Sudeep Sen

An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas
 containing stark white sheets,

perfect in their presentation of absence.
 Only a bold logo on top

revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else.
 I examined the sheets,

peered through their grains —
 heavy cotton-laid striations —

concealing text, in white ink, postmarked India.
 Even the watermark's translucence

made the script's invisibility transparent.
 Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets

of sophisticated pulp, paper containing
 scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned,

untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate
 and circulate to keep alive its breathings.

Corpuscles of a very different kind —
 hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.
...

drawing a breath between each
    sentence, trailing closely every word.
         — James Hoch, ‘Draft' in Miscreants
1.

some things, I knew,
were beyond choosing:


didu — grandmother — wilting
under cancer's terminal care.


mama — my uncle's — mysterious disappearance —
ventilator vibrating, severed
silently, in the hospital's unkempt dark.


an old friend's biting silence — unexplained —
   promised loyalties melting for profit
abandoning long familial presences of trust.


devi's jealous heart misreading emails
hacked carefully under cover,
her fingernails ripping
unformed poems, bloodied, scarred —
my diary pages weeping wordlessly —
my children aborted, my poetry breathless forever.


2.

these are acts that enact themselves, regardless —
    helpless, as I am,
torn asunder permanently, drugged, numbed.


strange love, this is —
a salving: what medics and nurses do.
i live buddha-like, unblinking, a painted vacant smile —
   one that stores pain and painlessness —
someone else's nirvana thrust upon me.


some things I once believed in
are beyond my choosing —
choosing is a choice unavailable to me.
...

Under the soft translucent linen,
  the ridges around your nipples

harden at the thought of my tongue.
 You — lying inverted like the letter ‘c' —

arch yourself deliberately
  wanting the warm press of my lips,

it's wet to coat the skin
  that is bristling, burning,

breaking into sweats of desire —
 sweet juices of imagination.

But in fact, I haven't even touched
 you. At least, not yet.
...

Ten years on, I came searching for
war signs of the past
expecting remnants — magazine debris,
unexploded shells,
shrapnel
that mark bomb wounds.

I came looking for
ghosts —
people past, skeletons charred,
abandoned
brick-wood-cement
that once housed them.

I could only find whispers —
whispers among the clamour
of a small town outpost
in full throttle —
everyday chores
sketching outward signs
of normality and life.

In that bustle
I spot war-lines of a decade ago,
though the storylines
are kept buried, wrapped
in old newsprint.

There is order amid uneasiness —
the muezzin's cry,
the monk's chant —
baritones
merging in their separateness.

At the bus station
black coughs of exhaust
smoke-screens everything.
The roads meet
and after the crossroad ritual
diverge,
skating along the undotted lines
of control.
A porous garland
with cracked beads
adorns Tiger Hill.
Beyond the mountains
are dark memories,
and beyond them
no one knows,
and beyond them
no one wants to know.

Even the flight of birds
that wing over their crests
don't know which feathers to down.
Chameleon-like
they fly, tracing perfect parabolas.

I look up
and calculate their exact arc
and find instead, a flawed theorem.
...

  1

A bright red boat
Yellow capsicums

Blue fishing nets
Ochre fort walls

  2

Sahar's silk blouse
gold and sheer

Her dark black
kohl-lined lashes

  3

A street child's
brown fists

holding the rainbow
in his small grasp

  4

My lost memory
white and frozen

now melts colour
ready to refract
...

The heavy drunken aroma
of fresh guavas
is too sweet for me to bear.

Instead, I drink its nectar
not as liquid-pulp
but as raw unsmooth fruit.

I bite its light-green rough skin
the way I used to
approach a sugarcane stalk

as a child
crunching every fibre
to extract their juice.

There are memories—
memories attached to food
and their consumption.

There are memories
about the rituals of intake—
how certain foods

are allowed or disallowed
depending on God's stance
and their place

in the lofty hierarchies
they create.
How misplaced these stations

are—God, Emperor, Man
all mistaken—proud errors
of selfhood, status, and ego.

