Anamika Poems

The Dalai Lama continues to laugh
addressing
a large audience.

The interpreter is super-serious
has no time for laughter
The English was like a net
the Tibetan words butterflies,
flew from the flower-petal lips of the Dalai Lama
sometimes to sit on the ears of the Tibetan kids
sometimes on the gold-flecked robes,
maybe the wedding dresses
of the Tibetan women
taken out only on special occasions
but worn away at the hems
this bit of sparkle left
like the trace of light in aged eyes.

The Dalai Lama was expounding
the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism
He raised his arm and
like three little dots of ‘therefore'
there were the marks of childhood vaccination
peeping through his ochre robe.
They whispered:
Aha, someone is talking about such high principles
but is from this very world
this very epoch
and he's just a man.

Right in front of me, rapt, a grandfather
on his shoulder a chubby little boy and his gurgling bottle
wiping his running nose
on grandpa's sweater —
He must have been like that —
the Dalai Lama
What do we know of Tibet —
Rahul Sanknityayan or Rinpoches
monasteries and chow mein
cheap sweaters and sandals, China,
snow, lost eyes, round faces and faithful Lhasa Apso pups.

How do those noble truths
connect with
such random bits,
the ignoble truths of life?

Does truth too have hierarchies?
A caste system? —
Brahmin truths at the top
and then the Shudra truths at the bottom?

Hunger and
thirst
heat and cold
attachment and cruelties
Love and hate —
are these truths really lower?

Dalai Lama, you tell me, please:
if the truth is like these mountain ranges —
high and low.
I prefer living in the deep cave of a small truth
occasionally coming to you
to learn the nobler truths of life.
...

Knowing someone is like buying another mirror for yourself
and another set of earphones, good ones
which let you hear distinctly.

After all, what does the bhatkoinya berry say as parting words
to the stunned silence of the fields sold away
If you listen closely, you can even hear
the sad laughter of old prostitutes
like swabs of cotton from some unknown mythic epoch
entering your space
you can hear Rag Jaijavanti on the ektara
of an ancient madman in the oldest asylum in the world.
You can hear the whooping cough of the prisoner playing his chains
to the rhythm of ‘jhan-jhan-jhan',
playing on the rhythm of crimes done/ undone.
and then, you can hear the double entendre
of all the established rules
and the soft thuds of languages almost dead
Each word difficult
but strong enough
to pull you into the fold of the mysterious naglok, the world of serpents.
Deep inside the waters
sunk within these waters
without a straw to hold onto
slowly, slowly turned into serpent jewels:

Knowing someone is a passionate leap
first outside your being
and then deep within it
It sends out ripples on the surface of the waters
over the pond for a long time.
Knowing someone is to become pond, river, ocean and rain.
Knowing is a departure
Clouds rain once
trees three times
after every rain, when you shake their branches
Knowing someone is like
gradually remembering
all things, forgotten,
sunk deep in memory

Knowing someone is
becoming
trembling leaves
catching raindrops.
...

Those who walk within confines are men,
those who walk beyond are saints.
No confines for me, no confines
a closed fist is my boundary wall

I can go wherever I want
but in this man's pocket

I can connect to anyone anywhere
but always under his thumb.

Even when he's dead asleep
he'll tuck me under his pillow
listening to the tick-tock-tick of his wristwatch.
The whole night through
quietly I'll keep all his messages
coming from all over the world.

Those silent messages will glow
in my dark spaces
They'll glow like the cats-eyes
of my dream-memories:
Mother's ailments
filed court cases
all the office scuffles
all the rush of unfinished kisses
all the muffled calls
the faint quivers of many a held-in sob all flicker within me.
In me flutter the wounded wings of messenger-pigeons
each feather yanked out and flicked off one by one
once in a while, even a pat on the wing.
No matter how modern the world may be
the expression of love and hate are primordial.

I'm like the roads of old Baghdad
before the American bombings
Parallel to the modern malls
are the old souks and the meena bazaar
glittering inside me
like archeological ruins dotting the heart of the metropolis.
...

My brother explained this to me:
Stars
are the snap-buttons sewn on the jacket of night.

In my part of the world, snaps
were called chutputia
because with the click of a ‘chut' one snapped into the other
They only worked when all four eyelets on both sides matched up.

They had no faith in the high and the low
Advocates of equality
neither hooking nor getting hooked up
came together without a fuss

In my part of the world
snaps were called 'chutputia'
but even the people from my part of the world
behaved liked snaps.

No chutputia here in this alien city
like sweet gourd, satputia jhigune
you just can't find them, can't find them anywhere.

chutputia people and chutputia snaps on sari blouses,
tailors in the city sew on hooks, not snaps
and there's always a gap
between the hook and the snare of the eye.
No matter how hard you try, they'll be no click of ‘chut' and no
‘put'.
...

