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.

Babur in Samarkand

Breeze from the hills blows between walls of mausoleum,
ascends on ribs of blue domed prayers
to wrap him in muteness.

The city carries memories of watercourses that
like veins rumble and knot close to the
heart of the land.

Gardens are young maidens that open their blouse,
bare pomegranates  - a  rash of desire smears an ache
that like a needle pricks him.    

He lays her on the cool mosaic of his colonnade,
the cool stone breathing through the pores in her neck
wrapped in a turquoise band.

City pants in tumescence with sharp cries of battle,  
the young emperor  is the dervish spirited
by his passion for the land.

Babur in Farghana

The clear air crackles over the steppe,
trembles blue of a pool where breast of bird
skims the surface like a sigh.
His tunic is splattered with mud, ropes of hair
fall on eyes turbid like dark lake,
nomadic blood runs like streams that crisscross
the land his ancestors essayed.
Turban laced with sapphires cradles
rinds of melons from Farghana country.
He reads the horizon as he would a poem,
counts the rolls of hills fading purple at distance;
considers he’ll pitch his kingdom where blue
gets ashen grey.

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)

The Daughter Of Fire

She loathes to be shared by them
laid by each one of them: fakes orgasms,
turns the face away – one for sure has halitosis,
he chews basil leaves from the palace garden,
                            cardamom pod under his tongue when he kisses.

Her body desires the archer:  lover with long fingers
that ease the tense string of passion . She craves for more
pleads that he doesn’t go to his other women.
He is no good lover, they hiss; how is he with you?
                                                                      they ask her.

Her eyes cloud in fury, the rich silk
cuts her body like the knife he uses in the kitchen:
he touches her tenderly drawing maps of sweat on her skin.
No.
                                  She is done with love making. 
 
He fumes and screams in sleep like an animal.
She refuses to cover her breast
he sees these pawed and maligned
not an object of desire anymore
                                  lascivious eyes had feasted on them.

He kills again and again for her.
Her hair matted with blood, breasts
caked with gore. She will not let them touch her
anymore: they have whored her.
                                                      The cursed woman.

(The cursed woman is a powerful character from an Indian epic. Read here.  I have been fascinated by  Mahasveta Devi’s reading of this character. Read this. It is from here I borrow the trait of the wronged woman refusing to cover her breasts. The breast is no more an erotic object but an object of revenge, a reminder of male impotency.)  

POW

Land Of Dreamers

We left the village of Dangs in Saputara
walked through deciduous leaved paths
black basalt rock were jade hued with moss
where sunlight didn’t penetrate

Higher, mountain got scraggy and peaks bald
soil golden dust the colour of a tiger’s coat
wind howled carrying scents of forests below
a Dang sat unmoving warning us ‘wagh hai’

That’s what they said in the village
looking up at the hills as though at the heavens
the tiger had come as far as that mountain there
eyes clouded with memory of a different time

Census does not map this region for tigers
still a Dang herding his cattle high there
as another sitting pensive on the  cliff
watching the blue skies, warn ‘wagh hai’

They dream tigers here
like their cousins Ratwa Bhils
dream of horses racing on their pastures

All these peoples indigenous to my country
spread across central India
adorn her like a richly jeweled girdle

Oh, they have beautiful dreams.

( ‘wagh hai’ , in Marathi, means ‘there are tigers’)

Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo # 18 NaPoWriMo Day 18

 

The Politics Of Remembering

The more I gather details about my family history, the seven siblings of my mother’s grandmother and the seven siblings of my mother’s grand father, I find myself drawn deeper in the mire of relationships, loose ends that need to be routed to some path somewhere that I have to painstakingly unearth not through the easy means of calling up an uncle here, an aunt there. The uncovered  branches, the partial details, the contradictory references by two different people to certain details, the facts that had not been put to verification over all the years emerge tantalizingly before me as I hastily write down in my diary the questions that want to scale the gaps and crease out contradictions. It is then that I realize that I have to carry the darkness within me, write about them and accept that at no point in the chronicling will I have clarity over everything because I am dealing with history, history created through memory and partial remembering – partial because there are not people to narrate all the facets of the story, and partial also because we choose to forget certain things.

