Arundhathi Subramaniam Poems

(for Anders who wants to know)
I live on a wedge of land
reclaimed from a tired ocean
somewhere at the edge of the universe.

Greetings from this city
of L'Oreal sunsets
and diesel afternoons,
deciduous with concrete,
botoxed with vanity.

City of septic magenta hair-clips,
of garrulous sewers and tight-lipped taps,
of '80s film tunes buzzing near the left temple,
of ranting TV soaps and monsoon melodramas.

City wracked by hope and bulimia.
City uncontained
by movie screen and epigram.
City condemned to unspool
in an eternal hysteria
of lurid nylon dream.

City where you can drop off
a swollen local
and never be noticed.
City where you're a part
of every imli-soaked bhelpuri.

City of the Mahalaxmi beggar
peering up through
a gorse-bush of splayed limbs.

City of dark alleys,
city of mistrust,
city of forsaken tube-lit rooms.

City that coats the lungs
stiffens the spine
chills the gut
with memory

City suspended between
flesh
and mortar
and foam leather
and delirium

where it is perfectly historical
to be looking out
on a sooty handkerchief of ocean,
searching for God.
...

I was neither born nor bred here.


But I know this city


of casuarina and tart mango slices,
gritty with salt and chilli
and the truant sands of the Marina,


the powdered grey jowls of film heroes,


my mother's sari, hectic with moonlight,
still crackling with the voltage
of an MD Ramanathan concert,


the flickering spice route of tamarind and onion
from Mylapore homes on summer evenings,


the vast opera of the Bay of Bengal,
flambéed with sun,


and a language as intimate as the taste
of sarsaparilla pickle, the recipe lost,
the sour cadences as comforting
as home.


It's no use.
Cities ratify
their connections with you
when you're looking the other way,


annexing you
through summer holidays,
through osmotic memories
of your father's glib
lie to a kindergarten teacher
(‘My mother is the fair one'),


and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca
suddenly awakening an old prescription -
Peabury, Plantation A
and fifty grams of chicory
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.


City that creeps up on me
just when I'm about to affirm
world citizenship.
...

In the women's compartment
of a Bombay local
we search
for no personal epiphanies.
Like metal licked by relentless acetylene
we are welded -
dreams, disasters,
germs, destinies,
flesh and organza,
odours and ovaries.
A thousand-limbed
million-tongued, multi-spoused
Kali on wheels.

When I descend
I could choose
to dice carrots
or dice a lover.

I postpone the latter.
...

There was nothing simple about it
even then -

an eleven-year-old's hunger
for the wet perfection

of the Alhambra, the musky torsos
of football stars, ancient Egypt and Jacques Cousteau's

lurching empires of the sea, bazaars
in Mughal India, the sacred plunge

into a Cadbury's Five Star bar, Kanchenjanga, kisses bluer
than the Adriatic, honeystain of sunlight

on temple wall, a moon-lathered Parthenon, draught
of northern air in Scottish castles. The child god craving

to pop a universe
into one's mouth.

It's back again,
the lust
that is the deepest
I have known,

celebrated by paperback romances
in station bookstalls, by poets in the dungeons
of Toledo, by bards crooning foreverness
and gut-thump on FM radio
in Bombay traffic jams -

an undoing,
an unmaking,
raw
raw -

a monsoonal ferocity
of need.
...

And on days like this
nothing else will do.

Nothing but that whisper
of breath against the ear.

Breath that's warm
like the sigh of palmyra trees
in Tirunelveli plantations.

Breath
that's crisp
like linen, rice-starched,
dhoop-soaked,
in a family cupboard.

Breath
to be trusted,

with a thread maybe
of something
your foremothers never knew,
or pretended not to -
the spice-mist
of hookah on winter nights
in Isfahan, or raw splatter
of Himalayan rain, or wine
baroque with the sun
of al-Andalus.

Breath
of outsider,
ancestor,
friend,

who leaves nothing more than this
signature of air
against skin,
reminding you
that there's nothing respectable
about family linen
when cupboard doors close,

reminding you
that this
this uncensored wilderness
of greed
is simply -
or not so simply -

body.
...

