When God Is a Traveller Read online

  ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  WHEN GOD IS A TRAVELLER

  Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

  Poetry Book Society Choice

  These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, about learning to embrace the seemingly disparate landscapes of hermitage and court, the seemingly diverse addresses of mystery and clarity, disruption and stillness – all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human.

  Wandering, digging, falling, coming to terms with unsettlement and uncertainty, finiteness and fallibility, exploring intersections between the sacred and the sensual, searching for ways to step in and out of stories, cycles and frames – these are some of the recurrent themes.

  These poems explore various ambivalences – around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey.

  Arundhathi Subramaniam’s previous book from Bloodaxe, Where I Live: Selected Poems (2009), drew on her first two books published in India plus a whole new collection. When God is a Traveller is her fourth collection of poetry.

  ‘A marvellous collection, wonderfully varied and rich… A remarkable book from a remarkable poet’ – John Burnside.

  ‘…one of the finest poets writing in India today… It is not dulcet music you hear in Where I Live. It’s the swish of swordplay, each poem skewered at sabre-point and then placed on an electric grille to sizzle like a rasher on a barbecue’ – Keki Daruwalla, The Hindu.

  Cover image: When God is a Traveller (2013) by Parama Dasa

  ARUNDHATHI

  SUBRAMANIAM

  WHEN GOD IS

  A TRAVELLER

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems, at times in different versions, first appeared: The Literary Review: Indian Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University), The Yellow Nib: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Queen’s University Belfast), World Literature Today: Writing from Modern India (University of Oklahoma), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians, The Brown Critique, The Missing Slate, English (KEYwording Series, Living Archive Project, Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin), IQ–Indian Quarterly and Muse India.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Textile

  How Some Hindus Find Their Personal Gods

  The Way You Arrive

  My Friends

  Eight Poems for Shakuntala

  Printer’s Copy

  I Speak for Those with Orange Lunch Boxes

  The City and I

  Or Take Mrs Salim Sheikh

  Benaras

  The Builder’s Lobby

  And here’s middle age again

  Bones

  I Knew a Cat

  Transplant

  Jogger’s Park

  You and I that Day in Florence

  Where the Script Ends

  The Dark Night of Kitchen Sinks

  Hierarchies of Crisis

  Quick-fix Memos for Difficult Days

  Living with Earthquakes

  Bhakti (with some adulteration)

  Shoe Zen

  Six about Love Stories

  Border

  When God is a Traveller

  Poems Matter

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Textile

  Some days

  nothing in your wardrobe satisfies,

  not the heat-maddened ikats, not the secular pastels.

  There’s no season you can call your own.

  Like others

  you wait

  in queues

  for the drought to end

  although you know everything

  there is to know

  about the guile and the gristle

  of the heart –

  its handloom desires,

  its spandex fantasies,

  its polycot, its wear-and-tear

  polytheism.

  And you know

  that when it happens again,

  the whoosh

  of textile, versatile,

  block-printed by sun,

  it will feel big enough

  to put an end

  to all the throbbing questions

  forever.

  But the winters –

  they get colder each time.

  And so you return

  reluctantly

  to digging

  through the stretch

  and seam and protest

  of tattered muscle

  deeper

  into the world’s oldest fabric

  deeper

  into the

  darkening

  widening

  meritocracy

  of the heart.

  How Some Hindus Find Their Personal Gods

  (for AS who wonders about ishta devtas)

  It’s about learning to trust

  the tug

  that draws you to a shadowed alcove

  undisturbed

  by footfall

  and butter lamps,

  a blue-dark coolness

  where you find him

  waiting patiently,

  that perfect minor deity –

  shy, crumbly,

  oven-fresh, just a little

  wry, content to play a cameo

  in everyone’s life but your own.

  A god who looks

  like he could understand

  errors in translation,

  blizzards on the screen,

  gaps in memory,

  lapses in attention,

  who might even learn by rote

  the fury,

  the wheeze,

  the Pali,

  the pidgin,

  the gnashing mixer-grinder,

  the awkward Remington stutter

  of your heart,

  who could make them his own.

  After that you can settle for none other.

  The Way You Arrive

  The way your words reach me,

  phantom-walking

  through all these tensile,

  suspicious membranes of self.

  The way you unclog

  these streets and by-lanes

  so I can surge

  through starshine and aqueduct,

  the luminous canals of a world

  turned Venetian.

  The way you enter

  and the day’s events scatter

  like islands in the sea.

  The way you arrive.

  My Friends

  They’re sodden, the lot of them,

  leafy, with more than a whiff

  of damage,

  mottled with history,

  dark with grime.

  God knows I’ve wanted them different –

  less preoccupied, more jaunty,

  less handle-with-care,

  more airbrushed,

  less prone

  to impossible dreams, less perishable,

  a little more willing

  to soak in the sun.

  They don’t measure up.

  They’re unpunctual.

  They turn suddenly tuberous.

  But they matter

  for their crooked smiles,

  their endless distractions,

  their sudden pauses –

  signs that they know

  how green stems twist

  and thicken

  as they vanish

  into the dark,

  making their way

  through their own sticky vernacul
ar tissues

  of mud,

  improvising,

  blundering,

  improvising –

  Eight Poems for Shakuntala

  1

  So here you are,

  just another mixed-up kid,

  daughter of a sage

  and celestial sex worker,

  clueless

  like the rest of us

  about your address –

  hermitage or castle

  earth or sky

  here or hereafter.

  What did you expect?

