Georges Seurat, A Riverbank
Borders
Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved…
Poetry cannot have meaning unless it
traverses the lines dividing you from me.
There is a muteness there of all the
things we could not say:
a sky half-filled with
constellations we cannot name.
So, I made a home in your body
believing that, if I did, I would
not have to contend with that
which shows you for you and me for me.
I was wrong.
Lapalang means a foreign country
to which I cannot belong,
no matter how hard I try.
Mei tells me its hurt is ancient,
its blood seeping past the familiarities
of home, nation, world;
a sound to which my ears
are unaccustomed. A turn of phrase.
It slices the night, she says, with
a knife meant to wound, if not kill.
I know
it fills cities with graffiti
that skewer even indifferent clouds.
Mei also says it inhabits a form marked by what
it ought to have left behind:
your affinity for cold, for instance,
and mine for heat,
you for you, me for me;
so that the lines may fall, jagged,
where they must
and I quote Rushdie for comfort
when they eviscerate
the air from which my poetry bleeds.
Leaving
When we leave this city,
there will be no light
from above to make us go blind—
there is no saviour for
abandoned boats on the River
Tapti, stranded during summer.
The lovers along Dumas Road
know the wretchedness of parting.
They say a prayer on arrival.
And doesn’t this feel
a little bit like love—
when one picks at the wound
to arrive at what remains?
At Amar Tiffin House
the kebabs smell
sickeningly of home.
The Valley
Here, in this city of lakes, the waters
wash a distant memory to shore: you
balancing between the hate of the familiar
and love of strangers. It is swimming
of a kind because there are no fish to greet you
like the ones the fishermen carry on their boats.
They have company you cannot keep.
It is Elah but also not quite when you
have already arrived, as it were, to gaze
upon children who barely grow up
to become adults. Eight died that week.
You notice old men in pherans
at the market and you wonder if
they ever felt lucky to be on this side
of the bridge and not the
other side with eyes closed.
You walk the streets no earlier than 8.00
and no later than 11 hours from then.
Happy schoolchildren fill a battered Maruti
with the scent of ink and chalk-coloured dreams.
A man behind the counter hands you
your packet of cigarettes. You smile your thanks.
There are firs in the garden to
keep you from peering too closely
through the windows of homes.
Their exposed bricks remind you of
of tents in a snowstorm.
You remember Munnu from
the deer story, the one you clutched
to your heart on your way here.
You delude yourself into thinking that
this cannot be history. It is only a graphic novel.
Schizophrenic
The thing about it is you’re never prepared.
One: remain calm when you hear the noise of the ocean
turn off the fan just to be sure,
words don’t float on a page.
Massage your body, gently
you are not air, you are not bird
be sure that you know this when
two: something tells you you’ve bungled
even when your life depended on it.
Don’t compare yourself to Scheherazade
remember, you’ve already died a thousand times
shivering in the last throes as you do now
without a language and tongue, a past.
Three: the lead in your brain isn’t actual
weight inviting you into silence
empty your pockets of stones
before waves take away your remains
you are Virginia Woolf but also
not really.
Stories
Stories are difficult to write
believe me, I’ve woven some from your hair,
untangled knots others do not see
like that day when you wanted to
make the sea your home and not return to me.
I fancy myself a gardener, sometimes
I’ve re-fashioned plots from loss and longing
separated your tree from its roots,
so I can graft branches
that grow in little pockets of the sky.
Other days, I am a petty mechanic
oiling parts of the evening with your misery
bolted down the setting so that your
hero wouldn’t have to die a slow death
I have blood on my hands, thick and viscous
in short, I kill.
Mostly, I am a thief
I have stolen from your hurt
its tortured limbs and labyrinthine arteries
to give unhappiness its due regard:
stories when you weren’t even looking.
Diasporic
Relocation.
When we got here,
light rain streamed down
windows of a plane;
we became birds cooing
from rafters damp with weeping.
In an airport
humming
with arrivals,
we called strangeness
by another name,
named new places
after the ones we’d left. Just in case.
We grew accustomed to habits―us
foreigners―
only for a time, for
a time, for a
time.
You remembered Marco Polo; I, Ruth,
opened an atlas
to welcome your coming with
the agony of
stones.
Dislocation.
Sometimes
the wound hurts
like
roots of a tree torn from its
earth, a great cavity
whose
jaws rip apart
we
who have left
and keep on leaving.
We tend
to blame it on the
losses,
those
worn out tents we’ve
stapled to the
sky
while we
were out. Camping.
Really, it is not cities that haunt us―
the maps
whose
loneliness
we have felt drive nails
through our palms.
Nor is it the baying
of wolves in
Gethsemane
before we traced
the
wetness of betrayal
on our cheeks.
We’d
left them on our way out
the
psychologist’s office.
One day,
I shall pluck it out of you― that
poisoned dart
which causes you
to never return.
