India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  The present is sufficient subject like Cezanne “I turn my head this way or that an inch, & the composition changes.”

  and a high voiced automatic chant from one man emerges up from the street amidst the voices of first male gossip & the lighting of matches as the morning walkers glide back & forth & accumulate—but not a hatchet, I didn't accumulate a hatchet, only straw brooms & mats & baskets & no more.

  19 Dec 1962—

  Well, where now me, what next,

  lying here in the church gloom naked mattress

  like a Corpse under Covers, just come into Peter's mouth

  with his cock in my mouth and pubic hair spread on my beard

  cupping his soft ass halves with my palms—

  now alone with all the french doors closed & darkened

  in late afternoon against the skull drum & girl cry of streets of

  Market below my balcony—

  What next soul task, in all this morphined ease

  drowsing to wake at midnight in the oldest city in the world—

  no need to rush out and carry burlap bags full of dung to

  make money

  my checks arrive from around the world,

  enough to lay here Oblomov all my fourth decade on the planet

  with the stars rising and falling and half moon

  disappearing as I peep out the blinds some nights weeks hence

  reappeared hanging over the wrinkled old river—

  rush out by airplane Vancouver New York Moscow

  and shout & weep before mind gangs of new kids born between wars

  with the tan red stain on my index finger dying deeper, cigarettes & tea

  in too many Cafes from Santiago to Kyoto—

  What possible poem to imagine any more, who can't even read Blake or Kabir with two hours rat minded lighthunger—

  Now seem the thrills of scanning the scaly dragon dream universe

  equal in endlessness boredom to passing my moons playing Cards

  in third class trains circling the equator, thinking letters to write

  or creating a network of poetry slaves drugged by the lunacy of electronic brain meat—

  or simply going home & sitting in the backyard watching the cherry blossoms fatten on my tree—

  having to pay no taxes to anyone, mumbling in my bedsheets while

  the same car lights of childhood prison the decade on my ceiling—

  perhaps even dream up a monster God in the spotted whorls of vast eyeball—

  My cup runneth over, my speed spilled into one familiar soft mouth

  month after month, as if another birth won't connect life

  together after death, all be black beforgotten from before—

  Not even doom, not even Hell except what this is already

  my mouth dry and having to get up & go out in the chill twilight to take a pee

  trying to write a poem—whatever that could be,

  scribbling in a vast book of blank pages, hoping my death will make sense of chaos notations—

  dashes which lead only to the next consciousness trying to shake itself and be free

  like a vulture circling over a green donkey field, like Lenin wagging his beard

  and raising his index finger into the air to signal the ragbooted masses

  a new Futurity! Archaic Eden and electric Serpent and my soul Eve

  Curious over the fruit before her face, noisily humming with radio messages inside.

  Poetry's the old apple tastes of death's tasteless eternity,

  Morphine worm that eats itself—Peter goes to fetch chicken Tanduri

  from the rickshaw thoroughfare a mile away—he's got his body out on the streets

  in alleys with bright bulbs and cloth patterns, and plaster Vishnus lying on a painted snakey bed—the same endlessness

  that wandering leads me mornings to the stone porch and the trident and fire & pipe

  and naked saddhus who don't talk, crosslegged smoking dope to overlook the corpse meat-dolls

  people bodies bursting and black-charred falling apart on log woodpiles by Ganges green fields

  morning down below long bridges in the distance filling empty space half thousand miles

  to familiar Calcutta filled with newspapers and war and burning trams

  by railroad stations where soldiers wave from trains at homeless lepers sleeping months on huge concrete floors.

