1

R Parthasarathy
[ Under another sky ]

It’s a tired sea accosts the visitor

between Fort.St.George and San thome
Here once ships bottled the harbour
With spices, cinnamon and cloves.
Inland, an old civilization hissed
In the alleys and wells the sun
has done. Its worst. Skimmed
a language, worn it to a shadow
the eyes ache from eating too much
of the ripe fruit of temples. Bridges
comb unruly rivers the hour glass
of the Tamil mind is replaced
by the exact chronomter of Europe. Now
cardboard and paper goddesses (naturally
high breasted) took down on Mount Road
There is no fight left in the old beat.
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Time has plucked his teeth. Francis Day

has seen to that what have I come
here for from a thousand miles?
the sky is no different. Beggars
are the same every where. The clubs
are there, complete with bar and golf-links
the impact of the West on India is still
talked about, though the wogs have taken over
A grey sky oppresses the eyes:
Porters, rickshaw pullers, barbers,
hawkers, fortune tellers, loungers
compose the scene. Above them towers
the bridge, a pale diamond in the water.
Trees big with shade, squat
In the maidan as I walk my tongue
Lunchbacked with words, towards Jadavpur
To your arms: you smell of gin
And cigarette ash. Your breaks
Sharp with desire hurt my fingers
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Feelings beggar description,

Shiver in dark all alleys of the mind,
hungry and alone. Nothing
can really be dispensed with.
The heart needs all.
The years have given me little
wisdom and I’ve dislodged myself to find
it. Here on the banks of the Hoogly
in the city Job charnok built.
I shall carry this wisdom to another
City in the bone urn of my mind.
These ashs are all that’s left
Of the flesh and brightness of youth.
My life has come full circle: I’m thirty
I must give quality to the other half.
I am alone now, loving only words.
Spring is no more the young season
I’ve forfeited the embarrassing gift
Innocence in my scramble to man.
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An Introduction
By Kamala Das

I don't know politics but I know the names

Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with
Nehru.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don't write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is
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honest,
It is as human as I am human, don't
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my Hopes, and
it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
WhenI asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
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Then … I wore a shirt and my

Brother's trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,

Belong, cried the categorizers. Don't sit

On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. Don't play pretending games.
Don't play at schizophrenia or be a
Nympho. Don't cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love … I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans' tireless
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
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The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,

Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.

Small-Scale Reflections On A Great House

Poem by A.K. Ramanujan
Sometimes I think that nothing
that ever comes into this house
goes out. Things that come in everyday
to lose themselves among other things
lost long ago among
other things lost long ago;
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lame wandering cows from nowhere

have been known to be tethered,
given a name, encouraged

to get pregnant in the broad daylight

of the street under the elders'
supervision, the girls hiding

behind windows with holes in them.

Unread library books
usually mature in two weeks
and begin to lay a row

of little eggs in the ledgers

for fines, as silverfish
in the old man's office room
breed dynasties among long legal words
in the succulence
of Victorian parchment.
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Neighbours' dishes brought up

with the greasy sweets they made
all night the day before yesterday

for the wedding anniversary of a god,

never leave the house they enter,

like the servants, the phonographs,
the epilepsies in the blood,
sons-in-law who quite forget
their mothers, but stay to check
accounts or teach arithmetic to nieces,

or the women who come as wives

from houses open on one side
to rising suns, on another

to the setting, accustomed

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to wait and to yield to monsoons

in the mountains' calendar

beating through the hanging banana leaves

And also anything that goes out
will come back, processed and often
with long bills attached,

like the hooped bales of cotton

shipped off to invisible Manchesters
and brought back milled and folded

for a price, cloth for our days'

middle-class loins, and muslin
for our richer nights. Letters mailed

have a way of finding their way back

with many re-directions to wrong
addresses and red ink-marks
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earned in Tiruvalla and Sialkot.

And ideas behave like rumours,
once casually mentioned somewhere
they come back to the door as prodigies

born to prodigal fathers, with eyes

that vaguely look like our own,
like what Uncle said the other day:

that every Plotinus we read

is what some Alexander looted
between the malarial rivers.
A beggar once came with a violin
to croak out a prostitute song
that our voiceless cook sang
all the time in our backyard.

Nothing stays out: daughters

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get married to short-lived idiots;

sons who run away come back

in grand children who recite Sanskrit

to approving old men, or bring
betel nuts for visiting uncles

who keep them gaping with

anecdotes of unseen fathers,
or to bring Ganges water
in a copper pot
for the last of the dying
ancestors' rattle in the throat.

And though many times from everywhere,

recently only twice:
once in nineteen-forty-three
from as far as the Sahara,
half -gnawed by desert foxes,
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and lately from somewhere

in the north, a nephew with stripes

on his shoulder was called

an incident on the border
and was brought back in plane

and train and military truck

even before the telegrams reached,
on a perfectly good

GITANJALI 35
BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held

high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
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Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards

perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-
widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country
awake.

Sir Aurobindo
Tiger and the deer

Brilliant, crouching, slouching,

what crept through the green
heart of the forest,
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws
of grandeur and murder?
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its
voice and the noise of its steps perturb the pitiless
Splendour,
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Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched

and crept, and crept and crouched a last time, noiseless,
fatal,
Till suddenly death leaped on the beautiful wild deer as it
drank Unsuspecting from the great pool in the forest's
coolness and shadow,
And it fell and, torn, died remembering its mate left sole
in the deep woodland, - Destroyed, the mild harmless
beauty by the strong cruel beauty in Nature.
But a day may yet come when the tiger crouches and
leaps no more in the dangerous heart of the forest, As the
mammoth shakes no more
the plains of Asia;
Still then shall the beautiful wild deer drink from the
coolness of great pools in the leaves' shadow. The
mighty perish in their might; The slain survive the slayer.

Mamta kalia – Tribute to papa

Who cares for you, Papa?
Who cares for your clean thoughts, clean words, clean
teeth?
Who wants to be an angel like you?
Who wants it?
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You are an unsuccessful man, Papa.

Couldn’t wangle a cosy place in the world.
You have always lived a life of limited dreams.
I wish you had guts Papa
To smuggle eighty thousand watches at a stroke,
And I'd proudly say, "My father's in import-export
business, you know."
I'd be proud of you then.
But you've always wanted to be a model man,
A sort of an ideal.
When you can't think of doing anything,
You start praying,
SPending useless hour You want me to be like you, Papa,
Or like Rani Lakshmibai.
You're not sure what greatness is,
But you want me to be great.
I give two donkey-claps for greatness.
And three for Rani Lakshmibai.
These days I am seriously thinking of disowning you,
Papa,
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You and your sacredness.

What if I start calling you Mr. Kapur, Lower
Division Clerk, Accounts Section?
Everything about you clashes with nearly everything
about me
You suspected I am having a love affair these days
But you're too shy to have it confirmed
What if my tummy starts showing gradually
And I refuse to have it curetted
But I’ll be careful, Papa,
Or I know you’ll at once think of suicide.
(Because, Father's Day)