Pathways Of Blood

Whenever my mother started in this manner, “My mother’s father had seven siblings and my mother’s mother had seven siblings,” I fled from the place. Just a few days ago my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, said that when they were children every other day several first and second cousins of his mother with their families dropped in at their Pelathope residence in Mylapore. My grandmother had many half brothers whom she called as her brothers, cousins whom she called brothers; ironically she did not have a single straight brother or sister whom she shared her mother’s womb with. I thought being a single child makes life simple, but certainly not in the case of my grandmother as my mother and uncle had me understand!  

My uncle recalled how he and his siblings constantly asked my grandmother to help them understand how the uncles, aunts, cousins were related. At a simplistic level that the children naively initially mistook as the end all of cognition, she traced the straight forward and immediate way in which she was related to all the people who dropped in with their families; at a tormenting level she explained how the cousin’s/ uncle’s wife was related in other ways as well. No relationship ran a single way, there were crisscrosses – an aunt was related to an uncle even before marriage through a brother’s wife or a sister’s husband or an aunt’s sister-in-law. Or she teased her children’s  young and tender brains further by adding how the cousin’s wife was also her sister’s sister-in-law’s husband’s uncle’s daughter. 

To understand theses labyrinthine pathways of blood and relationships called for an alert mind that processed the data and assigned it to slots, the slots that were  permeable and punctured several times with conduits of alliances  to such an extent that these slots were defined not by its exclusiveness but by these jabs that rerouted blood pathways. 

I presume there was not a dull moment in the lives of my mother and her siblings with the constant influx of brothers (?!), aunts and uncles into their Mylapore home that served as a hub for all those people coming from Mayavaram, Edakudi, Kumbakonam, Karur  and several other places in Thanjavur jilla where an uncle was a mirajdar,  an aunt had been taken as a bride from or where a cousin had been married into.

The Deep Sea Of Memory

I can talk now, tell the story of my parents. I can write of the guilt I feel now of having been so absorbed in my own world that I never knew what my mother went through at the death of her parents, at the passing away of her younger brother and on losing another brother to schizophrenia. 

Looking back now, after nearly two decades, my mother then would have been as old as I am now. I pick my memory to reconstruct my mother’s life at that time.   I wade through the deep sea of childhood memories to cast light on the relationships in her life that mattered so much to her, at the losses that pained and paralysed her. 

Memories of my grandfather’s home concretize in my mind, the memories are that of a small and young girl. The memories of a twelve something girl is seen through the sensibility of the adult that I am now. This might be a step away from truth as my consciousness penetrates through a different time and this has made me in fact two different individuals – a child that saw and a woman that wants to immortalize her mother by fleshing her out in different relationships, in seeing her life crisscross several lives.

This exercise is also largely to exorcise the guilt I experience that I perceived my mother selfishly only in relation to me, in relation to my emotional wants and needs. The sun shone brightly on me, as a small and young girl,  through the  dappled leaves as I felt my mother’s care and love nourish me. But, the corner of my mind always registered her joys, her pains and her agonies. All this, I hope to establish by unearthing memories that I had not acknowledged before. 

So my exercise now is to hold the flashlight away from me, at all the people who were close to my mother, at my memory of the events that did not necessarily have to do with me, at the warm corners in my grandfather’s home where my mother grew and whose images I am certain she carried vividly till the day of her death.

