Poetry Defined

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land and wanting to fly in the air.

--- Carl Sandburg

Mud Houses

Mud Houses

Into the thatched huts above the canal
only my imagination is allowed to enter.

There, above the slimy hyacinths
and the crush of healthy green stalks,
up the crumbling bank of brownblack mud,
my mind bumps against pots of earth,
denting prides.

There they live, scream and curse,
milk slothful buffaloes and even
slaughter pigs sometimes,
while from between dried palmleaves
curl smoke, upwards, out into the air
like the soft sighs of grandparents.

In those lived moments,
whose pale and mottled reflections
rock unsteadily on the water's edge,
on its torpidity,
only baked mud and parched earth mater,
and jagged thatching, as safe as
the wrinkled palms of aged mothers.

Home and Exile

From "Home and Exile" by Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist and poet, among Africa's finest, and author of Things Fall Apart:

There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything. They can bring out crowds of demonstrators whenever they need them...

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It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity.

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For me there are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you have an overpowering urge to tell a story. The second, that you have intimations of a unique story waiting to come out. And the third, which you learn in the process of becoming, is that you consider the whole project worth the considerable trouble -- I have sometimes called it terms of imprisonment -- you will have to endure to bring it to fruition.

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The new literature that erupted so dramatically and so abundantly in the 1950s and 1960s showed great variety in subject matter, in style of presentation and, let's face it, in levels of skill and accomplishment. But there was one common thread running through it all: the thread of a shared humanity linking the author to the world of his creation; a sense that even in the most tempting moments of grave disappointment with this world, the author remains painfully aware that he is of the same flesh and blood, the same humanity as its human inhabitants.

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Man is a story-making animal. He rarely passes up an opportunity to accompany his works and his experiences with matching stories. The heavy task of dispossessing others calls for such a story and, of course, its makers: oral historians or griots in the past; mere writers today. Repossession, if and when it does occur, needs also its enabling stories and the singers and writers to compose them. But as we can all appreciate, there will be a wide gulf of difference between the story put out by the first group to explain or camouflage their doings and the reconstitutive annals made up by those who will struggle to reclaim their history.

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For as Dylan Thomas himself wrote in 1953, "There is only position for an artist anywhere; and that is, upright."

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...those who inhabit the world of proverbs do not spend sleepless nights worrying over provenance. They know a good proverb when they hear it and simply add it to their stock.

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...strong language is in the very nature of the dialogue between dispossession and its rebuttal. The two sides never see the world in the same light. Thus, the British might boast that they had the first empire in history on which the sun never set; to which an Indian would reply: Yes, because God cannot trust an Englishman in the dark!

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An erosion of self-esteem is one of the commonest symptons of dispossession. It does not occur only at the naive level such as we have alluded to; even more troubling is when it comes in the company of sophistication and learning. It may then take the form of an excessive eagerness to demonstrate flair and worldliness; a facility to tag on to whatever the metropolis says is the latest movement, without asking the commonsense question: later than what?

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Well, it is not true that my history is only in my heart; it is indeed there, but it is also in that dusty road in my town, and in every villager, living and dead, who has ever walked on it. It is in my country too; in my continent and, yes, in the world. That dusty little road is my link to all the other destinations.

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And so it is, again, ultimately a question of balance. You cannot balance one thing: you balance a diversity of things. And diversity is the engine of the evolution of living things, including living
civilizations."

Poetry defined

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land and wanting to fly in the air. -- Carl Sandburg

The Warning

For love -- I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

--- Robert Creeley (1957)

The Road to Thottapally

Sometimes I call myself Renjini,
at other times I choose Usha, shorter
to my breath, easier on my tongue.

It depends on what I feel,
who I'm with
or just the time of day.

But when I set out on my journey
changing names was not my intent
nor deceit a plan of the mind.

Such deviousness was never
a part of me.
All I wanted was a job,
some means to send my mother

a hundred rupees or so once in a way.
So when the Village Officer
promised to get me into

the Alleppey Government Hospital,
my heart beat faster
than ever I could recall

and I was even happier
than when our first calf
was born to Lakshmi,

brown, with one ear wrinkled
like a dry jack-leaf. That
was long ago, when I was smaller

and my mother stronger.
Lakshmi was soon sold off
and her little one taken away too

when I was off at school,
rubbing away from my nails
the Cutex we had found
on the sandy path,

smearing its crimson promise
onto my green skirt,
the uniform of our government school.

But when I set out that bright day
my skirt was not green
but of a sheen more exotic,

a kind of silk, the clothseller said,
and which the tailor near
the ration shop
felt, rubbed,sniffed; confirmed its worth.

Into my plastic airbag with its white
aeroplane angled upwards, my mother
helped me pack two more skirts,

not as fashionable, though,
three blouses with puffed sleeves,
two bras, white cotton,

a towel with a line of green
as border, and some fine cloth
to absorb the flow on those days

when I oughtn't go to the temple.
My mother saw us off
at the crowd-choked municipal bus stand

at the hour the astrologer said
was auspicious, a harbinger
of good times,
and she cried, of course,

not loudly but with quivering mouth
and thin streaks of tears
that coursed down her scale-hard cheeks.

