Vanishing Acts

by Ranjit Hoskoté

  Where I am is a boat without a pilot,

  sculling through cold water.

  *

  Start again. There is no safety in numbers.

  The sixty-four saints stand paralysed

  in the authorized version of the legend.

  No footnote explains the hunting songs

  or the red skein curling downhill

  in place of the river.

  Script thrown away, I’m on my own.

  The detectives will find me

  when a rainbow prints itself

  on the litmus sky at noon.

  I clear my throat,

  the movie stops.

  *

  The hours have stopped in my veins

  but late-night travellers still rush past me,

  through me, to reach the midnight express.

  My country’s been swallowed

  by a sky darkening to cloud and sleep.

  The sixty-four saints have formed a caucus

  of havoc birds, the rainbow is a stanza

  they refuse to sing. Close to the tympanum,

  the horseshoe weather taps cryptic clues.

  On every clock-face,

  the hour hand and the minute hand

  go on mating.

  *

  Wakeful, all eye, the havoc birds read

  the scroll of earth unfolding,

  every fleck a signal:

  prey, home, danger,

  hiding-place.

  From a great height, each bird watches

  its shadow falling

  to its death.

  *

  I vanish, again, in the darkroom.

  A lamp exposes

  my heirloom bones.

  On a park bench,

  a gardener finds a surplice,

  drooping, ravelled at the seams:

  my skin, abandoned in flight.

  Corpus

  He hissed a quick breath in my ear:

  cradle knowledge, farewell wish.

  The world welled up in my eyes.

  Deaf to the fall of colour,

  the hangman stuffed my fists

  with newspaper cuttings.

  *

  Ripped open, the body that I loved, ripped open:

  no simple mirror, nor mind’s projection,

  it struck down my reasons with sudden fevers

  no thermometer could gauge, no drug restrict.

  I leave it on this slab, cast-off shape,

  marionette for rubber-gloved hands.

  *

  The image is a trauma

  buried deep inside this animal

  splayed on a zinc-topped gurney,

  moulting, blood’s debt left unpaid.

  Go, taxidermist,

  cut through fur to the bone.

  Poste Restante

  Instead of addresses, the postman finds

  a child pumping a thirsty hydrant,

  and a barber’s throne, twisted by fire,

  marooned in a side-street;

  to the north, a dented milk churn

  sits across the road from an upset pannier,

  buns scattered; past the traffic island,

  a leather suitcase, handle wrenched off;

  to the south, a public library,

  stack on stack of carbon ghosts.

  The letters fall from his hands

  like homeless prayers.

  At the Ferry Wharf

  Mandovi

  I

  Like animals in a sanctuary, images survive

  in the eye, outliving pogroms and inquisitions,

  falling prey to occasional poachers

  but otherwise beyond extinction.

  Take the bridge that once spanned this river:

  I could see it if I stood here, where the tawny sand

  meets the waves crumpling at the burr-tufted feet

  of the casuarinas. I step on the wharf,

  expecting the chug-chug-chug of a motor on the surf

  and the bobbing of a cabin shackled to the shore,

  the shell of an ironworks barge

  that sank forty years ago.

  Now that the bridge has fallen, the salvage crews

  have trawled stories of barrage, sluice and waterfall

  that the engineers could never have heard:

  how could their soundings have detected

  the drizzle of aboli around ruined chapels

  in the night, the sharp fragrance of tulsi

  around brick columns, from basil roots

  buried under the whitewashed cross?

  Or the shadow of palms by the river, lime-green

  prototype of eternity, the sleep no one survives.

  I’m crossing the river. I don’t know the way

  or what awaits us on the other bank.

  Laterite blocks on fire in the sun, the dust

  a red stain no soap can remove from the white

  of refugees’ clothes. No architect could draft

  this home again on his pencilled board:

  our phrases change colour, melting to riffs

  on the master tongue of time,

  which changes its tune when it crosses the river.

  Where I sit, in this quietus of catamarans,

  a man could drown, split keel-wise

  on a coral reef. But his stories will keep

  until, astride the foaming lions of their office,

  the predator-judges of Revelation stir out.

  II

  I came prospecting for emeralds and found a slave economy

  of stone heads dangling from temple gateways:

  relics of trussed victims, sandalpaste-smeared,

  appointed sentries to the monarchs of heaven

  when Mangesha and Shantadurga came down,

  bejewelled expatriates from the mountains.

  Then the Portuguese caravels made landfall

  and the crucifix, ivory against the candlegrease,

  took them for its sextons.

  Under the fumbling thumbscrews of aspirant saints,

  the river, like its gods, switched sides again:

  it lapped up the susurrants of a convert’s parlance

  but the bonemeal of old poetry sticks in its craw.

  The river is a commissar of memory:

  it empties a flagon of red, mine-blasted earth,

  wolfing down cargoes that arrive

  from inland seas whose ebb and flow

  the scan-lines of the satellite probe

  cannot arrest. That is the river I must cross:

  my boatman reluctant, his passengers

  a madman, a surveyor and a priest;

  a brief crossing their dream, but sliced moons lie

  scattered on the rucked iodine tide like scimitars.

  III

  I’ve thrown my atlas away, dragooned borders, built

  railheads on the route back. I’ve surrendered

  to a periodic table that baffled me as a child.

  Summoned as sacrifice, nailed to all I recall

  with slivers of the rawest mango steeped in brine,

  I counter the crossing with surmise that

  the lantern sun will let me slip

  into this water that remembers only

  darkness after darkness and hoards the light

  far below the diver’s reach, this water that drowns us

  to redeem us, carries us away

  and brings us back, but never whole.

  Fixed between a palmyra barricade

  and the heaped green tide, I wait for the smells

  of pickled fish and oil-troughed wave.

  Diesel fumes suffocate the landing. The drumbeat

  of boiler and rail takes over.

  As I step aboard,

  river, pier and fishing village

  dissolve in the stern, machine-tooled music

  and the boat stands shaking like some beast

  panting from the jungle’s ferocities.

  I
hear its engine throb and stall

  like a lover’s candled heart.

  A gull circles above the squall and hull-thump

  of a motor that’s gunning to move but can’t

  and I grip the shuddering wheel of this ferry

  that is not there.

  Canticle for Tomorrow

  after Lal Ded

  Lynx-eyed, play blind.

  Prick-eared, be deaf.

  Polished, lie dull

  among the dull.

  Survive.

  THE BEGINNING

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  This collection published 2008

  First published by Penguin Books India 2006

  Copyright © Ranjit Hoskoté, 2006

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Jacket images © Carlos Peixeira Marques

  ISBN: 978-0-143-06185-4

  This digital edition published in 2016.

  e-ISBN: 978-9-386-05784-6

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.