Leaving Yuba City Read online

  of a distant field

  called Kurukshetra. I lift my hand to it.

  Smell of jacaranda. Thorn of the blackwood tree.

  What do you see, Arjun?

  Only the bird’s eye.

  I release the string. And am flung

  forward. Time parts for me as water.

  Blood. Bone. Wet earth. I am a fragment of sunlight

  on a speeding metal tip. But do not think me gone.

  When you least expect it. I will reappear

  as lightning

  into your innocent future.

  Note

  Arjun: prince-hero and fabled archer of the Mahabharata. Persecuted and cheated of their inheritance by their cousins, he and his brothers were forced to fight and kill them in the battle of Kurukshetra.

  What do you see? Early in their training, Drona, the teacher of all the princes, asked them to hit a target, a bird’s eye. Just before each prince shot his arrow, he asked him what he saw. All except Arjun described the entire landscape—sky, tree, leaves, bird, etc.—and, due to their lack of focus, failed to hit the target.

  Cutting the Sun

  After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #16

  The sun-face looms over me, gigantic-hot, smelling

  of iron. Its rays striated,

  rasp-red and muscled as the tongues

  of iguanas. They are trying to lick away

  my name. But I

  am not afraid. I hold in my hands

  (where did I get them)

  enormous blue scissors that are

  just the color of sky. I bring

  the blades together, like

  a song. The rays fall around me

  curling a bit, like dried carrot peel. A far sound

  in the air—fire

  or rain? And when I’ve cut

  all the way to the center of the sun

  I see

  flowers, flowers, flowers.

  Indigo

  Bengal, 1779-1859

  The fields flame with it, endless, blue

  as cobra poison. It has entered our blood

  and pulses up our veins

  like night. There is no other color.

  The planter’s whip

  splits open the flesh of our faces,

  a blue liquid light trickles

  through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs

  when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyes

  refuse to forget where once the rice

  parted the earth’s moist skin

  and pushed up reed by reed,

  green, then rippled gold

  like the Arhiyal’s waves. Stitched

  into our eyelids, the broken dark,

  the torches of the planter’s men, fire

  walling like a tidal wave

  over our huts, ripe charred grain

  that smelled like flesh. And the wind

  screaming in the voices of women

  dragged to the plantation,

  feet, hair, torn breasts.

  In the worksheds, we dip our hands,

  their violent forever blue,

  in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests

  for the East India Company.

  Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains.

  After that night

  many of the women killed themselves.

  Drowning was the easiest.

  Sometimes the Arhiyal gave us back

  the naked, swollen bodies, the faces

  eaten by fish. We hold on

  to red, the color of their saris,

  the marriage mark on their foreheads,

  we hold it carefully inside

  our blue skulls, like a man

  in the cold Paush night

  holds in his cupped palms a spark,

  its welcome scorch,

  feeds it his foggy breath till he can set it down

  in the right place,

  to blaze up and burst

  like the hot heart of a star

  over the whole horizon,

  a burning so beautiful you want it

  to never end.

  Note

  Paush: name of a winter month in the Bengali calendar

  The planting of indigo was forced on the farmers of Bengal, India, by the British, who exported it as a cash crop for almost a hundred years until the peasant uprising of I860, when the plantations were destroyed.

  Train

  Every evening between six and seven I go to Sialdah Station. No one knows about this. Not even my wife, for how would I explain it to her? It isn’t as though anybody ever comes to visit me. Nor do I travel anywhere. And if I told her that it was a good way of avoiding the rush-hour buses, she would know right away, as she always does, that I was lying.

  I never go all the way inside where you need a platform ticket. A platform ticket costs two rupees, and she keeps track of every paisa of my salary. What choice do I have, she says. You earn like a beggar but want to spend like a maharajah. If it wasn’t for me, the children would starve. But it doesn’t matter because from behind the iron railings I can still see and hear it all: coolies in red uniforms and polished brass armlets carrying enormous khaki hold-alls on their heads; vendors pushing wooden carts stacked with everything from yellow mausambi fruit to the latest film magazines with Amitabha on the cover; newspaper boys crying Amrita Bajaar, Amrita Bajaar; the departure announcements, thick with static; the tolling of the station clock whose minute-hand moves in slow heavy jerks. And then suddenly everything is drowned in the shriek of an incoming train.

