For Abhay, Anand and Murthy,
who bring poetry into my life each day
I wish to thank the following individuals for their encouragement of my work:
Martha Levin, marvelous editor, delightful friend
Sandra Dijkstra, the best of agents and readers
Phil Levine, poet and teacher extraordinaire,
and
Gurumayi, light of lights
Parts of this manuscript won a Pushcart Prize and an Allen Ginsberg Prize.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals and anthologies in which some of the poems originally appeared.
The author wishes to thank the Gerbode Foundation and the Santa Clara Arts Council for awards that helped make this book possible.
Contents
How I Became a Writer
The Nishi
GROWING UP IN DARJEELING
The Walk
The Geography Lesson
The Infirmary
Learning to Dance
Going Home Day
The First Time
Blackout
RAJASTHANI
Two Women Outside a Circus, Pushkar
Tiger Mash Ritual
Villagers Visiting Jodhpur Enjoy Iced Sweets
At the Sati Temple, Bikaner
THE BABIES: I
THE BABIES: II
INDIAN MINIATURES
The Maimed Dancing Men
After Death: A Landscape
The Bee-Keeper Discusses His Charges
The River
The World Tree
Arjun
Cutting the Sun
INDIGO
TRAIN
MOVING PICTURES
The Rat Trap
To Mrinal Sen, on Seeing Bhuvan Shome
The Tea Boy
I, Manju
The Makers of Chili Paste
The Widow at Dawn
Storm at Point Sur
The Lost Love Words
VIA ROMANA
The Drive
The Tourists
Outside Pisa
Termini
The Alley of Flowers
Skin
YUBA CITY POEMS
The Founding of Yuba City
Yuba City Wedding
The Brides Come to Yuba City
Yuba City School
Leaving Yuba City
Woman with Kite
Indian Movie, New Jersey
How I Became a Writer
I peel off the sweaty dank of dawn bedclothes.
tiptoe to the door, soft, soft,
so the gorilla with iron fingers that waits
in the next room won’t hear me.
Sidle out. Then I’m
running, but lightly, still on my toes.
glancing back until I reach
the kitchen, thin cement strip where mother
sits at her steel bonti slicing bitter gourd
into exact circles for lunch. She has bathed already
and her damp hair covers her back
like smoke, the wisped ends
curling a little. She smiles and hands me
chalk. Under the grease-dimmed bulb
her shadow dips toward me, velvets
the bare ground. “Write shosha” she says
and shows me a cucumber, green light
sliding off its skin. “Write mulo.” Now
a daikon radish, white and gnarled, sprouting little hairs
as on an old lady’s chin. I make shapes
on the cement. It’s hard.
The tight circles of the lo
cramp up my fingers. Around us the household sleeps,
limbs gathered in, snout buried in stiff fur,
but restless, dreaming of onslaught.
Rasp of a snore, a cough,
the almost-mute fall of a pillow kicked away.
“Write mo-cha” Her cool fingers
petal over mine like the layered red plantain flower
we are writing. “Curl the mo like this.” Her voice
pours into me like syrup of palm,
amber, unbroken. On the street, sudden
angry yells. Perhaps a fish-seller or a neighbor
servant. Behind us, a clatter.
Her hand stiffens over mine, stops.
We’re both listening for that heavy stumble,
metallic hiss of pee against toilet pan, that shout
arcing through the house like a rock, her name. But
it’s only the mynah, beating black wings against the ribs
of the cage, crying Krishna, Krishna.
We suck in
the safe air, we’re smiling, I’ve completed the cha
which hangs from its stem, perfect, ripe
as a summer mango. She pulls me to her,
hugs me. Her arms like river water, her throat
smelling of sandalwood. Her skin
like light, so lovely I almost do not see
the bruise
spreading its yellow over the bone. “That’s
wonderful,” she breathes into my hair
as the sun steps over the sill
and turns the room to rainbow. And I, my heart
a magenta balloon thrown up
into the sky, away
from iron fisted gorillas, from the stench of piss,
I know I’m going to be
the best, the happiest writer in the world.
Note
bonti: curved steel blade attached to a piece of wood. It is placed on the floor and used to cut vegetables, fish, etc.
Krishna: The name of a Hindu deity symbolizing love. Pet birds are often taught to repeat the names of gods in the belief that it will bring luck to the household.
