staring at me from the mirror:
grandmother when she died, younger than I am now,
cut in half by the streetlight’s glare.
Hoard your powers, she says, do not give
from the core, my son, do not give.
Giving spites the flesh, corrodes intention.
Most unreliable of barters, most memorable of sins,
giving kills. My son, do not, like Karna,
rip off the armour that is your skin.
Trying to Fly
for Amma
I wish to stand on the flat roof of a house
in Bilaspur or Borda:
places picked from a lime-yellow map
for their sound. They sound to me like places
where palm fronds still wave, a pond still crowns
a hill with mirrored sun.
To stand on the flat roof of a house, trying to fly,
is to court ambition: this year I shall be
the king who winters in exile, sails back as a kite
sprinkling the land with a ferment of flowers.
This year, I shall be spring’s revanchist kite
come home blazoned with chrysanthemums.
In midflight, telegraph wires trip me up.
My streamers rip and flutter on the poles;
my even course in tailspin, I am impaled
on the nose of a cardboard MiG taking off
from an Air Force hoarding. Gravity and a pair
of snapped vanes: a dirge for my essay at aeronautics.
*
You can botch an effort, or risk little
by sitting in a tower room, counting the passing flights
on strands of golden hair.
You can wait for the dull clouds to lift,
for the tide to come crashing at the drugged moon’s command
through the high windows.
*
Having been spectacled son to horse-borne conquerors
and sceptred father to wastrel sons come home
with messages of peace and squandered kingdoms,
I can do with a back broad enough to take
an objective view
of the sun’s daily scourging, the tramp of soldiers’ boots,
the pelting tropical rain, the drought from the blue.
Broad in the heat, a back that is a continent
whose jaguar hungers beat hidden, or prowl
its lime terrain, do not abate.
Come now, history is names. Yet finally the name
hungers for the formal indifference of scale:
I wish to be the flat roof of a house.
Annunciatian
for Mary Nazareth
The Virgin:
When first you came, you gave me the reticent heart
from your silken sleeve. Leaving in haste,
you dropped a tawny feather
in the straw. But afterwards
it was a poisoned apple you brought,
slipping it from your hand with the easy tact
of a tempter shedding a stolen glove,
while I slept.
And now, God knows how, my pulse has struck
a litany of forked tongues behind my eyes,
a litany that pricks your priapic fingers
and for once
the act of giving is a revenge:
it stings you
but traps me in the sorcery of paradox,
quickens the iron, sour on my tongue.
My naive blood has served no wisdom
and you are gone.
The Angel:
Guest of the earth,
doubt argues with consolation
in the catechism of your sleep:
no witch or magus could have told you
that, at the threshold of my kiss,
the blessed drop their chaste mantillas
like pilgrims who, when crossing the river,
are hacked off by water at the knees.
Do not dismiss the epiphanies
as an accident of surgery behind the eyes:
like the pea concealed beneath the tenth mattress,
the hurt thrusts you forward from a remote life,
trains you to earth my lightning.
And though you bar the tempest of my wings
from the small house of your beating breast,
you wake as I do, with blood on your lips.
The prayer of open palms:
the deadlocked heart’s anabasis.
Portrait of a Lady
Objects are lessons: from bowls, hairpins, brooches,
you learn of forgotten lives. The stories say
my grandmother was a fever tree:
two birds sat on her branches, one pecking
at a grape, the other singing an aria.
What history’s bookkeepers do not show
is the tremor down the spine she felt,
the tendril of blood that coiled in her nose
when the whistle of a train announced
her husband’s return from a tour of duty.
In the stories, she’s an actor, a pilgrim:
shadow-boxing with a thunderstorm,
she slips through brick walls,
treads a theatre of scrubbed floors
and ember beds. She leaves me
a loaf of shortbread in the oven,
a page of couplets in a script I cannot read
and wrapped in a peel of green appleskin,
a teacup glazed with a Dutch windmill,
the last one of the set.
The urchin-cut waif in the vignette above
is the child she was. Voyeur, clairvoyante,
she stares in at windows, her head a gourd
hollowed by the age she never reached
in life, her hair a silver floss.
Objects are lessons: the light seeps
through the slats, sets off a shimmer
on her lace. She’s crocheted the evening
and its creatures: the silken thread
that she pulls from her pattern
knots tight around my neck.
