Poetry

The Patio

This is the space of distilled things.

Sunlight filters through the jagged
red edges of leaves and a Carnatic raga
in the house across the street
is pleasanter for being remote
and beyond my control. Still further,
the faint sounds of delighted shouts
over something surprisingly found.

Pale-headed Anthurium speckle
the green. Pure. Spatulate. Each
tentatively nodding flower holed
with little flecks of emptiness
where body should have shone.
The snails have been at it again.

Oil lamps in bright pink, gold and
green, now extinguished, are calm
as a row of Kathakali dancers at rest,
their masks off, hands still.
The night’s festivities are over,
they seem to say, and it is time
to seek the darknesses.

I gulp the cool, clear rustle of air.
Its sharpness on my tongue is the
memory of unripe berries, peppermint,
orgasm. I curl my toes into moist soil
hear the earth cake between them.
I will walk to the store this way
barefoot, earth-smudged, sated.

*First published at Cha: An Asian Journal

Arambol, Goa

The smell of hashish in the air is a dancing
thing. The girl’s small, curved hands are

like two shells in sleep. The bartender
raises his foot and brings it down on a

crab, spilling its meat onto the sand, leaving
a pattern in entrails. I eat my tuna salad.

The boys on the beach turn over in their sleep
and the one-eyed man in the café cups

his face thoughtfully. Such violence
on gentle shores is common.

In the distance, a blue boat is a blemish
I could rub away, a

transgression. The beach continues to
burn in its silent, unstoppable way.

*First published at Cha: An Asian Journal

Parvati
(the migrant’s wife)

When the wind comes down from the hills
and palm trees fling their leaves about
like Sufi saints stepped off the edge,
she lies on a mat on the floor,
arms out,
and listens to coconuts falling on the roof
like tough-shelled meteors.

In her, quiet,
is the cry of marauding elephants
Grey. Heavy. It flattens her.

Parvati, woman of the foothills,
woman of hard hands and bright teeth,
woman who endlessly waits.

Woman whose waiting is a wound
that will not let skin
close over it,

A wound full of tree, grass, rain
and the smell of mud

Woman who bears the hollows in deep places
but feels herself break
with the slow burn,
the stench in the night
of things growing old.

*Parvati is a migrant’s wife who I met in the villages near Jaigaon, a small town on the border of India and Bhutan.

** First published at Kritya

The Nizam’s Wives

Four girls in brocade,
tussar and stiff smiles, the
slow stranglehold of gold
on their hands, necks, faces.

They were the children who aged early.

Were they friends? Did they
share their fractured power
while swapping dolls, diamonds
and nights? Or were their eyes
darting and vicious over the pudding?
Did they avoid the bath at certain times?

Perhaps, three of them colluded
against the fourth, leaving
frogs on her bed, peas
under her mattress, spit
in her tea.

We can’t know. In this
photograph, they are
just four girls. Let out of purdah
frightened and unblinking
into the cameraman’s flash.

*First published at Kritya

The Names

Poet. Believer. Infidel.
Lover. Atheist. Bitch

These are mine.

Memorise them. Slake tongue
with them. Feed your thirst.
Open them to pure midnight
and turn them to gold.

Stripped of them,
I am unsyncopated,

flat as slate, diminished
by your thick face in dreams.

It is not enough to know the names.

You must speak them loudly
in rooms, pile them into cars
on smoggy evenings and drive
them around the city, check them
in as misshapen lumps of baggage
on cheap flights, hurl them
across continents.

This is who I am, you must say.
(Not so much who, as what
or perhaps, which and how.)

But what if a gun cracks your sleep open
and you’re running through
fields of blood?

and you’re on your knees,
arms clenched around your belly
for an unnameable loss?

and you don’t know if the shriek
will twirl in mid-air and disappear?

Will you know if something is still true
when there are no names for it?

*First published at Kritya