‘What the Hero Said to his Heart’ and other poems

The folded blue rug

Big as a mountain

Yesterday’s dust on the table

Snapdragons far as the eye can see

Then

I am an officer of the law

Newly transferred to some godforsaken little town in the north

In tight policekhaki and Ray-Bans

My steel-toed boots go splashing through the soapy waters of Dhobhi Ghat

To wrestle down the pehelwans who dared to insult me

Then

I am terrified of ending like Firdousi

Caught between the Ghaznavids and the Samanids

He died poor and brokenhearted

Buried in his own orchard

At the edges

Then

There’s Arendt and Butler

Husserl and Heidegger

And then

I’m to acquire a degree to be in the world

They had an affair

Arendt and Heidegger

Unable to exit existence, they used an elaborate code of lights to talk like spies

Collecting interesting anecdotes does not constitute a thesis, they say

Then

I stayed up to hear a philosopher talk

The clock behind them had stopped

Just a little before 10:10

Almost advertisement time

.         Who deserves to live?

.         Whose hands hold my life?

.         Who am I free to destroy?

I must think about all these questions

But Merleau-Ponty’s buried with his mother, his wife, and his daughter

And I am alarmed at the thought of their disarticulated bones

Mingled together in an untidy heap

Then

I am Ripley blasting facehuggers with a pulse rifle and incinerator unit duct-taped together

Watching the Nostromo explode from the safety of the space shuttle

The lights on the mortuary vans blink quietly like Arendt and Heidegger in love

They come by so often they’ve stopped sounding the sirens

Just the lights will do, thank you

And the bill, please

Why wake up the living for the dead?

.         Blinkblinkblink – “I must come see you this evening and speak to your heart”

.         Blinkblinkblink – “I kiss your brow and your eyes”

Then

I get into the stasis pod

As if I knew more

But, Firdousi, I have no orchard

I have no orchard

And you have no heart for war.

At the district court

I wait behind a small man with a dandruff-dusted fauxhawk

And a tattoo that says JESUS spread across his forearm

His phone has a picture of Christ in the garden

You know the one

Hands on rock, agony on face

.         You don’t have to wait outside if you’ve done nothing wrong

.         You don’t get locked up if you’ve done nothing wrong

I pull out a hair from the sleeve of my shirt

.          It’s not mine

A woman can’t stop sneezing

A girl in lavender coloured polyester chiffons is disgusted

A lawyer with a big moustache and sharp creases in his trousers talks importantly on the phone

He looks like every corrupt Bollywood police officer

That’s the kind of lawyer I need

Corrupt and moustachioed

My lawyer’s robes are torn at the back

And she forgot to tell me I need photos for the forms

From my hotel room window

I see that the red aluminium roof below is littered with cigarette butts

I love this city like it’s my own

On the flight back home

The woman seated next to me is tall and floral

We apologize to each other for no reason

Her boyfriend has muscles

And delicate wrists encircled with faded red temple threads

Every time there’s turbulence

Her various perfumes waft over

Has she waited outside courts?

I hope not

I think she’d just fall apart

I can tell by the way she smells

#

Near Sabarmati

Where Gandhi’s dead

There’s a traffic jam

The cab driver is chewing paan

It smells red, leaden, corpuscular

Two men on a bike share a packet of gutkha

They spray red spit on to hot asphalt

It’s 46℃ in the shade

I hate this city like it’s my own

#

It’s imperative that I have radiance and repair care

An activating serum, an overnight vitalizing mask

Maybe a concentrated ginseng renewing cream

An essential balancing water

A purifying mask

It’s imperative that I eat everything

Like clouds eat the moon.

My grandmother looks grey and wrinkled

Texture like elephant skin

A shrunken little woman too small for the box

They give us little pebbles of frankincense to put into the ugly plywood coffin

And my mother glares at me when I pocket a few

She hisses and says there’s no need to carry any of that back home

It’s bad luck

There’s a lot of things she thinks is bad luck

We’re all very superstitious

Spitting thhuthhu when a good thing happens

Telling each other not to laugh too loud because it calls to sorrow

I have some frankincense from my father’s funeral

It’s in a box lined with red velvet

I consider getting rid of it once I get back home

What if it’s responsible for everything that went wrong?

.         I don’t even know if it’s frankincense

They’re hammering nails into the coffin lid

That’s a first

This is only my third rodeo, though

Fourth, if I count the uncle

Not really an uncle

Uncle-adjacent

I walked by his house where he was kept in an ice-cream storage container

It had a see-through lid

His hands were wrapped around a rosary made of sky-blue plastic beads

They kept him on ice till his children flew in from whatever country they were in

All the children fly away

We couldn’t

Now look at us

The no-money-honeys

My cousin’s brought her dog along, it’s called Coffee or Toffee

Or maybe Muffin

Something with two f’s

There’s a couple of stray dogs walking around too

Pissing and shitting on the graves

I’m half listening to my mother

.         They don’t know how to make coffins in Gujarat

.         When your grandfather died, the coffin they made him was so wide it could fit four men

.         They don’t have nice graveyards either, no one tends to them

.         We have such beautiful cemeteries back home, well-kept, quiet, with trees

.         Look at that, no one would allow a dog into a cemetery back home, the priest would throw a fit

Simithery, simithery, simithery

I like how it sounds

English but not

She’s right, it’s a good place to die in

My father thought so too

My aunt’s a mess

First her son, now this

That house is bad luck

Filled with zamindar furniture

And fat lizards crawling on the walls

I watch my brother’s hands on the wheel

The green signs along the expressway

Anyone can see he’s sad

I look like my grandmother

She didn’t like dogs

The elephant skin blanket she gave me is soft with age

Pink printed flowers now faded

She should have had a henge

A dolmen, a menhir.