  India's hopeless existence, repeating the name of the Lord in the Kali Yuga, begging workless disconnected from rocket dams bursting over the torrential mudpie oceans—

  We'll be on the moon before I die, & maybe eat bread on Saturn—

  receive some heavenly message radio waves at Jodrell Bank— escape in the mind

  to rearrange the molecules of existence to a new Kaleidoscope China—

  See perhaps beautiful yellow cheeks and brows, new bellies to dominate the four

  directions of space & fill up time with their fried Pork Chow Mein—

  even if everybody eats Peking Duck with orange sauce, and has two children

  won't life be as useless as ever? But I wouldn't know anymore—what others should do

  with the vital breath, and the lungs and testacles we have all been given—

  Once I thought to rebuild the world to supreme Reality

  Emulsive consciousness developing in national brains and factories incandescent with human toys—

  What, robots with light bulbs to do our dying for us—eat our steak, and let us fuck them too—

  Once I thought the cracked walls of the moral house peeled back, beneath the spectral plaster

  saw the vast Bauhaus built in God by God for God in Man—

  Once I thought that by laugher & patience, by not scheming, by no ascetic sneer,

  the giant radiostation of eternity would tune us in to an endless program

  that broadcast only ourselves forever—now I hear the ringing of gongs and skull drums in Hindu temples,

  cries on the streets, peasant women waving sticks at hungry cows, the light bulb burning white

  only so I can transcribe the wierd suffering details

  for whom to read, myself & my fond dying indifferent trapped fellows—

  Ah—in comes Peter with two big dead stuffed chickens to eat.

  II

  So we ate cold chicken squatting on a mattress, 25 rupees 5 dollars worth while the old lady beggar I been watching on the corner steps downstairs rocked back & forth on her heels for the 4th successive day. Sleepless as last night no sleep, & all morn feeding bananas to monkeys on the roof at sunrise & then to Police to give papers registration address—the policeman a jolly type baffled by our presence: “Why do you want to say here in India so long?”

  Baffled myself out on the balcony staring down at the evening crowds and lights, a gang of cows & bulls burping angrily— gathered together munching the dried refuse of leaf-plates piled near the corner water pump. I stared in wonder—are they all walking corpses? At the burning ground the bodies are just the same, only they're not moving, they're dead corpses, here—all these gongs being rung & cigaretts sold across the road—and along came mincing an Indian devotee with the step of Quepie Doll Hugh Herbert, & he was covered with flowers round his neck, carrying a brass tray of little white sugarballs (god food. Prasad)—approached by a beggar he stoped gaily & dug up a palmful of candy, gave it to outstretched hand, & went mincing his way on the concrete path to the river, to temple probably to mind his evening before sleepdeath tonite. “They're all mad” I said to Peter, “Chinese invasions indeed!” They'll see some kinda Chinese invasion aint been seen any old thousand years ever.

  III

  In bed all day recovering awake from sleepless nite 3/4 grain M—going on & off balcony to stare down at street—Bulls grunting, they eat offal & garbage—some sleep in the concrete garbage dump tanks on Godowlia Corner—

  Processions of rat-a-tat drums marching down the street— straggling behind big dru
m, four coolies beating posters advertising a hot romantic movie—fat hero with big tits & double chin & Indian movie queen with round cheeks—“Kum Kum”— and a whisp of hair arranged over the eyebrow—a child ahead banging cymbals.

  Or a marriage procession in yellow & orange silk the groom, his long shirt tied to bride's veiled sari figure followed by a dozen ratty relatives & a couple of wheezing old beggars banging on drums rhythmically.

  or several times a day on the street a small group carrying a shoulder-high bamboo litter with a corpse swathed in orange or white shroud—saying aloud the gang Jai Citaram or Ram Nam Ram Nam—threading their way thru slow moving cows, rickshaws abycicle, hand carts with huge wheels, oxcarts dragged along by wood yoke to the ox-hump—the procession to the burning ghats passing down a main street or into little streets & thin alleyways crowded with potato chop stalls & teashops & portable salt-snacks, bearers carrying wicker baskets of brown dry hot noodles & roast peas.

  Went down for milk & cigarettes—at the tobacco stall always greeted by Jai Guru or Jai Hind—I reply Jai Tarama or Jai Krishna or Jai Citaram & namaste clasped hands to brow or breast, clutching cigarettes & matches in one fist.