Gandhi, More Than Family

I visited the Raj Ghat with my husband and son on October 3rd. We handed over our slippers at the counter for safekeeping and paid one rupee for each pair. There were racks where you could leave your slippers without paying money. I observed that many opted to do that. Near the shoe rack, on a marble slab are inscribed Gandhi’s words. I read it aloud as my son listened. It said that every thought and action of ours should bring a change in the lives of the poorest of the poor. We went in and stood before the Samadhi. There were not too many visitors, there was a family standing before the samadhi and posing for a photograph, a group of men languidly stretched on the freshly watered lawn, a group of workers were dismantling the stage set for musicians and bhajan singers, rolls of white bedsheets and bolsters were heaped – the October sun on the white linen stung our eyes.

These were the many distractions that I had to tide over while I tried thinking what Gandhi means to me now and how I can take this man across to my 13 year old son. I did not want a history class with him. There were several one liners that I had directed at him during the times he got addicted to action movies and thought that power and strength were only of the physical kind. I used Mahatma Gandhi as an illustration of my point ‘True strength lies in forgiving and letting go’, ‘A great war can be won without raising your little finger’ – there were punch lines that I created and chanted like slogans when he got back home after boxing someone’s ears. I knew these were very simplistic and told myself several times that I would present the complexities involved in any struggle like the one Gandhi spearheaded, once my son grew up. So when my son got carried away with Sylvester Stallones and Arnold Scwhazeneggers I introduced him to Richard Attenborough’s movie ‘Gandhi’.

When I saw the film with my son I realised how much I had underestimated his power to critically reflect. When he saw the scene where Gandhi compels Kasturi ba to clean the toilet my son observed, “So Gandhi’s wife refused to support him.” He was upset that Kasturi ba had to be forced, Gandhi’s sudden burst of anger that was shown in the film went against his understanding of Gandhi. He at once saw that Gandhi was also coercing Kasturiba at a very subtle level by making her do what she loathed from the bottom of her heart. That made him uncomfortable about Gandhi.

On seeing the film he was surprised that freedom struggle involved so much blood shed despite the fact that Gandhi was involved in it. He had believed that Gandhi delivered the goods for Indians and that he carried on his frail shoulders the fate of our country. He learnt that Gandhi was not in total control and that there were forces that were beyond his control. And that non-violence and non cooperation did not always yield positive result.

As a sole historiographer of India’s struggle for freedom in my son’s home education process and in my keenness to use Gandhi for a personal agenda I had caused enough damage and have been unfair to true historical thinking.

I recollected that Mahatma Gandhi was like family to me when I was my son’s age. I grew up hearing how my grand father was a Gandhian, how my father’s cousin wore Khadi as a protest, my father waited as a young boy at the Kumbakonam railway station to see Gandhi who was travelling past the town. I was strongly advised to read Gandhi’s autobiography, large tracks of it was narrated as stories when I was barely a toddler – especially the episode of Gandhi refusing to take the help of his teacher to spell right as it amounted to cheating the School Inspector, and the story of Harish chandra came en route Gandhi. I grew to feel pride at the legacy of Nehru and Gandhi; my opinions of critical political events were influenced by this. I grew to believe that Hindu-Muslim conflict broke Gandhi and the Indo-China war ruined Nehru. A great sense of tragedy accompanied such knowledge. My understanding of colonial and post colonial history was embedded in the common sense discourse of the middle class Hindu milieu that I hail from. The trite history texts in fact remained independent of the rich narrative that I acquired otherwise. I did not have the tools to critically read these narratives till I came to college. The teenage phase of defiantly declaiming the past should not be accounted for.

At Raj Ghat I had read to my son Gandhi’s words with a voice filled with passion. As I stood on the lawns I told myself that I should not sell Gandhi, my son can find Gandhi on his own. So as we stepped out to wear our slippers I read the same words with a controlled voice and placed Gandhi for my son to analyse and understand in the way he deems fit. Two generations away, distanced by time and with the shadow cast by the specific historical period paling away, for an adolescent Gandhi is no more a name invoked by an anxious mother driving home a point about ahimsa. I have observed my son sift certain rudimentary tools to analyse historical events, I might offer him simple frames of class, caste and class to understand Gandhi. Any suggestions?