The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He Being Neither Muslim nor Hindu in India
To be no part of this hate is deprivation.
Never could I claim a circumcised butcher
Mangled a child out of my arms, never rave
At the milk-bibing, grass-guzzing hypocrite
Who pulled off my mother's voluminous
Robes and sliced away at her dugs.
Planets focus their fires
Into a worm of destruction
Edging along the continent. Bodies
Turn ashen and shrivel. I
Only burn my tail.
Meena Kandasamy
i am a dead woman walking asylum corridors,
with faltering step, with felted, flying hair,
with hollowed cheeks that offset bulging eyes,
with welts on my wrists, with creasing skin,
with seizures of speech and song, with a single story
between my sobbing, pendulous breasts.
once i was a wife: beautiful,
married to a merchant: shifty-eyed.
living the life, until he was lost in listless doubt—
of how, what i gave him was more delicious
than whatever, whatever had been given to me.
his mathematics could never explain
the magic of my multiplying love—this miracle—
like materializing mangoes out of thin air,
like dishing out what was never there.
this discrepancy drove him away:
a new job in another city.
he hitched himself to a fresh and formless wife.
of course, as all women do, i found out.
i wept in vain, i wailed, i walked on my head, i went to god.
i sang in praise of dancing dervishes, i made music
for this world to devour on some dejected day.
i shed my beauty, i sacrificed my six senses.
some called me mad, some called me mother
but all of them led me here,
to this land of the living-dead.
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
never worrying
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside.
A home that I can wear lightly,
where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to fill in the crevices.
A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting.
Meena Alexander
'It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves'
Wallace Stevens
I
Twilight, I stroll through stubble fields
clouds lift, the hope of a mountain.
What was distinct turns to mist,
what was fitful burns the heart.
When I dream of my tribe gathering
by the red soil of the Pamba River
I feel my writing hand split at the wrist.
Dark tribute or punishment, who can tell?
You kiss the stump and where the wrist
Bone was, you set the stalk of a lotus.
There is a blue lotus in my grandmother’s garden,
its petals whirl in moonlight like this mountain.
II
An altar, a stone cracked down the spine,
a shelter, a hovel of straw and sperm
out of which rise a man and a woman
and one is a ghost though I cannot tell which
for the sharpness between them scents
even the orchids, a sharing of things
invisible till the mountain fetches
itself out of water out of ice out of sand
and they each take tiny morsels
of the mountain and set it on banana leaves
and as if it were a feast of saints
they cry out to their dead and are satisfied.
III
I have climbed the mountain and cleared
away the sand and ice using first my bare hands
then a small knife. Underneath I found
the sign of the four-cornered world, gammadion,
which stands for migration, for the scattering
of the people. The desolation of the mothers
singing in their rock houses becomes us,
so too the child at the cliff’s edge
catching a cloud in her palm
as stocks of blood are gathered on the plain,
spread into sheaves, a circlet for bones
and flint burns and the mountain resurrects itself.
IV
Tribe, tribute, tribulation:
to purify the tongue and its broken skin
I am learning the language again,
a new speech for a new tribe.
How did I reach this nervous empire,
sharp store of sense?
Donner un sens plus pur etc. etc.
does not work so well anymore,
nor calme bloc ici-bas.
Blunt metals blossom.
Children barter small arms.
Ground rules are abolished.
The earth has no capitals.
In my distinct notebooks
I write things of this sort.
Monsoon clouds from the shore
near my grandmother’s house
float through my lines.
I take comfort in sentences.
“Who cares what you write?”
someone cries.
A hoarse voice, I cannot see the face.
He smells like a household ghost.
There can be no concord between us.
I search out a bald rock between two trees,
ash trees on the riverbank
on an island where towers blazed.
This is my short
incantation,
my long way home.
William, Rabindranath, Czeslaw,
Mirabai, Anna, Adrienne
reach out your hands to me.
Now stones have tongues.
Sibilant scattering,
stormy grace!
Kamala Das
You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her
In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge
Of yet another man that I came to you but to learn
What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every
Lesson you gave was about yourself. You were pleased
With my body's response, its weather, its usual shallow
Convulsions. You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured
Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed
My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices. You called me wife,
I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering
Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and
Became a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your
Questions I mumbled incoherent replies. The summer
Begins to pall. I remember the rudder breezes
Of the fall and the smoke from the burning leaves. Your room is
Always lit by artificial lights, your windows always
Shut. Even the air-conditioner helps so little,
All pervasive is the male scent of your breath. The cut flowers
In the vases have begun to smell of human sweat. There is
No more singing, no more dance, my mind is an old
Playhouse with all its lights put out. The strong man's technique is
Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses,
For, love is Narcissus at the water's edge, haunted
By its own lonely face, and yet it must seek at last
An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors
To shatter and the kind night to erase the water.
