Here
in the dusty malarial lanes
of Cuttack where years have slowly lost their secrets
they wander
in these lanes nicked by intrigue and rain
and the unseen hands of gods
in front of a garish temple of the simian Hanuman
along river banks splattered with excreta and dung
in the crowded market square among rotting tomatoes
fish-scales and the moist warm odour of bananas and piss
passing by the big-breasted, hard-eyed young whores
who frequent the empty space behind the local cinema
by the Town Hall where corrupt politicians still
go on delivering their pre-election speeches
and on the high road above the town’s burning-ground
from which gluttonous tan smoke floats up
in the breeze, smacking of scorched marrow and doubt.
Here
like the unreal stirrings
of incense smoke in a darkened shrine
like the languid movements of mangled lepers
around a temple of the goddess Chandi at dawn
like a wounded whale drifting away
sadly in unknown seas
like the dark winds of Asia
which murmur joylessly in slums but do not answer
they wander, these lost children of America,
flaunting their long unkempt hair and their feet;
a man naked to the waist, the fringes
of his torn shorts two weary chapped mouths—
a woman, her face of old porcelain
burnt in the harsh sun
clothed indifferently in a discoloured sack
her breasts weak and sagging
having lost their glimmer and their power;
the lost children wander bare-eyed
smelling of incense and living on grass and flowers
like scavengers accompanied by their impassive shadows
perhaps in search of many gods, to ask for strength,
with their appearance of sibyls and witches,
limp and cold with the ablutions of another
separate world.
Or perhaps
like she-jackals pursued
by invisible hunters who retreat
with their wounded cubs into jungle depths,
and prompted by something stronger than fear
seek refuge in some forester’s shack for succour
and for that fierce bond of air
or to find whether these tropic winds
would catch and belly out the sails of their minds
that have been woven
with the strands of sardonic guts.
No one knows them,
they are the free, the common men
soft and green of gesture, preoccupied
with their hidden songs of mankind,
mind blown by acid and amphetamines
and we watch them go by
with vague feelings of exaltation and disquiet.
They are the people we do not need to know:
they, for instance, do not travel as guests
of Rotary International or the UNO.
They are the lost children
who do not need to ask us oft-repeated questions:
Why is my skin so brown, my birth not final?
Why do I clean my arse with my hand?
Why do I seek a virgin woman for a wife?
Why do I grovel before that grotesque god
of bitter wood I have helped to carve?
And why do I seize wisdom from this swaddled sod?
I have no need to ask
why they come ten thousand miles,
for though their eyes are open they appear asleep,
and perhaps they too are men with dreams:
these men rushing through endless supermarket aisles,
the calligraphy of hallucinogens in their blue eyes,
the incredible flesh in whose innocence they hide,
the breathless thighs, the motor of the precious pubis:
harmless obsessions
that take them only for a ride.
And in desperate sleep they move their eyes
opening their hidden faces
like lonely picture postcards of unknown lands;
perhaps some sing, and some others
chant the mantras of the dead
with that benign resignation of all children,
or perhaps like victims waiting out
the relentlessness of time,
keep watching the skies with terror in their gaze.
For at the dusk’s edge
blurred by the glare of unearthly flares
feebled by a sticky silence of faraway flutes
they learn to come to themselves
at the threshold of the void
as the emptiness of the sky’s luminous bowl
fills their eyes with a single hue:
the colour of the Third Eye, the oblique, the great,
the colour of eyes when the light goes out of them
the colour of nakedness and of flayed skin,
and they recognize states of humiliation
and hunger and the well-being of a woman
drying herself with her only wet sari
after her bath, and the nameless solitude
that has nothing to hide behind,
no tragedies small or big,
and they find the secret of dying
without realizing that they are dying.
We gaze at each other in silence, the lost child and I;
who knows who is playing a joke on whom?
What can drive me from these mean, sordid alleys
where I live?
Who is the one among us misled by vision,
more real than real,
that has filled homes with tremulous ash
and has brought from hunger unassuaged
the haunted wood and the hunted myth?
In the Hanuman Temple last night
the priest’s pomaded jean-clad son
raped the squint-eyed fourteen-year fisher girl
on the cracked stone platform behind the shrine
and this morning
her father found her at the police station
assaulted over and over again by four policemen
dripping of darkness and of scarlet death.
In this time of darknesses the lost ones and I
will dim like lamps and go back to the moments
we caught once in the uncertain light of dawns;
to balance ourselves in falsehood,
in the colour of dead leaves on the earth,
falling upon the unreal word of simile and metaphor,
glorying in hyperbole
as we wait to be allowed our manner of quieter joy,
and silencing the world with borrowed voices
of the dead that sing homage to clay
in crippling ennui:
echoes of an isolating idolatry.
And now we will endure the pain
when the words of our songs droop like lilies
in the dark without standing in judgement,
passing by the abandoned cocoon
through the stench of blood over the pure dawn wall
across the stinging smoke of burnt-out doubts:
perhaps like ageing men
in their bitter-lemon gaze who look up wearily
from their doorsteps when the truth-light of day
is levelling.
So to find the time among us,
here on earth
when history does not reverberate any more
with the pulse of the drum
or with the chant of the tide on a sacred Puri shore
but with the echoes of a bruised presence
lying like a stone
at the bottom of the soul’s clear pool,
feeling the virtue that is there
in the refracted light, the earth-sense
of what pleases us and of what is lost
forever beyond us,
as the burden of ununderstood things billows upward
like smoke.