Even under prayer's veil,
there is something about
eating guavas with unwashed

hands, tasting its taste before
masala, lemon and rock-salt
turn them into sprightly salad—

seed's bone-crack intentions
slip, cloaked—
buried before they fruit.
...

I meticulously stitch time through the embroidered sky,
through its unpredictable lumps and hollows. I

am going home once again from another
home, escaping the weave of reality into another

one, one that gently reminds and stalls
to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul.

But what talk of soul and skin
in this day and age, such ephemeral things

that cross-weaves blood and breath
into clotted zones of true escape.

What talk of flight time and flying
when real flights of fancy are crying

to stay buoyant unpredictably in mid-air
amid pain, peace, and belief: just like thin air

sketches, where another home is built
in free space vacuum, as another patchwork quilt

is quietly wrapped around, gently, in memoriam.
...

she has no english;
her lips round / in a moan ….
calligraphy of veins ….
— Merlinda Bobis, ‘first night'

My syntax, tightly-wrought—
I struggle to let go,
to let go of its formality,
of my wishbone
desiring juice — its deep marrow,
muscle, and skin.

The sentence finally pronounced —

I am greedy for long drawn-
out vowels, for consonants that
desire lust, tissue, grey-cells.
I am hungry for love,
for pleasure, for flight,

for a story essaying endlessly—words.
A comma decides to pr[e]oposition
a full-stop … ellipses pause, to reflect—
a phrase decides not to reveal
her thoughts after all—ellipses and
semi-colons are strange bed-fellows.

Calligraphy of veins and words
require ink, the ink of breath,
of blood—corpuscles speeding
faster than the loop of serifs …
the unresolved story of our lives
in a fast train without terminals.

I long only for italicised ellipses …
my english is the other, the other
is really english — she has no english;
her lips round / in a moan ….
her narrative grammar-drenched,
silent, rich, etched letters of glass.
...

You carelessly tossed
the jacket on a chair.
The assembly of cloth
collapsed in slow motion
into a heap of cotton —
cotton freshly picked
from the fields —
like flesh
without a spine.
The chair's wooden
frame provided a brief
skeleton,
but it wasn't enough
to renew the coat's
shape, the body's
prior strength,
or the muscle
to hold its own.
When one peels off
one's outer skin,
it is difficult
to hide
the true nature of
blood.
Wood, wool, stitches,
and joints —
an epitaph
of a cardplayer's
shuffle,
and the history
of my dark faith.
...

(for psc)

Birds fly across the pale blue sky
cross-stitching a matrix in Pali—

a tongue now beautifully classical
like temple-toned Bharatanatyam.

Dialogues in the other garden
happen not just in springtime. Yet

you stare askance talking poetry
in silence, an angularity of stance

like a shot in a film-noir narrative
yet to be edited down to a whole.

What is a whole? Is it not a sum
of distilled parts, parts one chooses

to expose carefully like raw stock—
controlling patterns in the red light

of dark, a dark that dutifully dissolves.
There emerges at the end,

nests for imaginative flights to rest,
to weave our own stories braving

winds, currents, and the elements
of disguise. Fireflies in the grove

do not belong to numbered generation—
they only light up because line-breaks

like varnam keep purity alive—
enigmatic, disciplined, spontaneous.

Let the birds fly tracing angular paths,
let the dancer dance unbridled,

let the poet write unrestrained—
natural as breathing itself.

Matrix woven can be unwoven—
enjambments like invisible pauses

weave us back into algebraic patterns
that only heart and imagination can.

She walks porcupines—as you do—and
listens to the sound of the sea in a conch.
...

1

A bright red boat
Yellow capsicums

Blue fishing nets
Ochre fort walls

2

Sahar's silk blouse
gold and sheer

Her dark black
kohl-lined lashes

3

A street child's
brown fists

holding the rainbow
in his small grasp

4

My lost memory
white and frozen

now melts colour
ready to refract.
...

