative as long as we eat of this world, the day changes to a forest-green night, the river reflects light, a sadhu from Calcutta in an orange raincoat asks, ‘Do you speak English?’ and then sings a quavering hymn about God coming home in the evening. And traffic is the only heartbeat – the insistent flow of people across bridges, conversations gliding in the dark, the merry-go-round of shops. A sign on a tree says, ‘Instant Enlightenment Cosy Corner’ but all I hear are the multi-coloured noises of an uninterruptible world.
An earlier version first published in
Chandrabhaga (New Series, Number 6, 2002)