Anjum Hasan Biography

My heart beat fast or did not beat at all;
I could not say all that I thought and thought
till words deserted me. I loved too abstractly.
I dreaded how all there was to give was me—
...

All through the day it stays: the sadness of coming
into a wet city at dawn, not speaking, neither of us,
when one by one the neon lights wake us from a cramped,
dream-ravaged sleep, driving home in one long curving sweep
...

Late summer, and mornings have nothing to do with evenings,
evenings untouched by mornings. The ghee light pouring over
streets and terraces out of a bottomless sky, loving everything
all morning, taking nothing back, concentrating in the small
gold champak flowers that men greedily balance on branches for.
Late summer sounds - dogs and nadeswarams, the last rites
of weddings, bikes with almost disco thundering, crack-lunged
buyers of old paper, buckets filling anew, and the butter light
melting in its own heat against compound walls and parked cars:
the generous light in which butterflies turn the same colour as the champak
stars among the last clumps of jacaranda, and the cassia tree flowering and
flowering in wilting yellow like no one told it to stop. Slow drip
of late summer thoughts - forgiving one's faults, everything becoming
a plan to find a place where it's always this late summer merge
between drums and bees knocking hard against panes, the dish-washing
clamour, and the flickering voices inside that one sits trying, with both
hands, to keep alive, not realising that this is that place, this is that place,
and when one does it's too late because the palms striped with sky
are thrashing about with something that almost has a human name,
and then it rains and rains and rains.

Later the children come out and collect in corners like wet ants.
The air is crowded with their new-born questions -
Are you pushing me? Is that a snake?
...

The man who runs the sports goods store
that also sells old unopened books and
board games in faded boxes, sits with his
tattooed arms folded in the sun.
He drinks a lot of beer and doesn't ask
stupid questions. His friends loiter
around small music shops all morning,
in slippers, with their shirt-tails out.

The distant air lights up the furrowed edges
of the hills. Sometimes he wants to describe
the smell of brown oaks ageing in the sun
and bakeries where boys in dirty aprons
lit their ovens in the early summer morning.
But the tattooed man dozes on when
his friends talk and the sun whitens the spines
of pale detective novels and books full of
blond-bodied girls and cross-stitch designs.

When a man is killed in the afternoon,
knifed and left to die with his face down
in a drain, the tattooed fellow has an opinion.
But he shuts the door and sleeps on a wooden
plank behind the counter that smells of cigarettes
and stale tea, till rain cools the streets. All the
farthest sounds of the city wake him up slowly,
till he hears the rain on his own window
and thinks of the dirty water running below
the dead man's face.

In the evening when the rain lets up for a bit
his friends might return and joke about it.
He switches on the lights at five. People drift in
With damp trouser-cuffs and notice the Chinese
dragons on his arms. They talk and again the cool
air outlines each noisy car and softened tree.
It's Saturday. He rests his elbows on the cracked
glass counter and watches a girl across the street,
scrubbing a couple of neat stone steps till they
gleam in the clear blue evening.
...

for Daisy
We come in here from the long afternoon
stretched over the town's sloping roofs,
its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours,
its melancholic second-hand bookshops
with their many missing pages.

Life's not moving.

We sit at a red table, among the dragons,
near the curtained-off street-facing windows
with their months' old orangeade.
Out in the streets there are schoolboys with
their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers.

We eat more than we need to. We eat
so that our boredom's no longer dangerous,
so that from the comfort of soup,
with the minor pleasures of chopsuey,
we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited,
unknown and unknowable affairs,
people with never-fading lipstick and
confident gestures who we will never be.

One day soon we'll be running,
our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus,
and we won't read each other's letters thrice.
But right there we're young, we count
our money carefully, we laugh so hard
and drop our forks.

We are plucked from sadness there
in that little plastic place with the lights
turned low, the waiters stoned from doing nothing,
the smells of ketchup and eternally frying onions.
...