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| Tabish Khair |
RUMI AND THE REED
Listen to the song
of the reed flute:
It
sings of separation.
Torn from the
leaf-layered, wind-voiced
Banks
of the pond,
It is joined to
sorrow and joy
By
a slender sound.
Who, asked Rumi,
can understand
The
reed’s longing to return?
Let its raw lips rest then;
Let all
words be brief then.
And I, O
Believers, cried Rum
(Having
lost the man he loved),
I who am not of
the East
Nor
of the West, un-Christian,
Not Muslim or Jew, neither
Born
of Adam nor Eve,
What can I love
but the world itself,
What
can I kiss but flesh?
Let my raw lips rest then.
Let all
words be brief.
(From WHERE PARALLEL LINES MEET)
AMMA
Down the stairs of
this house where plaster flakes and falls,
Through the
intimate emptiness of its rooms and hall,
I hear your slow
footsteps, grandmother, echo or pause
As they used to
through long summer afternoons spent within
The watered down
four-walls of khus and fragile drinks
Of ice, mango or
lemon, the circle of water-melon crescents.
Slowly you shuffle
examining each new tear in the curtains
Which will have to
be mended when the first monsoon rain
Provides a respite
from sun, curtails the need for shade.
Slowly on
arthritic joints you move from room to room
Marking the damage
of the years, evaluating how soon
The past will
collapse or how long the present last.
You never need
glasses to mark the contours of your house
Though you can’t
see grandsons at a distance, once wore a blouse
Inside out.
Nothing has changed, grandmother, no, not yet;
Though your
collected steps never turn the corner into you
In a starched and
white sari, the fragrance of soap
around you.
And all the
curtains have long been taken down.
(From WHERE PARALLEL LINES MEET)
THE BIRDS OF NORTH EUROPE
Twenty four years
in different European cities and he had not lost
His surprise at
how birds stopped at the threshold
Of their houses.
Never
Flying into rooms,
to be decapitated by fan-blades or carefully
Herded through
open windows to another life, never
Building on the
lampshade
Or on some
forgotten, cool corner-beam where droppings and straw
Would be tolerated
until the fateful day hatched
And the world was
fragile
Shell, feathers, a
conspiratorial rustle of wings above and of
An intrigued girl
below. Even the birds in their neat towns
Knew their place.
They
Did not intrude
into private spheres, demanding to be overlooked
Or worshipped.
They did not consider houses simply
Exotic trees or
hollowed
Hills. Not being
particularly learned he did not know the thread
Of fear that knots
the wild to the willed; not
Being well-read he
Did not remember
the history behind their old and geometrical
Gardens, could not
recall a time when the English
Parliament had
killed a bill,
Shocked by a
jackdaw’s flight across the room. He simply marked
The absence of
uncaged birds in their homes. He thought
It was strange.
(From WHERE PARALLEL LINES MEET)
MONSTERS
Theirs the city of
the sayable. Hers its suburbs,
Filling with the
screamed obscenities of graffiti, gestures
At coherent articulation,
the word within that world
Of splashed red,
aerosoled blue, skulls and crossbones,
Crashing cars,
rose out of a gun barrel, space monsters, all
Unable to utter a
sound that will count as speech.
It is in such a
moment of sheer scream, unsayable,
That Shakuntala
looks in the mirror and is surprised
To see fangs and
fire, a gaping mouth like Kali’s,
Goddess culled
from the anger of colonisation:
It is a vision
that lasts only a second, but in it
Are contained the
silent stories of her history.
Her lineage is
monstrous. Scylax said so:
Daughter of the
dog-faced and blanket-eared.
Such many-armed,
hydra-headed ancestors
Shocked the
evangelising white man, puzzled
The aesthetes of
Europe in later centuries:
Truth and beauty
have long been denied her.
Did her mothers
know what she has forgotten:
The choice was
between mirror and monster?
How to keep their devdasis from turning nuns
In Danse des servantes ou esclaves
des dieux,
They loosened
their limbs in the cosmic dance
Of the oppressed –
fingers, arms, heads flew off
Leonardo da
Vinci’s symmetrical bodies
And the mirror of
that white gaze shattered
On develish formes and uglie shapes. Adam
Stood speechless before monstrous
Ada,
Which hath foure hands with clawes…
The better to rip
you with, coloniser?
Faced with
humanity, they could not look
Into those eyes
and fail to be struck blind
By the injustice
of it all, their own greed:
Monsters filled
their mirrors. It was safer
To lose in that
adytum of demons the truth
Of bodies with
blackened teeth, minds on fire.
(From MAN OF GLASS, 2010)