  What could you be

  but halfway,

  forever interim?

  What else

  but goddamn

  human?

  2

  The trick, Shakuntala,

  is not to see it

  as betrayal

  when the sky collapses

  and closes in

  as four windowless walls

  with a chipped Mickey Mouse magnet

  on the refrigerator door

  or as eviction

  when the ceiling crumbles

  and you walk

  into a night of stars.

  3

  Yes, there’s the grizzled sage Kanva

  his clarity

  that creeps into your bones

  like warmth on a winter evening

  as you watch

  the milky jade

  of the river Malini flow by,

  serene, annotated

  by cloud

  and there’s a home

  that will live evergreen

  in the folklore of tourist brochures,

  detonating

  with butterflies.

  But what of those nights

  when all you want

  is a lover’s breath,

  regular,

  regular,

  starlight through a diaphanous curtain,

  and a respite

  from too much wisdom?

  4

  Besides, who hasn’t known Dushyanta’s charms?

  The smell of perspiration,

  the sour sharp beginnings

  of decay

  that never leave a man

  who’s breathed the air

  of courtrooms and battlefields.

  A man with winedark eyes who knows

  of the velvet liquors and hushed laughter

  in curtained recesses.

  A man whose smile is abstraction

  and crowsfeet, whose gaze

  is just a little shopsoiled,

  whose hair, mussed

  by summer winds, still crackles

  with the verbal joust of distant worlds.

  Who hasn’t known

  a man cinnamon-tongued,

  stubbled

  with desire

  and just the right smear

  of history?

  5

  The same hackneyed script.

  The same old cast.

  Springtime

  and the endless dress rehearsal –

  a woman lustrous eyed,

  a deer, two friends,

  the lotus, the bee,

  the inevitable man,

  the heart’s sudden anapest.

  Nothing original

  but the hope

  of something new

  between parted lips.

  A kiss –

  jasmine lapis moonshock.

  And around the corner

  with the old refrain,

  this chorus,

  (Sanskrit, Greek, whatever):

  It’s never close enough

  It’s never long enough

  It’s never enough

  It’s never

  6

  As for his amnesia,

  be fair.

  He recognised the moment

  when he saw it –

  sun springtime woman –

  and all around

  thick, warm, motiveless

  green.

  Can we blame him

  for later erasing the snapshot

  forgetting his lines

  losing the plot?

  We who still wander along alien shorelines

  hoping one day to be stilled

  by the tidal gasp

  of recollection?

  We whose fingers still trail the waters,

  restless as seaweed,

  hoping to snag

  the ring in the belly of a deep river fish –

  round starlit uncompromised?

  7

  What you might say to the sage:

  It only makes sense

  if you’re looking for me too

  wild-eyed

  but never despairing,

  certain

  I’ll get through eventually

  through palace and marketplace,

  the smoky minarets of half-dreamed cities,

  and even if you know

  how it all ends

  I need to know you’re wandering the forest

  repeating the lines you cannot forget –

  my conversations with the wind and the deer,

  my songs to the creeper,

  our endless arguments

  about beginnings and endings.

  Let’s hear it from you, big daddy

  old man, keeper of the gates.

  I need to know wise men

  weep like little boys.

  I need to hear your words,

  hoarse,

  parched,

  echoing

  through the thickening air

  and curdled fog

  of this endless city –

  ‘Come back, Shakuntala.’

  8

  And what you might say of the ending:

  Yes, it’s cosy –

  family album in place,

  a kid with a name

  to bequeath to a country,

  perhaps even a chipped magnet

  on the refrigerator door.

  I’m in favour of happy endings too

  but not those born of bad bargains.

  Next time

  let there be a hermitage

  in coconut green light,

  the sage and I in conversation,

  two friends at the door, weaving

  garlands of fragrant dream

  through days long and riverine

  and gazing at a waterfront

  stunned by sun,

  my mother, on an indefinite sabbatical

  from the skies.

  And let me never take for granted

  this green into which I was born,

  this green without ache,

  this green without guile,

  stippled with birdcall,

  bruised with sun,

  this clotted green,

  this unpremeditated green.

  And as wild jasmine blooms in courtrooms

  and lotuses in battlefields

  let warriors with winedark eyes

  and hair rinsed in summer wind

  gambol forever with knobble-kneed fawns

  in the ancient forests of memory.

  Printer’s Copy

  The ailing poet examines

  his typescript, adds a comma, deletes

  the second adjective, prunes

  a line-length, cuts, sutures, enjambs,

  and dies the next day.

  The need to believe

  there is octane enough

  in a bequest of verbs

  to gallop,

  dive,

  scoop,

  abduct,

  rescue

  reader and writer

  in the long hard ride

  into the sunset.

  The need to believe language

  will see us through

  and that old, old need

  to go, typo-free, to the printer.

  I Speak for Those with Orange Lunch Boxes

  I speak for those

  with orange lunch boxes,


  who play third tree

  in an orchard of eight

  in the annual school play,

  who aren’t headgirls,

  games captains, class monitors,

  who watch other girls fight for the seesaw

  from the far wall across the sand-pit,

  who remember everyone’s lines

  but their own,

  who pelt after the school bus

  their mother’s breakfasts still heaving

  in their gut,

  who still believe

  there’ll be exams one day

  they’ll be ready for,

  Those with orange lunch boxes.

  I speak for them.

  The City and I

  (returning to Bombay after 26 November 2008)

  This time we didn’t circle each other,

  the city and I,