  The dood (milk) shop, mixer salesman squatting barefoot on a wet stone board, pouring tea & milk from aluminum cup to glass or clay pot—the local dogs “fried in ghee”—mangy Breughel curs with gentle manners, three dogs living together in the milk stall alley each has an injured foot & pink flesh showing thru scarred, ribbed dogbitten flea buzzed hairskin. One dog walks on 3 legs, the left back leg retracted up above the level of his balls, as if a spasm came & left it tied up there—barks with hideous gargle at rival dogs invading his milk shop pavement territory—licks up the charcoal-milk-cow-piss-dish-water running in pools in the broken concrete. I gave him some milk several days ago.

  I had chicken bones to dispose of in a Quality Restaurant box—sneaked him a handful and as I left heard the snarling & yipes of a 4 dog fight—I sneaked guiltily around the Ganges side street market looking for a trash barrow to leave my cannibal bones hid from Hindu Paranoiac gazers.

  Sat & drank nice warm milk & watched the big white cow (always stealing vegetables in broad daylight from the gang of peasant women with baskets of herbs) lick the mangy three legged dog's neck with his big wise tongue.

  Dec 22, 8 PM—

  Walking (in dhoti & lumberjack shirt) thru Benares alleyways, turning corners past toy stands, thru red gates up Vishwanath alley past the temple—thru a grate seeing crowd round the lingam chanting slow-beat of drum vary-voiced tuneless mass— beautiful harmonies, ending as I passed out the back courtyard past the huge stone cow, with acceleration of drums—past the square where in daytime sell red and blue & yellow bright colored powders displayed in cones of dust—

  down to Manikarnika ghat (with small photos of Howrah & Naga saddhu naked in pocket—to show him—arrived on street thru woodpile up alley down steps to take a crap by riverside, pushing aside open rear of my dhoti, sick diarrhea, washing my skin on the steps of river (with left hand?) No, right—

  then up to Dharmashala sand-floored base level & sat in circles with Sadhus & a university bursar & the Naga I knew & silver haird fellow with boxer's or alcoholic's face but he cold sober smoking ganja by firelight—logs from burning pits brought up in clay dishes or iron tongs, still red & shining in square ash bed banked with sand—Shiva trident in ground—Sadhu came over, saw pix asked me to send him—to some difficult address in a Calcutta ghat—I promised—Sat smoking pipe (coughing firesmoke blown & my eyes watering & nose running) then moved over against wall on straw mat, touched Sadhu Naga's foot & conversed w/ English speaking Bursar—

  then after long hour by fire, started home, blue sky specked with stars, there was Orion's belt near in the sky—I squatted to pee over a high stone path right down into the river, with bubbing noise falling down the 15 feet—

  as squatting to pee

  on the night Ganges—

  Back there the firelit ghats.

  Looking back I saw the several log fires burning orange, noticed & remembered it to record, as Haiku.

  By home—an argument between a Hindu w/ club & a blue turbaned Sikh—crowd circled—up the street the prone body, rag covered, can flat on ground a few feet away—one lit a match to her head, new shaven a few weeks ago—blood trickling down skull—a “motor” accident.

  HERMANN HESSE

  (1877–1962)

  The German writer Hermann Hesse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946 and became fashionable in the 1960s with his novels Siddhartha (1927) and The Glass-Bead Game (1943), was born in 1877 in a family of Indophiles. Both his grandfather and father had worked for long years as missionaries in south India; many languages and cultures passed through their house in a town near the Black Forest. Hesse himself traveled to India as late as 1911, after he had already established his reputation as a novelist. But as the following excerpt from his essay “Childhood of the Magician” (1923) shows, Hesse's great preoccupations—the soulless mechanization of modern life, the rise of western militarism, the need for self-knowledge and stillness—seem to have been created by a childhood steeped in India, enriched by what were then only the intimations of a “wider world, a greater homeland, a more ancient descent, a broader context.”

  from CHILDHOOD OF THE MAGICIAN (1923)

  Again and yet again, lovely and ancient saga,

  I descend into your fountain,

  Hear your golden lieder,

  How you laugh, how you dream, how softly you weep.