The Nishi
I
Sometimes I wake up suddenly with the blood hammering in my chest and hear it, a voice I can’t quite place, deep inside the tunnel of my ear, tiny, calling my name, pulling out the syllables like threads of spun-sugar, Chit-ra, Chit-ra.
II
When I was very little, my mother used to sing me to sleep. Or tell me stories. A jewel was stitched to the end of each, and when her voice reached that place, it took on a shivering, like moonlit water.
III
Some nights I woke to hear her through the thin bedroom wall. Not tonight, please, not tonight. Shuffles, thuds, panting, then a sharp cry, like a caught bird’s. I would burrow into the pillow that smelled of stale lint and hair oil, squinch shut my eyes so red slashes appeared, hold my breath till all I heard was the roaring in my ears.
IV
After father left her she rarely spoke above a whisper. Go to the closet under the stairs, she would say, very soft. I don’t want to see your face. Her voice was a black well. If I fell into it, I would never find my way out. So the closet, with its dry, raspy sounds, a light papery feel like fingers brushing against my leg, making me pee in my pants.
V
What do you do when the dark presses against your mouth, a huge clammy hand to stop your crying? What do you do when the voice has filled the insides of your skull like a soaked sponge?
VI
Late at night she would come and get me, pick up my dazed body and hug me to her, pee and all. I’m sorry, baby, so sorry, so sorry. Feather kisses down the tracks of dried tears. But perhaps I am dreaming this. Even in the dream she doesn’t say This won’t ever happen again.
VII
I will never have children. Because I have no dark closets in my house, because I don’t sing, because I cannot remember any of my mother’s stories. Except one.
VIII
That night she took
out the harmonium, the first time since father left. It was covered in cobwebs, but she didn’t dust them away. They clung to her fingers as she played. She let me stay and listen. Outside, a storm. When the thunder came, she let me hide my face in her lap. She was singing love songs. She sang for hours, till her voice cracked. Then she told me the tale of the Nishi. She held me till I slept, and when she put me to bed, she locked me in. It was an act of kindness, I think, so I would not be the first to discover her body hanging from the ceiling of the bedroom that was now hers alone.
IX
The Nishi, said my mother, are the spirits of those who die violent deaths. They come to you at night and call your name in the voice you love most. But you must never answer them, for if you do, they suck away your soul.
X
Sometimes I wake up, blood hammering, hear it, a voice, deep inside a tunnel, tiny, pulling out the syllables, Chit-ra, Chit-ra. I squinch shut my eyes and answer, calling her back, wanting to be taken. But when I open them I am still here, webbed in by the sound of her name, its unbearable sweetness, its unbreakable threads of spun-sugar.
Growing Up in Darjeeling
Five Poems
The Walk
The Geography Lesson
The Infirmary
Learning to Dance
Going Home Day
The Walk
Each Sunday evening the nuns took us
for a walk. We climbed carefully
in our patent-leather shoes up hillsides looped
with trails the color of earthworms. Below,
the school fell away, the sad green roofs
of the dormitories, the angled classrooms,
the refectory where we learned to cut
buttered bread into polite squares,
to eat bland stews and puddings. The sharp
metallic thrust of the church spire, small, then smaller,
and around it the town: bazaar, post office, the scab
coated donkeys. Straggle of huts
with hesitant woodfires in the yards. All
at a respectful distance, like the local children we passed,
tattered pants and swollen chilblained fingers
color of the torn sky, color of the Sacred Heart
in the painting of Jesus that hung above our beds
with his chest open.
We were trained not to talk to them,
runny-nosed kids with who-knew-what diseases, not even
to wave back, and of course it was improper
to stare. The nuns walked so fast,
already we were passing the plantation, the shrubs
lined up neatly, the thick glossy green
giving out a faint wild odor like our bodies
in bed after lights-out. Passing the pickers,
hill women with branch-scarred arms, bent
under huge baskets strapped to shoulder and head.
the cords in their thin necks
pulling like wires. Back at school
though Sister Dolores cracked the refectory ruler
down on our knuckles, we could not drink
our tea. It tasted salty as the bitten inside
of the mouth, its brown like the women’s necks,
that same tense color.
But now we walk quicker because
it is drizzling. Drops fall on us from pipul leaves
shaped like eyes. We pull on
our grey rainhoods and step in time,
soldiers of Christ squelching through vales
of mud. We are singing, as always on walks,
the nuns leading us with choir-boy voices.
