Where Is India? Poem by Tarun Cherian

Where is India?
It is in the lice wandering like pilgrims in the filth-matted hair of the ascetic/sage walking half-naked down MG Road, (setting a bad example to visiting IT cats and so should be banned) not giving a 2nd glance at the merc desperate to overtake my ‘gaadi’, but afraid to risk rubbing shoulders, not to mention unaffordable paint, against the hoi polloi.

Where is India?
It is too busy burning its brides, (provoked by the hard tusks of greed dressed as the latest liberal God, the 1600cc car, the home theatre, the mirror-finished fridge, freely pouring kerosene over a creature who will never reach the high throne of mother in law and so direct her demons or sons to roast the human, who’ll be left over and thrown out as no one really eats meat) to answer such silly questions.

Where is India?
It is in the cowdung trail of the starved, paper-fed cow, gathered eagerly by artists seeking to make the latest statements. Also by Sonabai still using it for jowar rotis thick, heavy and belly-fillingly satisfying, as she lies in bed in hospital, dying, asking for handouts from a child that tagged onto her as she gathered seeds to sell,10 paisa for sackfuls, and who you or I don’t see is mom in another birth, which we have conveniently insulated ourselves against with some strange hotchpotch of karma and cause, effect, punishment, pierced by the deep generosity of spirit that fills one’s being with love as she who cannot feed herself feeds me.

Where is India?
It is in the arm that tells a stranger and a wife and mewling brat on a street to come home, gives half a home and more and so forges bonds so thick they’re banyan branches as the heart overflows.

Where is India?
It is in your kadai, with red, yellow, brown, green flinging their blazing spice spells and muttering mustard flaring up in ghee streaming up in snaky flows making your salivating mouth ask for only what Amma cooked, so you turn your wife into her, only narrower for it rests in the gallis of memory that sometimes can’t be mapped and so you can’t find the way out.

Where is India?
It’s in the software cat’s proud car purring like a tiger carrying appa, half proud, half thrilled, half don’t-know-what-to-say at this sudden rise to fortune, that surely-must-fall, or at least cringe as the pink slip bares its teeth or too many all night, work-ins take their toll and the graveyard of obsolescence cheats the caviar-filled mouth of taste, so goes on a strange journey to a smashana sthala of wealth, and if Bill Gates prancing with an AIDS patient resembles something else, so be it, for everyone knows the poor are damned to tap on the windows of your mind or car, (both being identical; efficient, powerful, successful, zippy, and fitting into any parking space) and to return to that hand tapping, you turn down your window and dispense with the largesse of kings.

Where is India?
It is in the cobra rising in my body, gold, fierce, terrible and so gentle into the dark womb of the night from which we pull the far speck of the kite down, manja entangling in strange heart-choked and mind-thorned places wrapping round and round the charka of the mind, that yearns to flee into the skies with kites crying as their bones wrench and the bamboo almost cracks scything down and freeing the cut patang to go haffa where it will into the sunset, the brambly tree of life, or the tall bamboo limbs of urchins waiting to rip its thin skin to shreds, only to see that what the hand wrenches from another, (if I can’t get it neither should you) is of no import, for that which has been set free was never trapped, was never encased by paper or skin, or bone or bamboo, never spelt in scaly skin or hood or fang ripped out and pussy thrown in combat against the ancient enemy, the asura mongoose that transmutes into God and his flute that we cannot hear, yet dance to.

Where is India?
It is in the shunyata painting sold to an NRI for 50,000 dollars.

Where is India?
It is beneath a Gandhi topi, skulls filled with lathis, bandooks, land grab and the sound of a bell muezzin’s call, Buddhist chant, that cut, dissected shows no special coil, just the usual grey.

Where is India?
It is in the butt that moves to accommodate yours in the train and has so adjust maadied it has fallen off the berth and become very 3rd class, so ready to be the khansaama to make a khichidi for world bank and whosoever has the money.

Where is India?
It is playing gili danda with Pakistan using nukes as gilis.

Where is India?
It is in the smell of the smell of the monsoon.

Where is India?
It is definitely in the ding’s dance floor, where everyone’s going to Australia, only sadly to find every one else has the same idea so Britain serves curry mostly.

Where is India?
It is in the tiger roaring in the gallis of Bombay and nowhere else except the barred zoo where mouldy, large, striped rats growl in front of monkeys dressed as humans.

Where is India?
It is in your brown skin that can be turned magically white, or at least a wheatish complexion, by multi-nats.

Where is India?
It is in the missing queues for phones, the no longer waiting for gas, the fat stocked supermarkets, the sitting across the table with the world, the firang waiting for us to change it.

Where is India?
It is in the auto driver who drives half an hour to return a bag to me filled with moongphalli shells called poetry.

Where is India?
It is in New York where my 2 uncles,6 cousins,12 second cousins and zillion relatives stay not knowing whether to cry as the towers crashed down and life’s no longer so easy in spite of the conversion rate and they wonder if all they did was for nothing, as all their friends have bigger cars, bigger homes, children who listen (er…) and servants and holidays and maybe a life.

Where is India?
It is not in the space between Shiva, Allah and Christ.

Where is India?
Is it in Vande Mataram? In the spice cupboard? In the Naga dance? In the blood streaked Kargill hill? In the kite dancing? Is it in the cobra to whom the universe is just one scale?

Where is India?
It is a river, underground in your chest, somewhere left of patriotism, right of Buddha, south of the missus, and dammed up by huge concrete heaps of indifference and history.

Where is India?
It is in you. It is in me. It is in the blood between us.