‘Parable of Refutation’ & Other Poems

Mithi

I was told one needs a different eye to see this,

this once upon a time a river—still a river—

still a time—an animal time that this story isn’t about the river

or the flocks of white crows she fell in love with,

always following their silver arc of flight

into little, fragmenting streams. Neither is this story

about how forking became her nature,

creating land which resulted to people accessing her

for their livelihood. Years passed as her forking multiplied,

so did the settlement of people around her streams.

They took notice of the white crows living outside

the order of things, non-native, unusual. Slowly growing

endangered, hunted for their red tongue delicacy.

With the disappearance of the last trace of a silver in sky,

the river cursed the people of detachment

to the world—which implied the equal bearing of the curse

over herself too—constituting in the bind of this trade,

she began withdrawing astray her blades of waves,

shelving backward, continual, time worn,

fragmented, forgetting the point of her origin,

vainly seeking a hold—pulling reigns by its helm.

Losing her speed right around her gravity

at the vertices to the deposit of filth

over her—endlessly becoming the inheritor of skins—

yes, the civilization under the dirt

but the dirt itself too. There is sorrow that discloses

everything. Like Pestilence. A contact without direction.

In the pane behind your eyes, a stopped horse-carriage

on the highway—fast flashes of redlights, consistent & dense,

groves—tall palms screening the black distance

to a faraway Suburb, unfurling in the mid-vowel

of a flume, thin in the air from where we look.

Steadfast course of iron-cast barracks,

fringes flamed by mill gong cutting through fog,

shouldered by overhead wire lines,

water let out in springs in busyness, tending inchoate

debris of our looking, on both sides, to valve

sewage through our long drawn traces—their branching

forking as we go—forming an overlapping section from where we break

& meld—a stream ending in its own turning.

We close in slow. Our arc is foretold. District—what was once

  barefooted has

come to pass through sequelae of seasonal

sepsis, piles, arsenic, omen, salting; dark seams

of non-municipal readjustments—

curtailing at the rims to fit the excess at the edges,

  tight, oval

leather coverings over tinking back rows & rows

of landscape undone in the harbouring to loosen

the pivot—edging into, then disappearing—

present in an oversight—the unvalved syllable

  extracted from-

a bedrock, the bargains of domicile—deposited—

a domicile still—the basis of a point-of-view; a silvery anterior with people

to call names from. In it, lips (an hour hand striking through

its circle) pronouncing a butcher’s path.

Bombay. Bombahi. Bombeiim. Bombeye. What does it mean where we came from?

Is the form of our arrival the same as our leaving?

  our breaking?

the content of its ruins, its going about to, is this how we move now?

Where? The form of informality is impermanence,

pressed to a metal, new tendrils curve in encroachment, in rout, incessant,

swarming in a million open sockets–—lest something

  so ripe

& tight–—the tipping rubbery red into dry chaff

–—might never emerge

from a sound again. He was fast asleep, I wanted to throw up–—

our room opened into the room where four strange men slept–—

I kept the light on at our bedpost. Elsewhere

the wet foliage around the rail tracks does its work

  of claiming & avowing,

eyelength grass blades around hot mountains

of Kalwa, soil desisting the upholdings of flocks.

  Attention

is a long river stranded by its muddy concentration.

His green only as much mine

as that for the third; this passage valley between us,

fronting empty plots of land, an egret, its loneness—supple, oily,

yellowing plumes indifferent to its surrounding, its compass,

its tutelage, having made a hem of itself to look from under.

This green, its given for, its talons clawing over the line.

Starched out of its colours, specks of sun-gold, its body disinterring

into flecks to thresh in the heap, then the strung-out beads,

scattered overground diversified by gaps in trees. Outside, slow-moving

shadows played by the cycles of light falling in postponement.

In the dawn, the maker held a wide slotted needle.

A long garment awaited him.

I slept rosily in his context.

In a room the lime-washed walls are ruptured by speaking words

full with pus & those who cannot

know which room the pesticides are hoarded in

& the ones who don’t, live in Bombay, where nothing much makes

a difference. Except that people arrive in tinnitus to worry

& distract from what caused it, blood belongs to homes

& shards of tubelights to the street.

Some people go to the temple to get a fistful of water beaten on their faces,

& some to a police station or a clinic.

Mostly one of the daughters

will have it enough, the other one will lose her mind, the son will elope

but it doesn’t make much of a difference as I said,

even if it is now a routinely public inconvenience.

If one is lucky, a neighbour will interrupt to remove

the stuffed cloth off her mouth, if not her,

at least to let her scream run out.

I have packed my bag & left (which I’ve regretted the most

when the rickshaw asked me where I wanted to go) unlike

the women who take over the corner of the house

to oil their throbbing heads from all the screaming

which they assure us, we will, too, grow quiet & familiar with in time.

At first, it’s a funny pain. It now sits on the face.

That pain gave my voice the tone to speak some

words & when I did, it took me to places I didn’t know existed.

Calling my friends luking for places I didn’t care to name until my sister

accused me for the bazaar in my language

& it reminded me of the man living in a slum,

crying on the phone—

that he will die if he doesn’t see the person on the other end of the phone by tonight.

The indignity of my loneliness is his given.

My future, a rose confused: How to bloom? Stems from

that man’s hand holding the phone in gullis like veins, only veins.

No organs, no heart. Whichever route you take, you know it

by the sound at the entrance/exit that you’re stepping into a market,

a depot, a main road, holy maidan, koliwada, khumbarwada,

mukundnagar, a quiet threshold of a to-let house

of your lover.

*

Daasaratayya with five drunken men sings at a funeral

as if revealing to the dead that it was never about right or wrong

in life, it was always only about the way the voices sing

& I carried that song into everyone & I sing it to myself into the forest

that I was before all the sweetest things.

I fell by folding sheets, rolling mats & pipes, sweeping the fallen leaves

of mango leaves after the ceremony, complaining of

too much milk in the tea, laughing at the things that

made us want to pack our bags and leave,

peeling chickpeas to boil in the evening as peacocks coast

between the trees, buffaloes grazing in the deep clearing.

  Swimming in the well so deep you confuse it as a valley.

Sunflower field opening into the ground where everyone

is too busy around the tank to notice our arrival.

The storm is passed and pitchers need filling.

In the dark, I’d have died if someone from the house

behind had not turned their lights on which travelled into my

kitchen through the window—making all the utensils on my shelves

shine—

turning the white marble tiles into a floor of milk

running into the field of the man who took the sweetsops

from my shawl as if reclaiming them for his branches.

He bites them to check their ripeness. We eat the ones that were ripe

& handing me back the one still unready, he instructs me

to roast it on a slow flame.