I wake cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
—THOM GUNN, ‘The Man with Night Sweats'


Outside, "Allah-u-Akbar"
pierces the dawn air —
It is still dark.

Inside, electric light
powers strength
to my feverish body.

Mosque minaret
radiate prayer-calls
all around —

like coded signals
emanating
from old radio

transmitter-towers —
relaying the dangers
of heat in this stale air.

˜

A bare body
sleeps peacefully
beside me —

her face's innocence,
and generous curve
of her eye

lashes, try to sweep
away my
skin's excess heat,

one that is fast
making my bones
pale and brittle.

˜

A brief lull
lingers outside.
I cannot hear

the heavy lyrics,
their rhymes
trying to invoke

peace and respect,
their wafting baritone
instilling faith.

Such things
are luxuries
for me now.

I lie, trying
to piece together
the eccentric song

of my own
inadequate breathing.
It is a struggle.

˜

It is also a mystery.
Mystery of a body's
architecture,

its vulnerability,
its efficient circulation —
they are perfect

models I remember
from school's
very early lessons.

They are only
how things ought to be,
not how they are.

˜

Only now, I realise
the intent
of prayer's persuasion,

its seductive expression.
I also value
the presence and grace

of the body that willingly
lies next to me,
as her breath

tries to realign my will's
magnetic imprint, and
my heart's irregular beat.

My vision is awash
with salt
of her night-sweat.

My hearing is trapped
within diaphragm's
circuitous drone —

in Arabic's passion
that etches
its parabolic script,

sung loud
so that no
slant or serif

can be erased,
altered
or misunderstood.

˜

Religion's veil
and chiffon —
its sheer black

and translucence,
its own desire
to give and want,

its ambition
to control
and preserve.

Such songs
mean nothing
to me

if one's own
peace and privacy
remain unprotected,

or, are not at ease.
I want
the chant's passion,

its heat
to settle
my restlessness.
I want the song
to soothe
my nerve-ends

so that the pain
subsides
and faith's will

enables to rise.
I also want
the beauty

of this faith
to raise
its heat —

not body-heat —
but the heat
of healing.

˜

But for now,
the diaphanous lull
is a big boon.

Here, I can calculate
the exact path
of my body's

blood-flow,
its unpredictable
rise and fall

of heat, and
the way it infects
my imagination.

˜

I step out
of the room's
warm safety.

I see
the morning light
struggling

to gather muscle
to remove
night's cataract.

˜
Again,
the mosques threaten
to peel

their well-intentioned
sounds —
to appease us all.

But I see
only darkness,
and admire it —

I also admire
the dignity and gravity
of heavy-water

and its blood —
its peculiar
viscous fragility,

its own struggle
to flow,
sculpt and resuscitate.

˜

In quiet's privacy,
I find
cold warmth

in my skin's
permanent sweat,
in its acrid edge,

and in my own
god's
prayer-call.

˜
...

(for Kwame)

1

It is mid-afternoon now,
the sun streaks slant wards
through the attic's double-glazing
melting the scorched ink
in my crowded note-book
that lies blanched
on the sparse weathered table.
Hardened sepia-stained lines
that once approximated to
a flock of metaphors,
now rearrange themselves
into a congregation of phrases,
a lineation of new line-breaks:
stops that defy
even the physics of refraction,
thoughts that now re-surface
and resurrect just as
passion and reverence did
within the folds of The Prophet.

2

It is still mid-afternoon,
the blue blaze makes the pages
of my book flip over gently
in the invisible wind of silence.
The heat penetrating the glass
focuses even more fiercely
smoking out redolent similes,
questioning the whole point,
the nib of writing itself.
Underneath the permanent scar
of jet-black fluid and heat
is pulp, half-dead.
Beneath the persistent hoarse-
drone of metal-scratching
is bleached pulp, half-alive,
its cotton laid sheets
carefully encoded with
the magic arc of a gold-tip.
Words appear, and more
words. And under them all,
I discover much later,
a small spring insect
that lay mummified,
quietly crushed below
the weight of words,
its innocence and juice
trapped under oppression
of ambition and intellect,
baptised and bloodied.

