In a Greek City
Egypt, 315
Bringing my face up against hers,
‘Who am I?’ I say to my mother.
She’s sitting on the edge of the bed,
Her legs swollen, stiff, the colour of white stone.
‘Neilos,’ she says, ‘but why do you ask?’
Her big eyes, wide open, stare at me
Uncomprehendingly. ‘Can’t find my comb,’ she says.
‘Have you seen it?’ Her right arm’s in plaster.
The wind, sand-filled, blows through the house, rattling
Windows, opening and closing the unhinged
Panels of her mind. I give her the comb.
In a gesture I know so well, her left palm,
Bent at the knuckle, touches the hairline,
Ready to follow the comb’s path through the tangles,
But the hand has no grip and the comb slips.
Shoulders hunched, hands in her lap, she looks
Like a child abandoned in a park.
‘Let it be, we’ll do the hair later,’
I tell her and go upstairs to get her breakfast—
A cup of milk, honey-cake, figs.
She eats hungrily, and I watch her eat,
Wiping her gummy mouth from time to time.
A sweettalker with one sharp tongue, she spoke
In many voices; neighbours and slaves
Told her their stories; she was the keeper
Of gossip. No one now comes, except
The wind blows, the windows rattle, and she asks,
‘Where’s Mama? Where’s Papa? Where are my sisters?’
‘They’re dead,’ I tell her, matter of factly,
As though reporting an incident in the street.
‘Is that so,’ she says, her mind somewhere else.
‘Get me something to eat. What do we have?’
‘But you’ve just eaten. See, you forget.’
She forgets that she forgets.
‘Whose house is this?’ she asks. ‘Where’s my bedroom?
When are we going back to Number 16?’
‘You’re in your own house,’ I tell her.
‘You’re in Number 16, where you’ve always lived.
Don’t you recognize the garden? the stairs?
The Gospels on the shelf, Matthew and John?
Shall I read out a passage?’ She looks tired.
I ask her to walk, to get some exercise,
But she’s adamant. ‘My no’s a no.’
That’s more like her. When she lies down, on her side,
I roll up her vest, exposing her back,
Letting the disinfecting sun fall directly
On her skin, where it’s discoloured, purplish, hard,
One unhealing bedsore oozing thickly.
A Hindu Panegyrist Remembers Sultan Mahmud
Ghazna, 1030
The wasting disease was bad enough,
Then he started losing his mind.
Visiting the treasury the week he died,
His jewels on display, he broke down
And wept like a child. Newcomers
Won’t believe it, but Ghazna used to be
A miserable little place, known only for
The sweetness of its melons, before he
Changed its face, gave it a skyline
To match Baghdad’s. He also changed our lives.
Each year before the onset of winter
He’d set off on his Indian campaign,
And four months later, when he returned
In the spring, the camel trains carrying
The spoils of war took a day and a night
To go past my door. We sang his praises,
He didn’t stint on the reward; gold mostly,
But sometimes a string of pearls
Or a silk robe, like the one I’m wearing.
For a Slave King 1
Ghur, 1167
‘In reciting the Qur’an,
In dispatching a lance,
He’s second to none.
To the imam who put him
Through the fire of learning
He was like a son,’
Said the Nishapur merchant
To Muhammad Ghuri.
Ghuri had heard before
Of Aibak’s diverse talents,
But never met him.
He was of uncomely appearance
And had a deformed limb.
He was about seventeen years old.
He had a beardless chin.
What passed through Ghuri’s mind
As he made the purchase,
Or what passed through the merchant’s
As he rose to leave,
A sack of dirhems by his side,
We don’t know.
Perhaps Ghuri foresaw
That the slave he was buying
Would be a slave-king
And didn’t mind the high price;
Perhaps the merchant
Was already figuring out
The next deal he’d strike.
For a Slave King 2
Delhi, 1211
Histories may not remember him.
His reign, in which he lost
The provinces his father had won,
Barely lasted a year.
Long enough, though,
To strike a copper coin,
Bearing on the obverse the legend,
‘The victorious Aram Shah, the Sultan’.
In the winter of 1972, in my second year with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, I was living in Black’s Gaslight Village on Brown Street. The buildings were run down but the rents were low, the rooms large, and stuffed with American colonial furniture. When I complained to old Henry Black about having to deploy a plunger every time I used the loo, he said, ‘This place is for American hippies, not Hindu Brahmins.’ I would look out the window and see snow and American students roughly my age walking past, and ask myself whether I shouldn’t change my visa status and become a grad student in Comp. Lit., even though I knew that this was not an option. I had a university job back in Allahabad, and had come to Iowa on leave.
It was here, in Black’s Gaslight, that I wrote a poem about my childhood. You sometimes have to go a long way from home to uncover memories of home, that would have remained buried if you hadn’t gone. The memories were of my pre-teens, and the poem they found their way into was ‘Continuities’. Some of those memories have to do with history:
In September I collect my cousins’ books
And find out the dates of the six Mughals
To secretly write the history of India.
I see Napoleon crossing the Alps
On a white horse.
By the time I was 15, I possessed my own small library of history books that consisted of two titles. One of them was Mughal Administration by Sir Jadunath Sarkar, and the other was the three-volume set of An Advanced History of India by R.C. Majumdar, H.C. Raychaudhuri, and K. Datta, a gift from my grandfather. I never became an historian of India, at most an historian of one of its literatures, but history as story never gave up its hold on me. I’d sooner open an history book, any history book, than a novel, any novel.
It is one thing to read history, quite another to write an historical poem. A poem on an historical figure has to be both sound history and a piece of literature. Perhaps first history and then literature. It has to pass a double test. This is something I learnt, as I did many other things, from Arun Kolatkar. For his book of Marathi poems Bhijki Vahi [Sodden Notebook], whose poems are all about women’s grief, he wanted to write one on Héloïse, and read all he could on her love affair with Abelard. In the end he abandoned the idea. ‘I could not find a way into the story,’ he said. Despite the years of reading, what was missing was the glimmering historical detail that would make the fiction of poetry seem like historical proof, as much as an inscription is. He had similar trouble with the poem on the 4th century Alexandrine philosopher Hypatia, but solved the problem by putting the poem in the mouth of the person responsible for her murder, St Cyril.
The poet who was preoccupied with history the most is of course Cavafy, and a lot has been written on it, sometimes by historians like G.W. Bowersock. As much as any historian, Cavafy took his history seriously, reading up original texts when he researched his poems, seeking the hard historical fact that could become the basis of something that, though imaginary, would have the ring of truth. For nine years he searched for the source of a story on which he had based one of the 12 poems he wrote on Julian the Apostate, and when he could not find it ‘he declared that unless the source could be traced . . . the poem could not stand.’ [1] Which is exactly what Italo Calvino said in an Italian television interview, ‘that only a certain prosaic solidity can give birth to creativity: fantasy is like jam; you have to spread it on a solid slice of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing, like jam, out of which you can’t make anything.’ [2]
What interests me, though, is also how certain thoughts crop up in certain minds, in this case the minds of Cavafy, Calvino, and Kolatkar, invisibly connecting the world’s literatures.
[The poem, “A Hindu Panegyrist Remembers Sultan Mahmud” first appeared in Atlanta Review (Spring/Summer 2012).]
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra lives in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He is the author of seven previous books of poetry and two collections of essays. He is also the translator of Songs of Kabir and the editor of Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar and The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose. His Collected Poems is coming out from Shearsman Books in 2022.