Power Cut
Tallow stained our sleeves, dripping
from high candles. We smelt the lavender
that you dabbed your temples with,
but knew it disguised the fatal stench
of childbed, a mortician’s dodge.
On an occasional table, your needlework
lay spread: a map of China never to complete
its borders. You chose a crueller pilgrimage
to the Forbidden City, taking your scent,
your touch, the sky reflected in your eyes,
the sun in them never moistened by your tears.
Burnt wire, bulb fused in a cast of ash:
what can these pictures do, poorly contrived
measures as they are, of a terminal injustice?
Group Portrait
in memoriam: Raja Deen Dayal (1844–1910)
The afternoons shuttle by, slides in the magic lantern
behind his eyes. Waking at teatime, he will neglect
the flavour of mint, brush the sandwiches aside.
First, he must replace each slide
with the true chronicler’s unhurried finesse
in its allotted tray. And as they fog,
the old man wipes his half-moon lenses
with the soft cloth of evening.
Scattered items gather on the programme he opens.
A city of onion domes folds out, a Ptolemaic cosmos
circling in orbits of brilliantined satraps,
tiers of bearded divines yearning for the next world
and shaven beaux beside them, crushed by the roses
of wit. Angelic orders, they die to the tunes
of a phonograph pining for the beloved and spring;
and when the beribboned band strikes up a march,
whiskered hussars return from campaigns and riots
&nbs
p; to court gracious gowned ladies with necks like stems
drawn out by the glass-blower’s fatal art.
The sun will not set tonight,
they promise themselves. The sun will not set
on the potted palms, the tiaras, the ostrich plumes,
the dress sabres of a venereal nobility.
Nor will it set on the hunt:
the one foolproof way of mapping a country
that exists only in mezzotint plates,
with slight variations from shoot to shoot.
Invisible artists arrange the mise en scene
for the shikar, but the swarthy beaters
scowling at the edge of the frame
almost give the game away.
The sahib does not see them: focused on the camera,
he plants one foot square on the felled tiger.
This light-eyed lord of the animals
is a finer man than the assorted cast
of princes, syces, liveried footmen
fawning on me, the Resident thinks.
Light-eyed lord of the animals, noble savage,
my ruthless double, fellow imperialist.
What plainer tales could portraiture tell?
In forty years, even Kipling’s flashbulb
will have lost its charge, his pictures faded.
And these slides in a sleepwalker’s head,
frailer even than art, are conceits
treasured by our courtly parents, despised
by us, their meteque children: prints ransomed
from the sun’s dusty albums.
Bloodlines, Songlines
for Vivan Sundaram
They call to you to stop, the ancestral voices.
But the winds rip them to shreds.
Will you draw breath at the cove that cusps
the bay with the ocean? You turn your oars
that way, and I dare to hope
you will bend to bearings I understand.
But at the stone overhang,
you slip on a hood of monsoon clouds
and without leavetaking, set sudden sail
for cratered shores now cooled to quartz.
Trapezing, you laugh at the past’s dry signals,
disrupt yourself, tear off the mask
and test the blade till it must spring
or snap. For you no rest
till the mastery of chance has blessed
your will with a dancer’s balance.
You do not relent, but improvise,
mount cankered hills, cross rivers in spate.
Years later, I will find your tokens
somewhere as I dig.
The detritus of storm and fire:
in your dreams, I have seen the anchored ketch
smothered by an oil spill, its canvas sails
burning. I have seen factory stovepipes
tear ragged seams through the sky’s fabric
as derricks blaze on glycerine seas,
towns unfurl in napalm trails.
The dull stutter of guns has blocked
my numb ears, sand and gravel
dribble from my mouth.
I have watched my body emptied of all its events
and tossed into the propeller stream
with a single question, asked of the water:
Is home where we start from, or is home
where our journeys take us?
No Permit of Residence
for Girish Shahane
Old friends come back from Europe with news
of a new crusade. Their speech is slow to come, delayed:
they know the newfound unity of republics excludes them;
no walls fell in their cause, their Berlins are not yet.
Rusted rationalists with a sombre regard for instinct,
they watch a neonate Enlightenment
close ranks against the Asiatic hordes.
Not this the welcoming Europe of the Goethehaus
with gentians in the windows; Europe of fauns,
of Flaubert’s novels, Chopin’s waltzes, philosophes
quoting the Vedas. That past is papier-mâché,
its obituaries blowtorched on sheets of flame.
