Vanishing Acts

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Vanishing Acts Page 12

by Ranjit Hoskoté


  Returning Native

  In dreams, his feet crunch on a carpet of pine acorns,

  his nostrils flare with the leopard’s fetid breath.

  He hasn’t forgotten the khansama’s stuffed capsicums,

  the quilted pulaos and dagger chillies.

  His tongue furred with patois lessons,

  he walks on the beach, once again

  a rusted child reciting from a primer,

  wondering what damsons are

  and what words like asphodel mean.

  *

  The words no longer fit his tongue:

  the vowels hurt, the syllables clog

  his mouth. He has been too long away.

  He says Ruh, meaning stillness;

  the men sharing his table hear ruh,

  meaning soul. Is this the mutant’s fate?

  When I speak, they picture another script,

  and answer, not me, but the thought of me,

  he complains to the lanes and fountains he knew.

  His exclamations fade to blue

  in the summer glare.

  The street-signs are written

  in another colour.

  The Advent af Birds

  for Vivek Narayanan

  Gravity was faith, till the mirroring water broke

  and they found themselves sibyls, suddenly afloat

  without reflections, the ground cut clean away.

  They gagged when they tasted the strident cries

  escaping their hacksaw beaks like prey

  too quick for dull reflexes.

  They couldn’t furl back the downy limbs

  that thrust from their shoulders, or bite off the spurs

  that forked from the webs they’d known for feet.

  And as they grew dizzy, pitched forward and spun

  above the void, not falling but trapped in fall,

  talons, sprung from their terror, struck out and rent

  the curdled shell that globed them, the broken-watered sky.

  They cry out in the dead winter of my sleep:

  refugees, ancestors.

  Travelling through Glass on a Cold Day

  Huddled in our soft black chairs, we talk,

  our backdrop a sky wet-brushed with cloud.

  On a cold day like this

  when, lions, even you shiver,

  the basic question is weather.

  Behind us, as we talk, glass walls rise sheer,

  showcasing the sky. Stand guard, lions,

  for that wing shimmering gold

  is more than a flash, more than the moment’s

  reflected passage: it’s been foretold

  that a detail, the merest blip

  on the radar will shatter

  these sheer walls wet-brushed with cloud.

  Lions, as you prowl the dazed avenues at noon,

  beware of the window being loaded on a cart.

  Sun’s-fire-whitened, emptiness in air:

  whoever looks through it is transported elsewhere,

  a self that shimmers on the circling thermals

  before it settles on a terrace or roof,

  small as a peepal leaf that’s fallen in December

  and stuck to the glass that two men are hauling

  down the street, knuckles bled by rope,

  with nothing to show for the pane they carry

  like a solid, except that random smudge

  of faded green, the merest blip

  on the radar. As the sky falls, screen by screen,

  somewhere, immune to the question of weather,

  an unglazed window stands square as a proof

  that walls are only easels, lions only statues

  propped up by a self wet-brushed with cloud.

  A View of the Lake

  Villa Waldberta

  The man in white stands back to survey the landscape:

  snow-melt just where he wants it and the crystal lake

  an eye widening in a forest of viridian strokes.

  Careful visitor from another planet, he probes,

  then trails his brush across the canvas, a lull

  before the sharp cobalt flick that unites water

  with heaven; steps closer, dabs

  at the palette, brush lighter than before,

  the tempo languid, the man hardly there

  except for the hand weaving images of itself.

  So to renounce speed is his explicit purpose:

  laying his knife aside, the man scrapes colour

  from his sleeves, rests his brush; a pause

  for breath, then circles back the way he came,

  thawing aquamarine, stripping coats of umber,

  dissolving velvet greens and speckled reds

  until the canvas is down to the primer,

  buff once more and void of sign

  except for graphite smudges to mark

  where cloud-hidden peaks will rise.

  In the failing light, he lets the figures grow

  again, the mountains and thickets, the clutter

  that signals where the slang of boat and pier

  has ruptured the grammar of leaf and wave:

  his strokes are discreet ampersands that keep

  the broken sentences of the district together,

  gestures that compose an air more rarefied, an earth

  more dense, a light more piercing than any the vista

  that’s squared in his picture window could offer.

  He has the exquisite manners of a ghost

  trained in an older school of grace:

  he does not remind the present of its failures

  or, returning to these haunts of persistent desire,

  play the loud impresario of the prospect.

