1. Chronology (for a visitor)
I’ve seen echoes of time
reverberating from alabaster and steam,
pumped from the red earth
into dark hands, bowls, mouths,
the clout of a man
hanging by a white thread
slung across a sunken chest.
The ghosts of the unborn children
draped like laundry on a rickshaw’s torn roof.
In the shade of a Bodhi tree
old men in saffron secure a place
in their grandfather’s heaven,
chanting ti the roar of traffic.
The bawling of a herd of goats
trapped in the alleys of cement and glass,
the young bride, the blood-red smear on her brow,
sitting on the kinetic metro,
her emerald sari a cocoon of silk
encasing her generation in dichotomy.
2. Mosquito Bite (For the mosquito who bit my &#^*@)
Literally on that little spot, so hard to reach.
Lucratively I let myself scratch
the heat reaching 100 degree Kelvin, the satisfaction
kinetic, just enough to justify
touching myself in public. Jubilee!
I can scratch as I jauntily walk, though
I am internally nearly insane with hysteria
as my hyperactive awareness of the hidden welt
heightens, and I groan. Go to Hell, mosquitoes!
Greedily you gorged on my blood,
gluttony growing into a fully-fledged
feeding frenzy, fastidiously filling
your entire mouth with energy
that emanated from my heart.
I cannot enumerate my Ebonic terms
used to describe your disgusting existence,
your dirty and diligent hunt for
hemoglobin-derived sustenance.
You deserve worse than death,
but I cannot catch you, for your wings
have carried you far from here
where you craftily and cruelly prey
on creatures who cannot culturally
calm the itch. I hate you!
3. Waiting (for the men who think all white woman are whores)
Waiting for a friend. Waiting in the puddle
of amber street light, shirt buttoned
past the collar bones, the scorn plain on the face.
Just to be clear.
The crowded Vespa, seated with four, their
oiled hair long, slicked back in confidence,
slows as it passes. Three hoots of glee
for the two white women on the lip of the fence,
five whistles for a sexual prospect, four
insults for their shocked refusal.
Ten minutes for the second proposition,
two dropped jaws for a 1,000-hair mustache,
one middle middle finger for his lack of comprehension,
two blasts of the horn in defiance for the looks of surprise.
Seven drunk men with eleven words of English,
“sexy,” “name,” “Obama,” “Pamela Anderson,” “yes.”
“no?” “where,” “come,” “my place,” “yours?”
500 rupees for a creamy white night,
eight promises of love, five unwanted grabs.
Two hard slaps for one late friend,
three find that everywhere already closed at 1.
4. Rs. 150 (for the taxi driver who ripped me off)
It’s dark and rainy, sheets of eye-stinging drops
pour down, the trees crying sap and feathers
and the tide no longer follows the moon.
I am not alone, but it is little consolation
when the young men leer from the stoops,
their eyes feral and ignorant,
their tongues spurting innuendos and threats.
The cabbie sees this all, his sharp eyes
read the fear on my face.
One hundred and fifty rupees is too much,
But it’s late and his wife is waiting,
his children are hungry, cold.
We climb in, trailing drops of water
Across the cracking vinyl, the mats,
And shut the door; the handle rattles.
The engine shakes like a nervous horse.
I shake, relief and anger blurring together.
I get out and ring the bell, hand him
His money and see in his eyes
He will be going home to no one.
5. Cracker (for the street children on Diwali)
The little one cowers behind a desolate taxi
his eyes full, and shut tight against the burst
of magnesium, sulfur, and barium slicing the sky
like a bullet in the name of justice.
The air is thick with smoke, the smell
of acrid incineration sticks to the tongue
and the shadows of the apartment launch-pads,
the sky ablaze with gun powder and flash paper,
a green parachute rocket gliding above the skyline
the red flares signaling a battle won, lost
to lore of a goddess lurking in the alleys of Kalighat.
The tall one lights a rocket with a cigarette,
his eyes reflecting the sparks waltzing across the street,
the pirouetting whistler shrieking its agony
as the smog-muted echoes of explosion and flame
crackle and sparkle over a thousand tiny faces
gazing up from trash heaps and ashy curbs,
from flaps of black plastic tens and
the space between the wheels of an abandoned car.
As the golden flames rain down,
bouncing off foliage and dead cable,
the little one laughs, finally understanding
how beautiful destruction can be.
6. Pull (for the rickshaw drivers)
Like a herd of scarred oxen, they surge
forward across the roaring four lane,
their sinewy limbs straining under the weight
of moral taboo and history’s dictation.
Stopping at the corner; the knot, the slap,
the stick of watery smack,
pulsing through labyrinthine veins,
straight to the heart of India,
rich and white, pulled through sewage
and clouds of petrol exhaust and coal.
Let them bear your burdens, escort
you to the five star hotel, to the market.
Let them dwell in the past, trapped under
ribbed nylon and splintered wood.
Tuck in your toes as they pass,
those manicured toes that slip under wheels
bruise blue for those too careless to move,
who try to step too soon into the roads to Delhi,
the alleys of Chennai, the Ghats of Varanasi.
Desperation makes animals of us all.
7. Millet (for the village children outside Agra)
My mother was half my age again when she covered her face, rode a tired and ancient pannequin,
made her home anew, like a nesting hen hardly more than a fresh-feathered chick.
Her skin was youthful, moist, tight, but quickly became hard and dusty.
cracked and rough like the sturdy hut she keeps.
The stamped earth, older than us all, is my terrain,
as permanent as wedlock and as coarse as a father in his cups.
I hid in the rows of stalky millet, lost in an eternity of farming a thankless land,
the sky bleeding into a distant horizon, hazily taunting the zenith to the stretching grain.
My brother, his English as broken as Mother’s spirit, explains to the white woman in green
how he takes the goats out to graze, and she nods, sorrow and ignorance in her sky-colored eyes.
I watch her, feel her pity skim my thin shoulders and stiffen. Keep your pity, I want to tell her.
It does me little good, your bleeding heart, your fair skin.
They built a school, a two roomed cement thing
where I went every day to be beaten and taught of mathematics and grammar,
a cement square on the sandy hill with two windows that framed a snapshot of the fluffy clouds,
whose water kept no promises to feed my sisters , my mother.
I am expected to marry soon, to leave for another village with a beaten track for goats,
to sacrifice myself for my husband, my children.
To bear and to birth, to bend to the timelessness of the grains
like my mother did before me.
8. Elegy (for a dying woman)
Laying, smudged, a thumb on the pulse,
as it flutters against the folds of skin,
thin and papery like a letter
read too many times.
Hollow and brittle, like an era
shed by an advancing adder.
Clouded by memory, cruelly
branded on blurring corneas
(those eyes are exploding voids.)
A pair of hands, tracing brow and bridge,
pulling, pleading, pressing palms.
Remember. Read my body.
Each scar a story, a sonnet of experience,
sliced into skin with searing vitality,
each line a gesture of genuine emotion.
Each inch lost or gained, a push or pull,
a decision declared into the wind.
As the chrysalis collapses,
the rice paper rapper frays, fades, and is left empty:
a wishing well, full of falling pennies
that never reach the bottom.
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