noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, June Nandy is highlighted.
"In a sand-apartment, not far, your body-double waits..." begins the first poem in this selection of Nandy poems. It points to what the strength is, over and over in these poems: the arresting statement, the statement that makes you take pause. "My steps won’t use their roads where only one thing is seen at a time." And where are those steps taking Nandy? Reading these poems, you will want to know. These poems will ring in your head and stay with you for days. "West can’t be an answer. Their hyphens copy our caste tales." she says and you stop and think. And think again.
At sunset point, Mt. Abu
Thar
Spaces to slip through
Pokhran
A walk through gaps
Mt. Kanchenzonga
In a sand-apartment, not far, your body-double waits: chic,
more convincing in looks— the drift misleads.
I want to know if she sings.
I hide from cousin Bela. She says, lucky you are, trained
in both ghazals & bhajans, incase…
(Flute, my flute, I sing Tagore, with closed lips,
My night comes to an end. Whom shall I entrust for you?)
West can’t be an answer. Their hyphens copy our caste tales.
Mother used to force open my eyes to pour a paste of darkness
inside. Mother knew,
nothing could match the color of night best as Kajal.
It is cold. Before the sun sets, it becomes a bubble bowl.
The entire dark horizon gets inexorably pulled into it.
Predictably, I’ll cry in a temple. So much fog the incense-sticks make.
This is my photo album. I can’t flaunt forts & palaces of Jodhpur.
Desert, yes, when khaki is the everyday color: In-curved. Slip-facey. Disconnected
living; in crowds though: strangers
to their hours. I’m invited by raga Maand.
Control-freak hosts, these sands. One step to next, they gather at your feet.
Pace increased, oh, the leash of closeness.
Suleiman should be helping me with riding the camel. He is feeling my legs
instead. He wants to take me
to central Thar. Wicked broke. Unless I wouldn’t learn to move like Sarangi notes,
no guide fees. Desert-waves have half-day certitude.
The Kalbelia gypsy has pulled me in to her troupe. I want her
to stop dancing on nails, on broken shards. She is a snake. She is
striking. If I can shake loose the sands.
November weariness.
I want to rest in a meadow of ease and simplicity. I know, I’ve to pay
to inhabit spaces.
I travel the countryside, shell out my powerlessness, buy a meter of cotton stole
to cover my body whole time: the price
of admission to a gap through which I can arrive.
The gap is extorting my wrist-watch when I’m trying to find the gate
of a Rilke poem. The sway of countryside is already wrenching.
The gap is mutating: it is a toll
sometimes. Sometimes, a resilience broken. A frozen second
it is, or a tear left by disagreeing forces. The many exits
in costumes of crack
of the dawn, where a gaze will obstinately wait
I’m leaving this jujitsu-self behind in the window-seat of a Bikaner-Jaisalmer bus.
No end to this
face-turning ways of roads, its mandatory breastplate of hardness, its speeding up
to a desert or sea. Powder. Every bit of the road finally is powdered.
A soft kutcha road
taking shape in my glum heart.
Sudden halt: Pokhran.
An enormous tract made sterile by an undetectable sea lies undressed in the air,
sending swells of radiation all over: Pokhran.
My makeshift road wants to wait. It waits
like the disadvantaged populace of this place. Waiting becomes ritual, another
sterile act; it cannot reroute the minds of sufferers.
I’m late to notice: the track is flanked by glistening sands. There’s a continuum
of no-tone colors as well. Most certainly, this clayey road will want to push on…
I
It’s the Ambler’s festival, the wind tells me.
Catalogues will be written and read out. Every
road will be taken.
Elsewhere, in a rainforest, song-birds continue to alert about the king’s cortège,
decry the drum-rolls, tip off the travelers, or fall silent
on hearing few cavernous roars.
Where I am,
directions have dropped the four corners
of day-sheet. I’m to give some dreams to the child, my extinction
to the partner. Afterward,
the Earth can wear her psychedelic dress and thaw out.
All that is sureness can dissolve in the air.
We’re not invited
to the festival. A woman is too eye-catching to be an ambler.
It’s higher art, where attention is not divided
between driving away the hawks and viewing the crowd.
To be an ambler is to be god.
A woman is too satisfying to be supernatural.
II
In my workshop, a step is in making. It’ll unwalk on margins, slip through
conceit. It forbids me to bring roots and soil there.
I listen. To it, I like to listen.
My steps won’t use their roads where only one thing is seen at a time. At the level
of either/or, things get mapped there, dismissing the prospects of parallel universe.
Such rationed capacity. My step will not
stop thinking about Saola. Do you know her? She bade farewell. People
downsized her to their fantasies.
I’m pulling an unlayered dress to wear.
A purpose-bag, a pram, anything, I don’t mind taking
as long as I, in my way, can see the concourse.
I know I can’t loiter without the preying birds marking me. I know
I must pull the wool over obstacle’s eyes so that never may I’ve to haul the outer
to home.
III
I’m the undead Diane, who’ll go to the last end of road.
I’m the raconteur J. Duval, telling about the beauty-eating malady.
I’m Meera. Know that
to walk the streets, undisturbed, I can even extol
an unseen god’s company.
I look for spaces to slip through. A gap
to walk through. A gap occurs
when a barricade of burly bones gets tired
of its own heaviness and fractures. When a wall of self-interest is attacked
by termites of guilt. When warmongers return home,
leaving their post to some novice.
I’m searching gaps to walk through.
I
False god you were not
before. Such perpetual poise. Ideal yet out-of-the-way. Everything was
comparison from then on. Every experience, for transferring to minor memories.
Every step, on the way to you. I unnoticed life:
that enormous éclair I half ate at Glenary’s, Darjeeling,
the St.Bernard, nudging my hands at the mall: It wasn't a runaway horse
from a local pen.
The ghost in Hotel Pineridge that robbed my claret slacks— regrets
regrets, for disregarding all.
You remained an immense wall, white, all this while
and I, unendingly self-revising.
II
Kalimpong was a step closer to you, but
the insipid years to cover that stretch. The severity of winds, the unanticipated mud
slides, the fog that mocked my vision. You glowed
being the focal sight.
III
Pelling. At your foothill,
an aberrant silence greets me. It forbids the hum I carry.
You do not recognize me. You’re looking ahead to another cloud, keen
to become rain.
Figures like you, it’s said, have funerary vault inside.
I must now find the entry gate.
June Nandy’s poems have appeared or forthcoming in RædLeafPoetry-India Award 2014 Anthology, Asian Cha, and elsewhere.