  No, he calculates differently: the high, clear flute

  tuned from the whistling breath of children lost

  among the pines, the icon coaxed from dripping wax,

  the reason distilled by the lame dancer

  balancing on the wine-press of thought,

  form his reward. He defers his signature for later.

  Vigil

  Lover, listening at the keyhole,

  married to a whisper on the phone,

  the rustle of a dress.

  How many rivals he has shot

  across the hedges

  of sleepless nights.

  Hiding behind the arabesques

  of the mirror, scarf knotted tight

  as his breath, conspirator.

  Breakfast, Interrupted by Apocalypse

  The rocking-horse is a carrier

  of early light.

  The pucker at one end of the orange

  is the north pole.

  A headwind rushes the roof-tree,

  the walls knuckle down.

  The hills fall away

  like crusts cut from bread.

  And then, as the world comes to an end

  around them, those who want to stay

  turn back to where it all started:

  crashing trees, burning hedges,

  cottages going up in fireballs,

  the credits rolling.

  The Philosopher of the Early Hours

  At 3:30, these claustral fears bind me to a chair:

  the fear of being sealed in a windowless cell,

  the judges shot, the warders fled; of having my eyes

  gouged out, darkness branded deep

  into my brain and my tongue,

  only my bitter tongue

  spared to remember.

  I’m coming apart, my unholy halves tearing

  one from another in their common waste:

  by day, a pope shrivelling in an airtight cage,

  his words, aspirins past their sell-by date;

  by night, a panther stumbling in thickets where once

  he’d plunged like black lightning.

  Colours far a Landscape Held Captive

  in memoriam: Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001)


  They never knew you, who only recall

  your smashed golds and broken reds:

  those flashing conceits, tropes of a night too dark

  to spell out by the fading glow of words;

  those surfaces that melted as you spoke,

  laying bare depths in which we’d drown

  without a pilot’s full-throated voice

  to bridge us to land. And as you sang,

  a starburst of paisley moths lit up

  our eyes behind closed eyelids, dark cells

  unlit by thought of such a dawn.

  You never meant to trap us in that country

  without a post office, where boatmen and saints

  trade stories to while away the days

  of khaki captivity. No, Beloved Witness,

  these were signposts you’d sketched

  at the lake’s treacherous edge, to break our fall

  as we hurtled down the foothills of policy.

  No, your smashed golds and broken reds

  were never laments: not yesterday’s colours

  but tomorrow’s, they summon us to hope.

  They never knew you, who only recall.

  Fugue

  Roots. Routes? Coracle. Oracle.

  A dry pasture. Goats. Oatmeal. Bridge.

  Or ridge? Or turnip? Urn. Lip. Loose. Use?

  Marvellous, isn’t it, the way words unravel,

  Tin Man and Lion Man? Airstrip. Strait.

  Lateen sail. Dhow! Skein from skein, thread

  unknotting from thread? Fissile articles.

  Missiles. Parts of speech, neem leaves

  in an amber jar in the kitchen.

  Or vinegar? What am I smelling

  between each syllable? Parsley? Thyme?

  Simon and Garfunkel? Olive oil. Foil

  for the oven. Cinnamon. Carrots. Fingers around a candle.

  Candelabra! The skeins keep branching, ravelling,

  unravelling, same thing isn’t it, drawing further and further

  from what I meant? Gap.

  Autocorrect. Alter Control Delete. Table of contents.

  Right click. Wiped clean. Tabula rasa. You were saying?

  Shore Leave

  The sea floods your canals, heaves at your gates:

  inside you, our child learns the sail-maker’s art.

  Closing Act at the Old Theatre

  in memoriam: Guru Dutt (1925–1964)

  It might have been simpler to break a vase

  or sift the alphabet on a credulous table,

  but parlour games never featured too high

  on his list: the playwright comes back

  only to pursue an interrupted passion

  for the study of curious physiognomies.

  As in life, he stands tactfully aside

  for the crowds that jostle to get their seats

  in the theatre; he knows the plays backwards,

  it’s the audience he’s returned to watch,

  the same carnival that he loved to savour

  from the safety of the dress circle.

  He thinks he’s strong enough to withstand

  the crush, and besides, he’s invisible;

  but the revellers break like a hurricane

  upon the house, a thousand throats crying

  in the voices of strange animals driven

  by fire or flood into the wrong country.

  He cracks under their stampeding feet,

  plaster moist with seepage, gutters sagging,

  teak panels splintering, bay windows shattering,

  worm-eaten timbers crashing to the floor.