  This is my favorite moment, when a train pulls slowly into the station, the engine’s black cylinder sweating, the wheels’ chugging rhythm cut off by the hiss of brakes. The smoke billows out one last time over the waiting faces on the platform. A whistle shrills, the doors open, and a man in dark glasses swings down from the first class compartment, a Pan Am flight bag slung casually from his shoulder. Someone in a sun-colored rayon shirt helps a laughing young woman down the steps, his hand on her bare upper arm. Her salwar-kameez is printed with orange butterflies that flutter as the couple races towards the gates. The clock strikes seven. A coolie shoves past me, swearing. A spat-out wad of betel leaf stains my pant leg. I remember that just before I left my wife called down the stairs, Do you think you can keep your head out of the clouds long enough today to not forget the baby’s cough mixture?

  At night I lie in the airless bedroom that smells of diapers and her hair oil. If I stretch out my hand. I will encounter the dark mound of her body. She is waiting. If I pull her to me, she will hiss, Stop it, you’ll wake the children, but I know her blouse is unbuttoned, her sari loosened and ready. The streetlight has thrown the shadow of the window-bars against the peeling walls. They look a little like railroad ties. I lie chewing the inside of my cheek, the salt taste of blood, to hold down the feeling that spirals in my chest like water being sucked down a drain. If I stay very still, surely her breath will slow into sleep. Somewhere the night trains are flying across glistening tracks, their headlights spearing the dark. And suddenly it comes to me again, that pounding hot magic smell of iron and steam and speed. I remember that tomorrow evening the Pathankot Express arrives at 6:45, and I don’t mind too much when my wife turns and puts a damp arm over me.

  Moving Pictures

  Poems Inspired by Indian Films

  The Rat Trap

  To Mrinal Sen, on Seeing Bhuvan Shome

  The Tea Boy

  I, Manju

  The Makers of Chili Paste

  The Widow at Dawn

  The Rat Trap

  After Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Elippathayam

  At night we sleep with the windows bolted

  in spite of the sweat,

  in the women’s quarter, elder sister and I.

  The old house settles on my chest

  like the grinding stone she uses each day

  to make chili paste. My pale hands

  burn my body.

  Out
side I can hear the Kaju trees

  growing, green poison, toward the house.

  Today, again, brother refused an offer

  for elder sister’s marriage: Not good enough

  for our family name.

  Now from the main room, he frog-snores,

  while night leaches the black from her hair,

  cracks open the edges of her eyes.

  I wait for the rat. In the passage

  the coconut sliver I hooked into the trap

  is a thin white smile, moon

  to my dark nights. Soon, the clatter

  of the wooden slat falling, the shrill squeaks,

  the frantic skittering claws. Then silence.

  In the morning, the huge eyes, glint-black,

  will watch me as I carry the cage

  through palms whose jagged leaves

  splinter the sky.

  Monsoon mud sucks at my feet. The pink

  hairless tail twitches. The green pond

  closes over my wrist.

  The cage convulses, quiets.

  A few bubbles, stillness. I know how it is.

  I open the trapdoor. The limp brown body

  thuds onto the ash heap

  next to the others. The red ants swarm.

  I cannot stop looking.

  After bath, in front of the great gilt mirror,

  Grandmother’s wedding dowry,

  elder sister combs the wet dark down my back.

  I press on my forehead, for luck,

  vermillion paste like a coin of blood.

  Check my white teeth.

  They look smaller, sharper, rodent-honed.

  Our eyes meet, glint-black, in the smoky mirror.

  Red ants swarm up my spine.

  To Mrinal Sen, on Seeing Bhuvan Shome

  The man wanted to shoot birds, as men have done

  from time to time. So you brought him

  to the heart of the land.

  In rural Gujarat

  you faced him with the silver flight

  of wild ducks across dunes

  vast beyond human understanding.

  The rush of their beating wings took his breath

  so that he could not pull the trigger—

  almost.

  In this world of sand, it is easy

  to lose ourselves. All we need

  is to lie down, let the grains sift their gritty silk

  like childhood promises through our hair.

  Wrinkle our eyes against the wind’s

  unpredictabilities. Look how the clouds

  progress across the sky

  with endless amoeba movements. Trust. Sooner

  or later the birds will come.

  Here where always beyond the last dune rises another

  so we wonder, despairing, will we ever

  reach the sea,

  time is a sudden feathered flash

  falling in midair,

  the sharp red thread of its cry

  cut off by the dull thud

  of body hitting ground.

  It stuns us, that hard, blunted sound. No one said

  it would be like this. The weight of sand

  settles itself around our ankles like a chain.