  As a warning from your depths

  Comes the whispered word of magic;

  Drunken and asleep, so I seem,

  And you call me forth and away…

  Not by parents and teachers alone was I educated, but by higher, more arcane and mysterious powers as well, among them the god Pan, who stood in my grandfather's glass cabinet in the guise of a little dancing Hindu idol. This deity, and others too, took an interest in me during my childhood years, and long before I could read and write they so filled me with age-old Eastern images and ideas that later, whenever I met a Hindu or Chinese sage, it was like a reunion, a homecoming. And yet I am a European, was, in fact, born with the sign of the Archer on the ascendant, and all my life have zealously practiced the Western virtues of impetuosity, greed, and unquenchable curiosity. Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before my school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods, bees and beetles, taught by the god Pan, taught by the dancing idol in my grand-father's treasure room. I knew my way around in the world, I associated fearlessly with animals and stars. I was at home in orchards and with fishes in the water, and I could already sing a good number of songs. I could do magic too, a skill that I unfortunately soon forgot and had to relearn at a very advanced age— and I possessed all the legendary wisdom of childhood.

  To this, formal schooling was now added, and it came easy to me, was amusing. The school prudently did not concern itself with those important accomplishments that are indispensable for life, but chiefly with frivolous and attractive entertainments, in which I often took pleasure, and with bits of information, many that have remained loyally with me all my life; for instance, today I still know beautiful, witty Latin sayings, verses, and maxims and the number of inhabitants in many cities in all quarters of the globe, not as they are today, of course, but as they were in the 1880s.

  Up to my thirteenth year I never seriously considered what I should one day become or what profession I should choose. Like all boys, I loved and envied many callings: the hunter, the raftsman, the railroad conductor, the high-wire performer, the Arctic explorer. My greatest preference by far, however, would have been to be a magician. This was the deepest, most profoundly felt direction of my impulses, springing from a certain dissatisfaction with what people call “reality” and what seemed to me at times simply a silly conspiracy of the grownups; very early I felt a
definite rejection of this reality, at times timorous, at times scornful, and the burning wish to change it by magic, to transform it, to heighten it. In my childhood this magic wish was directed toward childish external goals: I should have liked to make apples grow in winter and through magic to fill my purse with gold and silver. I dreamed of crippling my enemies by magic and then shaming them through my magnanimity, and of being called forth as champion and king; I wanted to be able to find buried treasures, to raise the dead, and to make myself invisible. It was this art of making oneself invisible that I considered most important and coveted most deeply. This desire, as for all the magic powers, has accompanied me all my life in many forms, which often I did not immediately recognize. Thus it happened later on, long after I had grown up and was practicing the calling of writer, that I frequently tried to disappear behind my creations, to rechristen myself and hide behind playfully contrived names—attempts which oddly enough were frequently misunderstood by my fellow writers and were held against me. When I look back, it seems to me that my whole life has been influenced by this desire for magic powers; how the objects of these magical wishes changed with the times, how I gradually withdrew my efforts from the outer world and concentrated them upon myself, how I came to aspire to replace the crude invisibility of the magic cloak with the invisibility of the wise man who, perceiving all, remains always unperceived—this would be the real content of my life's story.

  I was an active and happy boy, playing with the beautiful, many-colored world, at home everywhere, not less with animals and plants than in the primeval forest of my own fantasies and dreams, happy in my powers and abilities, more delighted than consumed by my burning desires. I exercised many magic powers at that time without knowing it, much more completely than I was ever able to do later on. It was easy for me to win love, easy to exercise influence over others, I had no trouble playing the role of ringleader or of the admired one or the man of mystery. For years at a time I kept my younger friends and relations respectfully convinced of my literally magic power, of my mastery over demons, of my title to crowns and buried treasures. For a long time I lived in paradise, although my parents early made me acquainted with the serpent. Long enduring was my childish dream that the world belonged to me, that only the present existed, that everything was disposed about me to be a beautiful game. If on occasion discomfort or yearning arose in me, if now and then the happy world seemed shadowed and ambiguous, then for the most part it was easy for me to find my way into that other freer, more malleable world of fantasy, and when I returned from it, I found the outer world once more charming and worthy of my love. For a long time I lived in paradise.