Mitteleurapa offers us refuge no longer. We wheel, outcast,
like migrant terns, cold-shouldered by the summer we trusted.
Seleukos Nikator’s Elegy for Alexander the Great
Babylon, 323 BC
Now, Alexander, the Fates have struck you down
with a lingering fever, no memorable stroke:
your anointed head, once tousled with gorgon hair,
lies stiff on the pillow, a wasted sun,
and the hand that bridled emperors is limp
as a splashmark of tepid rain on a shield.
Now I shall leave you, good Alexander, Beloved of the Gods.
War is for us who are old men. For you, untouched
as you were by cunning, there were triumphs to stage:
Porus’ pledge of kinship, the Persian concubines.
Symbol and gesture, the flourished crests of pride:
what a life it was, my prince, what a life it was.
Now I shall leave you, good Alexander, Son of Zeus-Ammon:
you were always a child. Why did you campaign,
revelling god of the pageant? Why did you stain
your greaved buskins in the malarial swamps?
You should have left the sieges to us, the skirmishes,
the bloody assaults by night.
Now, Alexander, we shall leave you in the capable hands
of the embalmers. They will fill you with myrrh
and you will live on, horned on coins, winged in legends;
whilst we, released from the bondage of your vision,
shall step out into the fly-heat and the stench of camels
to conclude some unfinished business.
Now, Alexander, we leave you with the spoils of fire and dark.
You end with a dead moth and an eagle’s feather
in each sewn sleeve; a clay toy clasped to your heart.
And rising from our trestled tables, gruff soldiers
of fortune, bent by our bowstring Fates,
we go out into the last noon of your empire
to sharpen our long and very thirsty knives.
Palace
for Sudarshan Shetty
We were brought by stealth, through spiked gates and sunken courtyards, to the queen’s favourite’s palace. He was a grandmaster whose head she had once saved from the block, by wrapping her brocade shawl around the executioner’s axe. The ruse had not been entirely successful, but by degrees she had restored the dead man to health, feeding him a mash of basil leaves while the harem slaves dressed his wounds in poultices.
She has given him a sinecure now—as she does to keep him busy every summer, when she must repaint his head in turmeric and kohl. He maps the treacherous dunelands that shift ground behind the palace; they whisper as they shift, like courtiers, through the afternoons while the guardsmen doze beneath their canopies.
The queen thinks this will occupy her favourite through the day. In the evenings, he forgets the burden of air that his shoulders carry, when he sits with the palace librarians, who have gone blind through their minute scrutiny of the palmleaf manuscripts that have come down to them in an undeciphered script. Now they no longer read, but measure the hours in delicate quanta of opium. The poppy is their only talisman against an ironic custom that obliges them to wear the spectacles which were the insignia of their office.
They have mumbled the same chants over and over for forty years, trying to recall the one spell that works the rain. They fidget with the polished betel nuts secreted in their cummerbunds. Their milkstone eyes crinkle from habit. They leave nothing to chance, cling to a mnemonic belief in miracles.
That is all we know of what happens on the terrace where the librarians huddle around a fire in the icy desert darkness, though mute gond
oliers are reported to sweep it with night-long oars. The gardeners never talk about the fallen waves that they shear away every morning.
These routines have never been breached. So the grandmaster cannot believe it when rasping thunder interrupts, for the first time in forty years, the lull and drone of the recitation. For the first time, those eunuch mouths taste ant-hill dust on their rolled praises of lightning and fall open. In the moment that they fall open, a peacock cries out and is heard for miles, even in mudbaked hamlets where no one knows that the king has been dead forty years, and they still worship him in effigy.
Out of Range
I
Single cloud impaled
on a mallard’s cry
I sit
out of range
across a lotus pond
centre of breath
for a tropical Monet
grown silent, eye-hand-brush watching
great cupped palms
thrusting green from the weed-clogged water
to receive
the benison of rain.
II
Cast wide
the net of dreams.
A mountain deposited by morning
has fallen asleep in the eye.
A single egret, the one note
of dissent under a radiant cloud.
III
The technician’s only ambition:
to grow from fish to salt
in the ocean’s churning.
IV
From a single straw, the field seeds
a harvest of suns.
Suns that torpedo
my clotted veins.
V
A hermit in autumn, reluctant to lie down
on the sharp points of grass.
To call the sun home is like trying to heal
Vanishing Acts Page 6