O Kindly Light, and then a song
about the Emerald Isle. Ireland, where they grew up,
these two Sisters not much older
than us. Mountain fog thickens like a cataract
over the sun’s pale eye, it is stumbling-dark,
we must take a shortcut
through the upper town. The nuns
motion us, faster, faster, an oval blur of hands
in long black sleeves.
Honeysuckle over a gate, lanterns
in front windows. In one, a woman in a blue sari
holds a baby, his fuzzy backlit head
against the curve of her shoulder. Smell of food
in the air, real food, onion pakoras, like our mothers
once made. Rain in our eyes, our mouths. Salt, salt.
A sudden streetlamp lights the nuns’ faces, damp,
splotched with red like frostbitten
camellias. It prickles the backs of our throats.
The woman watches, wonder-eyed, as we pass
in our wet, determined shoes, singing
Beautiful Killarney, a long line of girls, all of us
so far from home.
The Geography Lesson
Look, says Sister Seraphina. here is
the earth. And holds up, by its base, the metal globe
dented from that time when Ratna, not looking.
knocked it off its stand and was sent
to Mother Superior. And here
the axis on which it revolves, tilted
around the sun. Like this, the globe a blur now.
land and water sloshed
into one muddy grey with the thick jab
of her finger.
Ratna returned to class with weal-streaked
palms, the left one bleeding slightly. She held it curled
in her lap so it wouldn’t
stain her uniform as she wrote out,
one hundred times, I will not damage
school property again.
Now each girl sits with her silent laced shoes
flat on the classroom floor. I grip
my chair-edge. I know, were it not for the Grace
of the Holy Ghost, we would all
be swept off this madly spinning world
into perdition. Sometimes I feel it
at morning mass, six a.m. and the ground
under my knees sliding away, hot press
of air on the eardrum and the blue sleeves
of the Virgin opening
into tunnels.
Ratna didn’t cry, so Sister Seraphina
pinned to her chest a placard that said,
in large black letters, WICKED. She
was to wear it till she repented, and no one
could speak to her.
This is the way the moon
travels around the earth, Sister
says, her fist circling the globe, solid,
tight-knuckled, pink nails
clipped back to the skin. I know
the moon, dense stone
suspended in the sky’s chest,
which makes flood and madness happen and has
no light of its own. As our heathen souls
unless redeemed by Christ’s blood.
That night in the moon-flecked dormitory
we woke to Ratna thrashing around in bed,
calling for Sultan, her dog back home. She
would not quiet when told,
and when the night nun tried
to give her water, she knocked the glass
away with a swollen hand. All
over that floor, shards, glittering
like broken eyes, and against the bed-rail
the flailing sound of her bones. Until they took her
somewhere downstairs.
On this chart, points Sister, you see
the major planets of the Solar System.
Copy them carefully into your notebooks. Smudges,
and you’ll do them over. I outline
red Mars, ringed Saturn, the far cold gleam
of Uranus, their perfect, captive turning
around a blank center which flames out
like the face of God in dreams. I will my hand
not to shake. We never saw Ratna again, and knew
not to ask.
Tomorrow we
will be tested
on the various properties of the heavenly bodies,
their distance, in light years, from the sun.
The Infirmary
I
I’d seen it only in daylight, once each month
when we were sent down
to be dosed with Enos Salts. Regularity,
the Sisters said, was the root of health.
A nun in front and one behind, we filed
across the compound to the low brown building
crouched among jhau trees. And at the door, waiting,
Sister Mary Lourdes, her habit
stiff as pages in a new book, her hard white hands
smelling of carbolic soap.
Mixed with warm water, the Enos
turned a pale yellow, bitter and bubbly,
burning the nose. Like champagne, said Yvonne
whose parents were Goan Christians
and drank. Cheers, dears, she’d say,
the plastic infirmary tumbler raised, breasts thrust out,
one eyebrow lifted, a black-haired
Marilyn Monroe, while we Hindu girls
from bland teetotalling families
watched open-mouthed. Until the day
Sister caught her at it. And made her bend over
and whacked the backs of her thighs
till the ruler left strips of raised flesh.
We watched the silent light
glint on her Bride of Christ wedding band
each time she slashed the air.
II
So it was strange to come to it in dark, alone,
wrapped in a blanket that prickled my skin.
The night nun’s name wavered in my brain
like a flame in wind. Her hands
held me too tightly, made me stumble. Or was it
the rippling shift of ground? The air was fire,