Editor's Note
Jayant Kashyap’s poem ‘The Right Kind of Stealing’ reminded me of Arun Kolatkar’s ‘To a Crow’ from Kala Ghoda Poems. Kolatkar’s crow is a craftsman carefully picking out a twig to build the nest. But he does so only after careful examination making sure that it is of the right kind, of the right balance, and that it fits in with the rest.
Kashyap’s crow is his own namesake Jayanta, son of Indra, and the protagonist of this version of the myth of Samudra Manthana. Samudra Manthana is the episode from Vishnu Purana where the celestial ocean is churned by the gods and the demons and the nectar of immortality is extracted. Here, Jayanta’s journey, to fulfil the will of gods is described by Kashyap as ‘the crow’s take-a-stand / do-a-different-thing workshop / his how-to tutorial…’ Thus, Kashyap writes his crow into the tradition of crows in anglophone Indian poetry, crows who act as surrogates to the poets themselves.
Kashyap’s poems presented here all have this quality of blending the old with the new, revisiting and rewriting myths from various canons and making them undoubtedly contemporary.
— Aswin Vijayan
The Bombay Literary Magazine
The Right Kind of Stealing
When the crow got to the party, it was more a ruckus. Saw the gods and the demons
were dissatisfied.
As it is, the gods and the demons were always dis-something / dis-
this / and dis-that—the slow
kind of vocabulary. The tortoise (again, a god) had shifted under the hill too long
and the sea had now / finally! / bled some juice—the game before now
was poison: that which Shiva drank / a kindness
and the game now was an earthen pot
and what would make them immortal (hence, the ruckus): the demons wanted it
for themselves / the gods for anyone but the demons / (petty gods!) / so the crow:
son of Indra, named “victorious” and such, took it—
carried the everything-anyone-could-ever-want / the sweeter-than-wine / the earthen pot
in his beak, and the pot, flailing / flailed for twelve long days and he
didn’t rest / and stopped only a handful of times: four cities—Prayāga, etc.—
where the pot, kumbh, touched the earth / touched what it came from / and con-
secrated everything. This was the crow’s take-a-stand / do-a-different–
thing workshop / his how-to tutorial…
Artemis
after ‘Artemis’ by Yoko Kubrick
When I look at it a mother embraces her
child, when you do there is no child no
woman; a maiden you say walking through
the woods with a deer at her feet a bow
(crafted by the Cyclopes) and a quiver
around her shoulders, her lover
accidentally killed by herself or someone
—nobody knows
when they come looking, they name her
variously / Cynthia Agrotora Diana
Locheia Phoebe / and she does not
listen, young she amuses herself on
mountains with archery sends a boar1
to kill him that claims he is a better hunter
than herself midwifes three women
under a canopy by the side of Olympus
and stays there a while; when they find her
she is a bent figure holding nature to her
warmth, a virgin she now holds her child
feeds it at her bosom in a shivering
Greek midwinter
what paved the way for evolution
think of this: what if adam / came upon it by chance, this earth
and the earth was still very much water
in the distance he saw the sun dissolve
evening after evening after evening and not knowing ‘magic’
called it ‘god’
became a pilgrim / called himself john and left eve
in pursuit of ‘grace’ and never knew to return
soon eve was lonely and prayed to god but he didn’t answer
he was probably testing her patience
/ and she decided she couldn’t take it anymore / thought
of going out in search of adam but didn’t know which way
there was water all around
and every direction could be the direction he didn’t take
so she didn’t take any either and went to sleep
and the next morning she woke up / ate an apple and killed herself
Notes:
[1] “amuses herself on mountains with archery”, from a poem by Callimachus.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Yoko Kubrik. Artemis. 2023. Calacatta Michelangelo Marble. 48 x 42.2 x 31 in (121.92 x 107.19 x 78.74 cm). Source of image: filoli.
Author | JAYANT KASHYAP
JAYANT KASHYAP, the author of the pamphlets Unaccomplished Cities (Ghost City Press, 2020) and Survival (Clare Songbirds, 2019), will publish his Poetry Business New Poets Prize-winning third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, with Smith|Doorstop in 2025. Jayant has also published a zine, Water, with Skear Zines in 2021, and his poems appear in POETRY, Magma, Arc, Acumen and Poetry Wales.
Photo: by Anshika Sarin.