Kambu Koozhu

Children lie on their bellies, reach for cobs
of tall grasses growing in dry sluices,
seeds burst on fingers like confetti of pearl drops.
They brew sunshine, mix in breeze of the hills,
they walk past dry farmland chewing juicy stalks,
take time to sit on haunches and trace paths of snakes
which heave out of rocks that breathe silent heat.
They carry bouquet of grasses with cones of millet
for their mothers to cook mid noon broth.

Kambu – pearl millet / bajra
Koozhu – porridge 

Day 15 Poem A Day Challenge : “For today’s prompt, think of a favorite regional cuisine, make that the title of your poem, and then, write the poem.”

For the recipe of kambu koozhu or pearl millet porridge, go here.

Babur in Kabul

The northern wind from the Hindu Kush
set the talisman tied to the doors jangle,
prayers of souls drowned the lake, greened
the meadow. Dead skin from wintry nights

in the cold desert fell away like vermins in
the warm embrace of smoked rhubarb
that filled the air of the hill country,
blue with traces of  silver and lapis lazuli.

Fields stained red with madder roots
spread like shawl of heavens at his feet, but
he sought echoes of different nights,
visions of lands that entombed lost legacies.

Ashwamedha

                                            Each of the organisms 
                                              that flies in the sky
                                                swims the water,
                                                 walks the land
                                           is the sacrificial horse.

The adhvaryu measures the sacrificial land,
fills chants like breath into an inert body:

thus an unremarkable clearing 
becomes centre of heavens and earth:

what is the navel of the universe?
what is the farthest end of the earth ?

The sacrifice is the navel of the universe
the altar  is the farthest end of earth

Temporary huts spring up, become little factories,
a  melee of activities: stakes built from felled trees,

knobs fashioned with care to bind the stake;
ropes made by firmly twisting durba grass,

finely woven cloth to lay the sacrificial horse  
and shroud him with the chief queen,

gold smelted in furnaces for the queens
for the sacrificial horse on its return a year after -

all strung by chants, words coded in brain
first to last – last to first. He builds the altar

eyes feverish, mind in vigilance.
Every utterance, action unites the horse with

Prajapati whose right eye fell down and swelled,
became the white horse with dark patch -

stories that the hotŗ narrates,
the sacrificer king listens while the horse roams,

a year his thoughts follow  the horse across the earth,
the cloud of dust it leaves with a retinue of 400 people.

(First, the poets created the world in metaphors:

Drops of gold
melted from the sun, the horse -
the whinnying white animal
with wings of eagle
gait of antelope, flashes across the sky;
its russet mane
like light dances on the floor of forests.

This, coded as manual of rituals,  
mnemonic verses welded in memory

notwithstanding obscurities
where cognition crumbled.)  

Prajapati desired the horse that he was, desired sacrifice;
desire is heat that dispersed as gods to be propitiated -

a sacrificial animal victim for each of the gods,
parts of the universe: the sky, grass, heavens. 

Bestow dark necked goat, a deep hued goat,
a white one, black one, two with shaggy hind thighs.

And the horse for Prajapati.
Queens like the metre of  poetry
 
write on the horse, mark the path for the knife; 
adhvaryu carves the ribs dexterously,

cleaving the limbs with love and without hurt,
endearingly: you do not die, you are not harmed.

one two three four… thirty-four, calling them out
offers the first to Agni … the thirteenth to Yama…

every muscle, every tendon to each of the organisms
that flies in the sky, swims the water, walks the land. 

_________________________________

From the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda and Shatapatha Brahmana.

Among these, the Rig Veda is the oldest text, dated to 1500 – 1000 BCE . The Rig Veda consists of ten books or ten mandalas (about 1028 verses), composed by different families of priests.  These are hymns dedicated to Agni, Indra, Surya, Varuna, Rudra, Vishnu, Soma, Ushas.

Ashwamedha finds a mention in 2 consecutive verses in the  Book I of Rig Veda (1.6.2, 1.6.3). One verse through exuberant poetic imagery celebrates the beauty and power of the sacrificial horse, it is compared to Aditya, Yama and Varuna. The other verse details the horse sacrifice; though it states the slaughter of the animal, there is an urge in the poets to communicate the deathless quality of the animal because of its divine nature, there is a plea not to harm the animal. Sacrifice is metaphoric in the early Vedic world. It got interpreted as a ritualistic exercise in the later Vedic period.

Yajur Veda that includes two branches- the Krishna Yajur and the Shukla Yajur, contains mantras and verses to be recited during various rituals and different sacrifices. It is dated to have been composed after 1000 BCE and not later than 900 BCE and 800 BCE respectively.