People are going away
each one from the other
People are going away
and the space around me is expanding.

I translate this ‘space'
not as ‘breathing space'
but ‘outer space'
because I sent my flying saucers out there.

Thank you, Time,
my watch has stopped
Thank you, Window
just behind the grille a sparrow
is ready to lay her eggs.

Whoever, wherever, thanks to all of you
This is the time you're all within me
I, a little bit in each of you.

The harmonium of my empty house
whines its moaning silence.
This empty time
filled with work
This is the time when I must translate
dirty linen into the dialect of water
Then a little while, stand still and think
if a sinkful of soapy water
can be translated
into the melody of a raga
Frankly, this whole house
I'd like to translate
into some other language.
But where will I find this language
except in the words my children speak?
By the time I finish, it's evening
I'll translate this evening into drawing the curtains
the splinters of last light
will fill up all the space
I'll translate those splinters
not into outer space
but into my
breathing space.
...

These days I'm reading only ancient scripts
Can manage to make out even the Harappan script
Every language is a language of pain
ever since I understood
I could read a message even
in the most obscure of languages
In my own infinite emptiness
this is the only thing I've done
I've learned the tottering notation of music
in every tone of pain
There's a fire in me
to write something on pages of the wind
and then crumple them up and toss them under the broken charpoy
Unfolding these crumpled scraps,
my mother reads them
and her glasses fog up
This is where my fire gets transformed into water.

My bound hands are restless
they want to do something
There's strength in them still.
Milk, they can draw from the breasts of the mountain
What if only a mouse turns up
when you've dug it all up?

My bound hands are rough and cold —
they've never had the chance to sweep up the sweetness of the earth
Never has a tattered dupatta been spread out in these hands
and laughingly begged those berries.

The moon is no longer that pale
There's a layer of dirt on its yellowness
it‘s as grungy as the grayed pages of a miserly bania's ledger
The sunlight slowly fading,
like the tired dusty beauty of an unwed elder sister

Hey, butterfly, tell me
how far is the last sigh from infinite desire.
This ‘should', what kind of a bird is this?
Has it ever alighted in your courtyard?
perched on your hand?
So how can they say
a bird in the hand is worth more
than two in the bush?

Wringing my hands, I often wonder
are my hands like two flints
will they ever trigger fire?
I never get a wink of sleep
My life is the chaos at a call-centre
that might close down any moment, who knows?
...

This is how the shloka goes —
women, nails and hair
once they've fallen
just can't be put back in place
said our Sanskrit teacher.

Frozen in place out of fear
we girls held on tight to our seats.
Place, what is this ‘place'?
We were shown our place
in the first grade.
We remembered our elementary school lessons
Ram, go to school, son,
Radha, go and cook pakora!
Ram, sip sugar syrup,
Radha, bring your broom!
Ram, bedtime, school tomorrow
Radha, go and make the bed for brother.
Aha! This is your new house
Look Ram! Here's your room
"And mine?"
Oh, little loony!
Girls are wind, the sun and the good earth
They have no homes
"Those who don't have a home,
where do they belong?"

Which is the place from where we fall
become clipped nails, fallen hair trapped in combs,
fit only to be swept away
Houses left behind, paths left behind
people were left behind
questions chasing us, too left behind
Leaving behind tradition,
it seems to me I'm as out of context
as a short line
from a great classic
scribbled on a BA examination paper


But I don't want
somebody to sit down and
analyse me
to pigeonhole me
At long last, beyond all contexts
with real difficulty
I've gotten here


Let me be hummed
like an abhang,
unfinished.
...

We were read
like the torn pages of children's notebooks
made into cones to hold warm chanajorgaram

We were looked at
the way grumpily, you squint at your wristwatch
after the alarm goes off in the morning.

We were listened to
distractedly
the way film songs assail your ears
spilling from cheap cassettes on a crowded bus

They sensed us
the way you sense the sufferings of a distant relative
One day we said
we're human too.
Read us carefully
one letter at a time
they way after your BA, you'd read a job ad.

Look at us
the way, shivering,
you'd gaze at the flames of a distant fire
Listen to us
as you would the unstruck music of the void
and understand the way you'd understand a newly-learned language

The moment they heard this
from an invisible branch suspended in limbo
like a swam of gnats
wild rumors went screeching
"Women without character
wild vines draining the sap
from their hosts
well-fed, bored with affluence
these women
pointlessly on edge

indulging in the luxury of writing
these stories and poems —
not even their own,"
They said, amused.

The rest of the stories dismissed with a wink



Hey, Blessed Fathers
you blessed men
spare us
spare us
this sort
of attention.
...