  We squeeze our eyes to will away

  that limp whiteness, that twitching. But

  it lies there, waiting, relentless.

  Like Bhuvan Shome

  we must finally lumber

  towards those frantic eyes. Must hold

  in our hands that terrified moistness, its meaning,

  must wonder

  what we should do, for the rest of our lives,

  with this bird we hunted down.

  The Tea Boy

  After Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!

  All day I carry glasses of tea

  down streets full of holes or feet

  waiting to trip me. Above summer is singeing

  the feathers of black pigeons

  that circle and circle. Gopi carries a knife

  with a twisted snake handle.

  Each time a glass breaks

  Chacha cuts my pay.

  Dark windows.

  Women with satin eyes calling me. The tea

  thick and sweet in its rippling brown skin.

  Downstairs pimps play cards

  all day. I take a sip from each glass

  when no one is watching.

  Broken-horned cow, chewing garbage

  in the alley where we sleep.

  Rain soaks my yellow shirt, turns the tea to salt.

  The cinnamon smell

  of women’s brown bodies.

  When you can’t stand any more

  the pavement is soft enough.

  I am hiding my money behind a loose brick

  in the bridge-wall.

  First thing to learn: melt into pavement

  when you hear

  police vans.

  Sometimes my skin

  doesn’t want

  to hold in all these bones.

  Chillum sells hashish

  to tourists by India Gate.

  It pulls you out of your body, flings you

  into the sun. The night Gopi mugged the old man

  he bought us all

  parathas at Bansi’s Corner Cafe.

  Footsteps follow me, a muffled cough.

  My soles are turning to stone. I must

  lie down. The night-dust

  is warm as Shiva’s ashes.

  When I have five hundred rupees

  I can go back

  to my mother in Bijapur.

  Till I fall asleep I watch

  that fierce glistening,

  the sky full of scars.

  I, Manju

  After Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!

  I

  The bed smells of crushed jasmine,

  my mother’s hair, the bodies

  of strange men.

  All day she lies against the pillow’s

  red velvet. Smoke rings fly up,

  perfect ovals from her shining mouth.

  Sometimes she tells me

  shadow-stories, butterfly fingers

  held against the light.

  On the panes, silver snakes of rain.

  The curtains flap their wild wet wings.

  My friend the tea boy brings us

  sweet steaming chai from the shop below.

  She lets me drink from her glass,

  wipes the wet from his hair.

  Turns up the radio. A song

  spills into us.

  She claps in time and laughs.

  We dance and dance around the bed

  as though the rainbow music

  will never end.

  II

  From the balcony, my waiting

  probes the swollen night.

  Like light down a tunnel

  she disappears into the room,

  each time with a different man.

  My fingers squeeze the rails

  till rust scars the palms. The door shuts.

  The curtains shiver with the silhouettes.

  My nails are cat-claws

  on the panes. Tinkle of glass, a sharp curse,

  thick men-sounds like falling.

  After a long time my feet find the way

  to the street-children.

  They let me lie with them on newspaper beds,

  do not ask why. My face tight

  against the tea boy’s cool brown spine. My arms.

  I, Manju.

  All the dark

  burns with the small animal sounds

  from my mother’s throat.

  The Makers of Chili Paste

  After Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala

  The old fort on the hill

  is now a chili factory

  and in it, we the women,

  saris tied over nose and mouth

  to keep out the burning.

  On the bare brown ground

  the chilies are fier
ce hills

  pushing into the sky’s blue. Their scarlet

  sears our sleep.

  We pound them into powder

  red-acrid as the mark

  on our foreheads.

  All day the great wood pestles

  rise and fall,

  rise and fall,

  our heartbeat. Red

  spurts into air, flecks our arms

  like grains of dry blood. The color

  will never leave our skins.

  We are not like the others in the village below,

  glancing bright black at men

  when they go to the well for water.

  Our red hands burn like lanterns

  through our solitary nights.

  We will never lie breathless

  under the weight of thrusting men.

  give birth to bloodstained children.

  We are the makers of chili paste.

  Through our fingers the mustard oil seeps

  a heavy, melted gold. In it

  chili flecks swirl and drown.

  We mix in secret spices,

  magic herbs,

  seal it in glowing jars

  to send throughout the land.

  All who taste our chilies

  must dream of us,

  women with eyes like rubies,

  hair like meteor showers.

  In their sleep forever our breath will blaze

  like hills of chilies

  against a falling sun.

  The Widow at Dawn

  After Satyajit Ray’s Ghare-Baire