View from a Shiva Shrine
(Hanging Gardens, Malabar Hill, Mumbai)
Seen from this distance through the last hillside thicket
Left upon the island, now for a moment
On the other side of beach and bay, this seething city—
Its endless skyscrapers veiled behind foliage,
Its relentless car-horns muted by the height—
Grows suddenly so much easier to befriend.
Here distance asserts its ancient equation:
To sing in praise of where I am
Is to praise the distance at which cities seem forgiven
On evenings like these at the ringing of a bell
Their infinite cruelties and unyielding ways.
I praise the distance at which cities are forgiven.
—from Hymns of a Broken Man
Two Miniatures
i
Diwali on the Palace Roof
(Kishangarh, 18th century)
Where the light from my reading-lamp falls on this open page
It is always Diwali night and we have nothing to do
But wait and watch while the palace concubines
Lift and wave lit sparklers to amuse us;
Watch black and gold revive old questions,
Till gold betrays its transience, yielding to black—
Each minuscule spark, frozen in paint,
Resigning itself in sudden contentment
To the knowledge of its own brevity,
Coming gently to understand
That night will have her way and must be allowed to.
Where the light from this reading lamp falls
On this open page, we begin to see
That fire is just another game night likes to play,
That this is true of each of us too,
That we are aspects of the night,
And night will have her way.
ii
Sudhama Takes Krishna’s Leave
(Chamba Valley, 18th century)
Here colour reserves the right to hold back the future:
Raw contrast of the feather-crowned monarch’s
Fine yellow robes and gold brick walls,
With the shredded grey loincloth of his departing friend,
Now turning to take his host’s final leave,
Now navigating in tatters,
Homebound and out alone in the open,
Beyond shut doors and thick, outer walls of gold,
A sparse, pathless green
Which reveals no hint of the miracle that awaits him:
The sudden undreamed-of house with its plates of gold coins,
The abundance of his courtyard, the laughter of his children,
Upon this page forever postponed.
Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife
(For Deepankar Khiwani, author of ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-aged Woman’)
Solihull School, February, nineteen seventy-nine.
Seen against a backdrop of wiry trees
And sheets of snow, a frozen quadrangle,
A football field frosted over, our Scripture teacher
Mrs. H., in thermal slacks and unusually high heels,
Looks more desirable than ever, as she instructs her flock
Of fidgety ten-year-olds, just back from Christmas-break,
To depict in crayon and pencil, a scene from the life of Joseph.
Enslavement and the-coat-of-many-colours
Suggest themselves at once as obvious themes,
Amongst brief thoughts concerning bakers and grapes;
But something about my Scripture teacher’s ineffable rump,
Calls to mind the tale of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.
I put down my colour-pencils and take a deep breath,
Before slipping into my private, contorted version of the tale,
According to which the two protagonists, having made love
Many times over, finally get caught in the act,
And Mrs. Potiphar cries rape in utter defencelessness,
To save herself from being thrown to the crocodiles.
I shut my eyes and play at being either of them in turn:
Now I am Joseph—not lurching back, startled by an
Impassioned tug at his loincloth, as our Children’s Illustrated Bible
Portrays him, his palms retracted in sanctimonious refusal,
But feasting instead to the utmost upon her lips and breasts;
And now I am her, serpentine, venomous,
My breasts slipping out from the papyrus-like coils
Of the same silver gown our Children’s Bible reveals her in,
My lips pressed firm round his startling member,
Awaiting in ecstatic ignorance some savage enigmatic thrust,
Some cryptic overflow that I imagine as I may
But as yet possess no clear knowledge of,
Bare dunes and muralled walls swinging,
Amidst pulsating hieroglyphs and slavish salivations,
Round pillars rocking, till the Nile
And all the pyramids consign themselves to darkness,
And all Egypt falls asleep to the sound of our moaning.
Outside, beyond the double-glazed windows,
Huge men in black scatter salt on ice. Here,
In Scripture-class, laid out on shelves above the coils
Of classroom heaters, as I stare, amidst premonitions
Of an unfathomable heat, at a blank notebook page,
Wet rows of tiny, fingerless gloves thaw and drip.
Invocation
(To my secret mentor with a verse by Emerson)
The ancient symbols will be nothing then,
We shall have gone behind the symbols
To that which they symbolised...
–Wallace Stevens, The Sail of Ulysses
If you are the hymn the brahmin sings,
Tighten my pyjama-strings.
Lift this low whimper to the pitch of a shout,
Or with the old gesture mute it out.
My song that shone like a sword now gropes for a sheath;
Its burgeoning vowels run short of breath,
Its consonants fall like worn out teeth,
Its metres collapse at the thought of death,
As my hands turn back from dangling ends in fear,
And I turn as limp as these trousers I wear.
O grant this sinking cadence the levity of hyacinths;
Resuscitate its floundering middle C, its decentred sevenths.
Salvage these timorous inflections from imaginary eyes,
Whose faithless cravings now urge them to sermonise.
Grant them new firmness in the face of old terror,
Of the mirror’s familiar plots, the primeval error
Of needing to be understood by anyone but you.
Let the heart contain them. Let them brew—
And if, as you say, when you I fly, you are the wings,
Acquaint them with the furtive semiotics of pyjama-strings;
Of the ripple on the lotus-pond, wind in a concrete vent,
The humming of elevators in ascent or descent;
Of wings that deceive, chains that set free,
The maternal shadows of the jackfruit tree;
And of wheels and whale songs and the onset of rain
From which all but the strongest shall be sure to run.
Let none comprehend us and the singing be strong.
O lave me with the lore of the unstruck gong!—
And string my defeated quavers into rosaries of sound;
Till this whole foretold sentence comes gently round,
Where you now place it. Now, while pride
Still seems a prerogative of the crude,
While the nerves relinquish their ancestral claim
To all knowledge of tone or tune or form or time;
And thought sits useless as a broken pot—
Bind, before I believe the great books lie,
The ineffably simple, self-redeeming knot
I cannot bring my tired hands to tie.
Set me with a jolt upon the journey out—
For You are the doubter and the doubt,
And You are the hymn the brahmin sings,
And You are the lord of pyjama-strings.
Born in Mumbai in 1971, Anand Thakore grew up in India and in the United Kingdom. He has spent most of his life in Mumbai. His published collections of poetry include Waking In December (2001), Elephant Bathing (2012), Mughal Sequence (2012), Selected Poems (2017) and Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls (2017). A Hindustani classical vocalist by training, he has devoted much of his life to the study, performance, composition and teaching of Hindustani vocal music. He received musical instruction for many years from Ustad Aslam Khan, Pandit Baban Haldankar and Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande. He is the founder of Harbour Line, a publishing collective, and of Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians. He holds an MA in English Literature and is the recipient of grants from The Ministry of Human Resource Development and The Charles Wallace India Trust. He lives in Mumbai and divides his time between writing, performances, and teaching music. His fourth collection of verse, entitled Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls, was recently shortlisted for The Jayadeva National Poetry Award.