Shatapatha Brahmana (700 BCE) contains explanations and discussions on various sacrifices and rituals. It executes minute detailing of how various rituals and sacrifices have to be performed.

Adhvaryu recited the verses from the Yajur Veda and oversaw the rituals involved in a sacrifice. He practically did all the manual work of the sacrificial rites. Hotŗ recited verses from the Rig Veda.

Satyavati And Vyasa

The man from the mountains
ferreted out the fish girl; feet sore

with calluses, he descended the hills
like a mountain lion and sniffed her skin

scaled in water. (He stepped out the river boat
water at the bottom slurped, a hood over

his head he disappeared beyond the copse
to a path that took him again to the mountains.)

Like a sprig of herb ruffled by breeze 
smelling of radiance, in the warmth

between her legs she cradled silence.
A word snarled in skeins of sounds

swelled in her belly, looped into tales
till the tangles stretched her uterus;

her story got written in her womb
where the Kuru dynasty swam:   

Vyasa birthed Satyavati and the Kuru clan,
blurring who mothered whom.

Yama And Yami

Yama died, stepped across the divide of the pasture;
there he sat on the cool grass, drank the fresh pressed Soma
as he thought of his sister Yami he left behind: she was
a lover he had denied, his twin of destiny /desire –
they lay together in their mother’s womb – man/woman.

Her flesh he shared, her breath his, the hair that
blew  on his face as she bent to pick a flower,
he had gathered into curls of order on her neck,
the down on her neck he had seen bristle on cold evenings
that they as children spent alone on the banks of the river.

Their beautiful mother the dear daughter of Tvastr,
the free spirit of the skies could not be made to yield to
banalities of parenting: changing diapers, cleaning snot,
spooning messy drools of porridge. She complained
she had perpetual headache and that light swam behind her eyes.

After bearing Yama Yami she refused to lie with her husband,
Vivasvat – the glorious Sun; he was too radiant, gave her a migraine.
She darkened the chambers in her palace with thick curtains,
desultorily spent the afternoons sipping cool chalices of Soma
as her neglected children sat in the cold porch outside her room.

Yama and Yami the inseparable twins were the only mortals
in the world of gods – blood and clay, sweat and desire
that made and unmade them at birth. One day was like another
as she baked bread and stirred soup for him – she felt
alone as life passed by, angry that he never touched her.

Eyes rheumy with age she sat in the dark kitchen
not quite recognising the man her brother became -
shifting on his feet, looking into the blue depths of the sky
beyond the radiance that their father shed on the earth.
One day she brought him a kernel of pumpkin soup

and found him dead, the breeze from the mountains
on the skin that she knew so well.  It had never happened before-
Death. Gods didn’t know what to do with a dead man.
But Yama knew, lived for this death 
to step into a world that was left for him to create.

No Viswakarma could do that convincingly:
you should have lived to die, have the fire claw-singe your flesh,
feel the body mix with the earth, eyes with the sun,
breath with the wind. Death calls for compassion,
to deliver the dead you must be compassionate like Yama.

(Yama and Yami were twins, born to Saranyu and Vivasvat or Surya. Saranyu was the daughter of Tvastr or Hiranyagarbha, she was a wild and free spirit who could not be pinned to domesticity of marriage and child raising. Yama was the first mortal to experience death . This poem is drawn from the allusions to Yama and Yami in the Rig Veda (10.13, 10.14, 10.15) where Yama is still a human persona and has not been mythologised into the Lord of Death.)

 

Satyavati And Parashar

He seeks her in the crevices under the arms -
smell of fish, the river bed, weeds that dance in the water;

she ferries him across the Ganga, dreams in her eyes
like the distant moon, blue in a honeyed night.

In the velvety darkness through speeding currents
in the folds of her misted skin he inhales

the smell of worms and algae that swim
in the depths of her eyes; as the pool of passion

surges and stirs, he ingests fragrance of the musk
under her breasts that roll down the waist like heads of

sleepy children. She is no longer a secret he carries
in his loins, she has spilled into kingdoms far and in history.

(Out of this union Satyavati gave birth to Vyasa, the master story teller of the great Indian story)

Garuda

Mandala

Ashvatha tree is the Ficus religiosa or the peepal, also called the sacred banyan tree in India. There are references to this tree in the Vedas, Bhagavad Gita and the Puranas.

The poem refers to the vision experienced by sage Markandeya while meditating on the banks of the river near his ashram. After incessant rain that blinds the sage’s vision he observes the trees, the mountain, the land around him disappear in a sea of water. The universe is plunged in darkness and in what appears like pralayam (the deluge that ends the world) the sage floats desolately till he sees a peepal tree stand alone in the sea of water and his eyes focus on the emerald glow at the centre of a leaf.