3

It is mid-afternoon,
and I too lie, dead-
still, blanched, bloodied.
...

(for Bina)

In Japanese, Yuki is snow—
unmelted and poised.

She sits askance
in front of a wine-tinged door

whose paint flakes
to expose its wood-raw skin—

pale, seemingly snow-flecked.
Her hair rambles all over

her face, eyes, and neck,
as she stares shyly—

sideways into the distance.
There are secrets locked,

bolted securely
in a shut non-descript studio

in Mumbai,
tucked away somewhere

in Prabha Devi—
as the industrial estate

temporarily quietens
at the allusive

thought of snow herself.
Fantasy instils in

factory-workers, passion—
just as for me—

peeling curls of paint,
a circular chromium lock,

a rusted dis-used bolt,
and breeze that affects

a woman's hair and lashes,
inspires visions

of snow—
thaw, compassion, desire.

[inspired by a photo by Rafeeq Ellias]
...

at 12,000 feet
slopes steeply. Hard snow
cut into two
by winding tarmac—
a severe cold-slice
freezing to a stand-still.

A car shrinks
through this open-air tunnel—
ice walls on either side—
a geometric strait
resisting
the warmth of diesel's grey metal.

Two yaks on the lower slopes
look up for colour
in this blinding white.
Their horns storing clues,
anticipating
the mood
of changing temperatures.

In this rarefied air
lungs shrink—
breathtaking breathlessness—
clarified oxygen is sparse here—
high-tone octane echo in the stark terrain.
...

Your poem translated itself so many times:
From the incipient thoughts that brewed
in your mind, as your mother tongue fumed
straining to come together, trying

to emerge from shapelessness
to a semblance of shape. Re-piecing
together the shattered mirror, remoulding
and reflecting light from unknown niches,

the poem switched tongue and its skin
as the oblique image stamped its imprint.

But the translation wasn't quite done:
It was fed into a computer
to be processed, polished further,
and parts re-written, then fed again. One

strange beast of an electronic transmission
ate the poem again, the fodder waxed
and its shape reshaped. Then out of my fax
at night, a sheet of glazed emission

emerged, words on an unsuspecting tray:
A real poem defies translation, in every way.
...

Together, we lie
incurably conjoined.
Just as the sky
and the earth are joined

by an indeterminate
horizon, so are we, made
one by an indeterminate
faith.
...

A lone lash
from

my eye-lid
had disengaged

itself,
its vision

now resting
on the page

I'd scribbled on.
It formed

an unintentional
arc,

an odd gesture
of a smile.

But this
I am sure,

was
an accident.
...

One moonlit December night
you came knocking at my door,
I took my time to open.
When I did,
there was just a silk scarf,
frayed, half-stuck in the latch.
...

the kindness of libation, lyric and blood

her endless notes left for me -
little secrets, graces -
trills recorded on blue and purple parchment
to be lipped, tasted, devoured -

only essence remains -
its stickiness, its juice, its memory

seamless juxtaposition -
the brute and the passion,
dry of the bone and wet of the sea,
coarseness of the page and smooth of the nib's iridium

I try and trace a line, a very long line -

the ink blots
as this line's linear edges
dissolve and fray -

the capillary threads
gone mad
twirling in the deep heat of the tropics -

threads unravelling,
each sinew tense with the want of moisture
and the other's flesh

there are no endings here -
only beginnings -
precious incipience -

translucent drops of sweat
perched precariously on her collar-bone
waiting to slide,
roll unannounced into the gulleys
that yearn to soak in the rain -

heart-beat shift
the shape of globules
as they alter their balance and colour,
changing their very point of gravity -

constantly deceiving the other

I stand, wanting -
wanting more of the bone's dry edge,
the infinite blur of desire,
the dream,
the wet, the salt, the ink,
and the underside of her skin.
...