I wept too, even though I knew
the money I'd soon send would
make her a little happier

and give her much to tell
the neighbours.
I sat on the Ladies Only side of the bus
and kept staring at my mother

as the mist of dust and exhaust smoke
rose up all around her and hid her
finally from my tear-caged eyes.

The Village Officer sat far behind
in the last row, near the huge spare tyre
and the frayed gunnysacks of copra.

Beside me was an old woman with
crinkly hair
burnished like old silver lamps
who said she was getting off too

at Haripad. In the white heat of noon
we didn't talk much, lulled
by the shimmer of the freshly
tarred road.

But when we reached our stop
she hurried off without
even a goodbye.
Perhaps she was afraid of
missing her son.

We stopped at the Jena Hotel for tea.
His was strong and dark, mine
sweet and milky. I didn't dare tell

him I like my tea strong
as I always commanded my mother
to make it. The waiter stared at me

and so did the potbellied man
who sat on the other side. I looked
out of the window, between sips.

The sand on the ridge where
the roadsmen
were working was a pale brown,
bleached
in the heat, gritting their sweat-cooled
armpits.

Each bus that swerved by threw up
a nimbus of dust that separated me
from the fuzzy row of passengers,

some nodding in sleep,
some peering out of
the windows. Some of the dust floated
over to my glass, settling

on the flotsam of tea. He paid the bill,
with money from the waistfold
of his dhoti
and hailed an autorickshaw.

We got off just before the Thottapally
spillway,
which I recalled the government
proclaim
a boon to the farmers of Kuttanad.

The hotel was wooded in green,
immersed in acres of coconut palms,
some bent, some upright,
some swaying.

He asked the man behind
the Formica counter
for a cottage. A short boy, unsmiling
in a purple uniform, came

and led us beneath the sky of coconuts
along a muddy path lined with grass
to a cottage with a door painted white.

Let's rest, said the Village Officer,
after the boy had left with his tip.
It was dusk and I could tell

it was getting darker
because the crows were quieter
outside the cottage, flying back blackly

to nestle among the palm leaves.
When he locked and bolted
the plywood door,
I began to cry.

I knew what was coming.
I thought of my mother
and the tears on her ageless face

and I bit my lip so hard
the tears stung its redness
when they reached the toothmark

many pains later.
Don't cry, he said, you'll enjoy it
after a while. All girls do.

He hurt me while I cried,
thinking of my mother
through the searing,
as he rode roughshod over the tears

that I felt writhing down
like rivers of molten ice.
He finished fast, puffing, out of breath.

The bed was narrow, the mattress foamy,
the sheet a hospital green
like tender coconuts.
I shut my eyes but it hurt all the same.

There was blood all over the sheet
and between my thighs, on my stomach
and on my fingers too.

He rose as I turned away, choked.
The wall was stippled with
red reminders of mosquitoes.

When I looked again,
he had a bidi between his teeth
and was smiling. He urged me

up, and from his black suitcase
pulled out a sari fringed with flowers.
From now on wear this, he said,

as he pulled away the bedsheet
and took it to the bathroom
where the tap soon began to run

and the squelch of washing
drowned the tinny cries of the cicadas
outside, near the paddy fields,
near the loam,

in the dark, in the blessed dark
which from that gloaming on
became an accomplice,

a confederate so close and familiar
I would burn joss sticks
to welcome him,
the god of my darkness.

I didn't get the job finally.
I never even reached Alleppey,
but I found a trade alright:

it found me, befriended my doubts.
The Village Officer was only the first
in a long line of men,

ceaseless like the waves of Kovalam
where I often go by myself,
in a cab these days.

They come and go:
government clerks, rice merchants,
doctors,
car salesmen, drunks, medical reps;

but never a Village Officer, not once
in all these years since I set out
on the hot road to Thottapally.

Sometimes I feel like a queen,
and then I never fail to call myself
Renjini, the star of the arc lights,

glittering on the screen,
the maiden of men's dreams.
But men don't dream, do they?

All they want lies between my thighs
or on my raisin nipples
or on my lips that often feel like bark

scissored with striations
of thickened deaths.
Sometimes I feel I'm just spicules
of flesh, effervescent and seething,

forming and reforming
on the edge of the sun, forever
on the road to Thottapally.

And now as I lean back on my bed,
not far from the waves I so love,
amidst the laughter of the other girls,

I wonder where my mother is:
at home winnowing paddy
in the shade of the mango tree

or at her sister's, the aunt I never knew...
Or is she no more, dead,
as I too will one day be...

Did they cremate her by
the lone tamarind tree at the edge
of the coconut grove, I wonder...

Sometimes I wish I could see her;
if only I had a body
to take out of my own, a skin

to leave behind when I go
back to the home of my mother
and her single slow groan.

Blood and mucilage won't show,
the gelatinous splotches of his semen
won't seep through. And I can always

tell my mother
the discolourations on my skirt
are just the drops of Cutex

that I found when I left her side
before I set out that day, long ago,
on the road to Thottapally.


--- first published in MANUSHI No. 60, Sept-Oct 1990

Poetry defined

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land and wanting to fly in the air. -- Carl Sandburg