Drawing near, the sage sees Krishna the child lying on the leaf. Sucked in by a deep breath from the child, Markandeya sees millions of universes and millions of suns, successive creations and destructions, the land of the devas, the earth, the plants and animals, the mountains, the river that flows thick with silt through the mountains, his ashram on the banks of the river where he is seated in deep mediation.

‘Mandala’ in Sanskrit means ‘circle’.

(The banyan leaf and the figs were done in Adobe Illustrator.)

Translating A Sangam Poem

(I have translated a Kapilar’s poem from ‘Ahananuru’. This got featured in the edition on Tranlsations in Qarrtsiluni )

What Her Friend Said As Golden Flowers Covered The Hill

by Kapilar (Ahananuru 2)

Banana and jack fruits
ripened, weigh down from trees
in your mountain slope;
they fall in the cool pool of water
gathered in the rocks.
The thirsty male monkey
drinks the fermented sap
mistaking for water,
intoxicated he sleeps on flowered bower
unable to climb the sandalwood tree
its trunk twisted with pepper creepers:
when pleasures are easily attained in your land
you can never be insatiate.
My beautiful friend
shoulders slender like bamboo
has love for you that is unstoppable,
come to her as the moonlight
drenches the hills
scented by the Vengai flowers.

*

The Sangam Age in Tamil Nadu (2nd century B.C. to 3rd century A.D.) was the greatest period of literary outpourings. Tolkapiyam (literally meaning”‘Old Composition”), a detailed treatise on grammar and poetics written at this time, defined the Sangam poetic tradition.
According to Tolkapiyam, a poem either lay in the inner space of love, relationships and feelings (aham) or in the public realm of kings, war and community (puram). The aham poems or poems of the interior grew from the four landscapes of the Tamil country: the mountain region (Kurinji), forest lands (Mullai), the agriculture lands about river basins (Marudam), the coastal region (Neidal) and the parched hill slopes or forests (Palai).

Each of these landscapes with their gods, plants, animals, tribes of people and their occupations, watering holes, drums, and music became a rich repertoire of images, symbols and metaphors. This exterior landscape that mapped an interior terrain of emotion and feeling got associated with a phase of love. Thus a whole world of signifiers in the outer landscape with various living forms and cultural codes signified specific human feelings.

Kurinji landscape, the lush and beautiful land with waterfall and high hills was associated with the burst of passion in the first union of lovers. Mullai, the verdant forest land with the fragrance of wild jasmine, was associated with the patient waiting of lovers before their union in marriage. Neidal, the coastal plain, was inhabited by hardy fishing folk who lived at the edge of life. This landscape was associated with the feeling of anxiety experienced by the lover waiting for her man who has braved the stormy ocean. Marudam, the fertile river plains and centre of urban life, was associated with infidelity and misunderstanding between lovers. Palai referred to the forest land and hillside parched by the scorching heat of sun in the summer months. The bleak and relentless dry lands of Palai were associated with the feeling of desolation experienced by lovers in life’s harsh terrain.

Ahananuru is a collection of 400 poems written by over 145 poets. “What Her Friend Said As Golden Flowers Covered The Hill” is the second poem from this collection and is written by Kapilar. The poem is set in the mountain region (Kurinji landscape). Kurinji is also the name of a flower (Strobilanthes kunthiana) that blossoms in hundreds on the slopes of the hills once in twelve years. Bamboo trees, sandalwood, jackfruit and Vengai trees (Pterocarpus bilobus or the Indian Kino tree) grow luscious on the cool hills where waterfalls and pools of water are cradled between rocks. This region is a veritable haven for monkeys, elephants, wild bulls, peacocks and parrots. The hill tribe people who worshipped Cheyon or Murugan the god of war and beauty, collected honey, fruits and grew wild millets.

The honeyed fruits of banana and jack that fall in pools of water, the intoxicated male monkey are metaphoric signifiers of the pleasure that the man seeks in the first union with his woman during their clandestine meeting in the dead of a moon drenched night.

Gayatri Mantra

Om
mother of sounds       resonance of silence
               echoes from depths

into the mind: a mud of sloth
sapphire blue radiance of  earth
space beyond perception: ether     

where topaz uncut
            a crystal of  colourless existence
reflects million suns

effulgences  effulgences effulgences

that I carry in my prayer bead.

Day 25
Poetic Asides – write a prayer poem
Read here for the Gayatri Mantra