Again and again the same questions, my love,
those that confront us
and vex nations,
or so they claim -

how to disarm
when we still hear
the rattle of sabre,
the hiss of tyre
from the time I rode my red cycle
all those summers ago
in my grandmother's back-garden
over darting currents of millipede,
watching them,
juicy, bulging, with purpose,
flatten in moments
into a few hectic streaks of slime,

how to disarm,
how to choose
mothwing over metal,
underbelly over claw,
how to reveal raw white nerve fibre
even while the drowsing mind still clutches
at carapace and fang,

how to believe
this gift of inner wrist
is going to make it just a little easier
for a whale to sing again in a distant ocean
or a grasshopper to dream
in some sunwarmed lull of savannah.
...

Supple as wisteria
her plait of hair across our beds -
my talisman at the age of five
against torch-eyed gods and ancestors
who leaked nocturnally
out of cupboards, keyholes,
the crevices of festering karmas.

Later
we drank deep draughts
of monsoon wind together,
locked eyes in mistrust,
littered our bedroom with books, fuzzy battle-lines,
quivering dominions of love and malice,
even as we ruptured time,
scooping world upon world
out of cavernous weekend afternoons
through the alchemy of mutual dream -
turquoise summers over ruined Mycenae,
the moon-watered stone of Egyptian temples,
and those times we set the zephyr whispering
under the black skies of Khorasan.

Clothes were never shared,
diaries zealously guarded,
but in the hour before the mind
carves out its own fiefdoms of memory
we dipped into the same dark estuaries
of lust, grief and silted longing.

Now in rooms
deodorised into neutrality,
we sniff covertly
for new secrets, new battles, new men,
always careful to evade
the sharp salinity of recollection,
anything that could plunge us back
to the roiling green swamp of our beginnings.

But tonight if I stood at my window
it would take very little, or so it would seem,
to swing myself across
to that blazing pageant of peonies
that is your Brooklyn back-garden,
careening across continents
on that long-vanished plait of hair,
sleek with moonshine,
fragrant with Atlantic breezes.
...

Not scripture, no,

but grant me the gasp

of bridged synapse,

the lightning alignment

of marrow, mind and blood

that allows words

to spring



from the cusp of breathsong,

from a place radiant

with birdflight and rivergreen.



Not the certainty

of stone, but grant me

the quiet logic

of rain,

of love,

of the simple calendars of my childhood

of saints aureoled by overripe lemons.



Grant me the fierce tenderness

of watching

word slither into word,

into the miraculous algae

of language,

untamed by doubt

or gravity,



words careening,

diving,

swarming, un-

forming, wilder

than snowstorms in Antarctica, wetter

than days in Cherrapunjee,



alighting on paper, only

for a moment,

tenuous, breathing,

amphibious,

before

leaping

to some place the voice

is still learning



to reach.



Not scripture,

but a tadpole among the stars,

unafraid to plunge

deeper

if it must -



only if it must -



into transit.
...

This shoebox started out

a stiff-upper-lipped quadrilateral,

Upholder of Symmetry, Proportion, Principle,

sanctuary to an upright couple

of pedigree leather moccasins.



This week

shoebox learns

to sigh

de-

cant,

contemplate



gravity.



Old idealist softens,

grows whiskers,

paw,

drowsing chin,

slumped tail,

Arctic eye.



Form is emptiness

Emptiness is form, Shariputra.



Shoebox abdicates

shape

and Gucci worship,



secedes from

nostalgia.



Pukka sahib

learns

to purr.
...

To swing yourself

from moment to moment,

to weave a clause

that leaves room

for reminiscence and surprise,

that breathes,

welcomes commas,

dips and soars

through air-pockets of vowel,

lingers over the granularity of consonant,

never racing to the full-stop,

content sometimes

with the question mark,

even if it's the oldest one in the book.



To stand

in the vast howling, rain-gouged

openness of a page,

asking the question

that has been asked before,

knowing the gale of a thousand libraries

will whip it into the dark.



To leave no footprints

in the warm alluvium,

no Dolby echoes

to reverberate through prayer halls,

no epitaphs,

no saffron flags.



This was also a way

of keeping the faith.
...