  His words, when they come, are a cascade,

  the sound of stones rasping on stones.

  Circa

  The archivist returns to the earliest drafts

  of the master’s poems, folded away

  between the pages of old notebooks:

  it’s like carbon-dating a few fine bones

  buried in an avalanche of conceits.

  Philoctetes Curses His Tormentors

  Because I could not stanch the pus from this burning wound,

  you marooned me. I was a hazard to the ship, you said,

  that rag-sailed hulk with its rotten timbers.

  Anyway, I rolled with the wave

  and what do you know, Philoctetes held out:

  there were wildfowl to shoot and berries to eat.

  The bow was the one stringed instrument

  I heard on this island: I made that music, harping

  till my fingers bled. It kept me going ten years

  and today, I’ll stroll down to the beach

  to trawl your wreckage from the shadow of the reef,

  fish your corpses from the combers.

  Padlock

  Returning, I stop up your door

  with my sprung shadow,

  a futile padlock

  marking a disputed border.

  Why speculate? I dodge

  the light spittle of rain. There’s

  a stubble of rust on the iron key

  left out on the garden table.

  South

  Closing the gap to your streaming hair my arms

  stretch across the white lightning-hit air.

  Through split trees, spit-ripped rivers,

  I wade ashore, come south to find

  your trail dried. Sweat pricks like rust

  in my pores. The spade offers its testimony:

  a memory of desert agaves

  knocking at childhood’s door

  with the sharpened shafts of shadows.

  The Surveyor’s Camplaint

  What is land but the wry code left to be broken

  at the map’s edge, a challenge deferred

  to another day’s work in mist and rain,

  or left to bleach through a summer of trumpets,

  a dream lost to measurement, found again

  in heavy leaves, fallen like keys on the doorstep?

  My fear of houses is about leaving:

  the shutting of doors, the creaking of hinges,

  the fastening of bolts, the snapping of latches,

  pausing at the step before taking a train,

  moving on. My fear of houses

  is about folding places up, putting them away.

  In a province not my own, my gifts begin to work:

  tractor, cloud, bridge across the river

  activated by degrees; slurry pouring into sinks

  from which houses should grow; oranges

  gathered and heaped up. The landscape itself,

  like a stalled engine, growling to life.

  Stonecutter

  He’d tracked tigers through the foothills,

  carved an alphabet in rock, man-spoor

  that wanted for voices to sing it.

  Alone, in his eightieth year, he chipped

  a last petal from the rose of silence

  and checked it for blemishes or veins

  before wrapping up his tools in oilcloth:

  the chisel a patient opener of graves,

  the mallet used to absences as complete

  as rain gone missing in the desert.

  He buried his phrasebook, muffled the last echoes

  of common speech, then locked his breath,

  escaped the shutdown of the senses,

  all colours narrowing to black.

  He had decades to go

  on the road with that last petal

  chipped from the rose of silence,

  his fingers drumming on his tool-kit,

  sketching shapes in the parched air.

  He knew, he knows he must finish

  with his last breath that winged statue.

  Annatatian ta the Ustad’s Treasury af Verses

  for Jürgen Brôcan

  No poems, really, from the Ustad’s middle period.

  Just a few notations he’d left to brew.

  Her ivory comb. A strand of wool torn free

&nb
sp; by a trailing fingernail, redder than any gulmohur.

  Jade bowls standing on a smoke-blackened shelf.

  In the window, the river’s spilt silver.

  A tortoiseshell cat playing on the doorstep.

  And, cancelled in a rage of strokes,

  the grey-eyed sitarist drowning, out of earshot.

  Just this broken song, suggesting he had chosen

  to tarnish his rhymes with a warmer breath

  than the court would permit. He sings

  of his draggled woollen coat, his winters

  spent in a potter’s kiln, roofed in colour

  by fickle skies, the river a shrivelled skin of ice,

  the wildcat his one companion, the drum and blast

  of rain his only music: he’s begun, already, to hear

  the perfect cadence beaten on the heart’s shattered anvil.

  Footage for a Trance

  for Shuddhabrata Sengupta

  The hours stop in my veins.

  Evening falls, a spotted tissue

  draped across dayglo streets.

  The clocks go on marking

  the time in another city

  where the trains still run,

  taking people home.

  *

  Over my shoulder, I see my country vanish

  in a long unfurling of cornflower-blue sky.

  My limbs are clear as glass.

  The wind grazes my shoulders,

  the animal buried in my voice

  wakes up and growls.

 

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