Believer, aka The Tale of Hindusattva
I.
Their tails were clipped. Severance was the mainstay.
In a time when our wells no longer watered our gods,
chipped away at by acid rain and crop failure, they came,
the rooters, a clan of monotheists, clapping their
hands, brushing away the rotting feathers – our offerings
stretched over the hillside in a slow line of uprootings –
clutching water in leather, desert seedlings that would drink
the heat. They drank nothing; knew nothing of throats
laced with traces of blood, mud or beak. We will save
they said, and took in turn, the feeble pulse of our
wrists, sucked it in with their mouths, caressed our
veins with a studied thistle-prick. We bled no blackness
or bile; they fused us with their brown waters, as sparkling
as the sun filtered into crystals of ice. Such tender
drinking shriveled our wings. We too lost the tails –
arms sprouting in their places. Webs yielded to
bone; the cartilage that tore our hips into flight
calcified. We felt the grass under soft feet; the cotton
of the new seedlings entranced our new finger-tips.
We came to wake, but could not rise. What barter
is this, our leader asked, and one of them, a long
-nosed one said, in this life, rising is forbidden. When we
turned around to our temples, the bells moored to
the banyans had fallen, and the gods, white with
the snow of our new waters, had sprouted wings –
our amalgams – and were spiraling away. We appeased
their floating feet by scooping our forgotten beaks
up, but they crumbled into sand. The one who spoke
looked up, raised his nose, and traced our veins
on the clouds. We tried to lift off, but our feet
stopped us. The earth was in our lungs, pushing
us back, the breezes moving forward, turning
into drafts, no longer under wing.
II.
In Pondicherry, the foam swells into minarets near
the sea-wall. Salt scoops out innards of birds, flowers,
or moss-branches, sucking out the resin, leaving
a water so gravid, its turbid frothing is bleached
bone-white. I spelt his hands out on the sand,
in the shape of a great black stone. Kneeling,
he prayed into the crags, where the crows had
lain in droughts, unable to fly to the water’s edge.
The Auro mandir flattened its shadow against
ours. Can we fly here, I asked him, but shaking his head,
he kicked a piece of granite. The tide rose to lap
it up. See, he gestured. When he turned to face
away to the teeming town fair, full of coconut shell earrings,
bamboo prayer mats sewn with seashells, or salt in hour-
glasses, I lunged toward the tallest wave, my only
benediction being the dismissal of mooring, a return
to silken webs, of joints as malleable as the strips
of bamboo wired to make rosaries. My feet hit
something, and I lifted into the pillaged horizon:
a tired line mirroring the gold dome behind me.
Were he to turn back, the eclipse would have
mired us all in the question of temples: how they
were constructed in straight upward lines, forever
silhouettes of another, vaster flight. When I came
to, I was on the dome, a prone offering to my
gods who were descending on the wharfs below: white
crows, licks of red salt, splitting whole minarets
with their wings, tearing up his raised arms,
while he stood at an intersection, waiting
for the speeding bus. The sands came out
soon after, piling in heaps across the wall. When they
returned, the water would well up, covering
the town with temples, broken, split or carved
out from our gods’ heads, such as it was
before our plumes broke, loosening the earth’s
tether, spraying a sea of spurs upon us:
the ones chosen for no volary.
III.
Bent into arrowhead, beaks polished with banyan,
our chests are quivering with leaning
bird-song. Seeds swollen into hatchlings,
the armor of our definite trajectory
has fallen: we are exposed to the deceptions
of plant, worm, wet rot. After the wave,
I climbed down to find his body washed
into the sand, the sand trickling into
water, the water cleaving to moon. Prayer
calls were gone, replaced by our chanting
hilltop bells. We were gathered. Our old
leader came to me, wings ornate. Prostrating,
I held out the dead lover’s feet. You have routed
the sands, he sung. I closed the open, water-milked
eyes, lifted the carcass and soared. The flock
aw me from below, swooping in, cutting my
tailwind, parting the nimbuses with their formations,
my tail dredging their path. The moon grew
miniscule behind us; the filament of westbound
sun speared our eyes, but we floated, away
and into our firmaments, studying our
limbs into prayer, convoking our new children
into this schism – an arrangement of billed notes,
all humming toward the stars, where we could
be and be again, with no wingspan of migrants.
Chapel
In the mornings, rice steams over a prayer-mantle
stocked with brass receptacles full of water, marigold,
hibiscus, ash. When I light it, the lamp swills sesame
smoke, and the crooning of road-roller and chirping
of lark take over. In the ocean-bound city, drifting
toward its artificial seaport, the cross-wind would have
blown south-east, but here, in the red-rimmed inland
plain, ambushed by waterfall, mountain light,
and Malabar thrushes, flickering denotes obstinacy.
The flame, an ellipse, a contortion of light, follows
me to school, where I stare at the pale lime-green
walls, the adhering of chalk in striped wounds
across coils of coir-chairs. The steel cupboards
simmer in lunch-light, ponderous with notebooks
and ink bottles. In a single file, we are led by
the peepal tree, where a musty room, evocative
of three-week old, half-opened Wibs bread
winces to life. Kyrie Eleison, the nun in the beige
saree croaks. We follow notes lodged in each
other’s self-assured eye-movements, pausing
to eke out a melody that the absence of stale
mouths emanates. The flame has forsaken
the cupboards, heating the shingles on the roof,
perhaps, trickling a steady line of steam-prints
on the black keys of the piano. I turn my face
to an altar with pews strewn in front, taut in their
suggestion of kneeling, themselves genuflected
at forty-degree angles. I readjust, read the notes
off the back of the nun’s shoulders, two muscles
working as if grass-shears, hacking their own
blades off, chopping, heaping the swift hot air back
onto the flame that has descended upon our
throats, coping to take in this new turn, a bridge.
Walk by the edges of Cape Comorin, and you
will see a giant rock where Vivekananda meditated.
You may not speak there, in a room full of flame,
battered by raging offshore gusts, but in this room,
we are free to roam the bridges of songs and saunter
to the crucifixes at the far-end, where the flame
lingers, having accumulated thirty-three thousand godheads
– elephant, horse, tortoise – wondering how to congeal,
and how, if any, respite from water would ever
be necessary to feed its one mouth.
Watch
The cinema is cruel
like a miracle... We our- selves appear naked
on the river bank spread-eagled while
the machine wings nearer.
– ‘An Image of Leda,’ Frank O’Hara
The platter of crisped corn in this film is a sleight
of hand, accreting further in every frame
as each mouth rues etiquette, craving the crisped shell;
however, the situation does not warrant
satiation. The underdog cook, perhaps
of gutter-side, perhaps from The Taj,
is of dystopian imagining – watch how tender he cooks
the lamb, how impermeable the edges
of his ever-gleaming apron.
What tactile pleasures the butcher’s
character sustains, what whimpering runts or tender
marrow spared of liquidation, what chining
reserved for entertainment and dramatic purposes
only are in store for you? Flash back to the phantom
machete – an apparition fleshed by women
about to be raped, bare biceped men, goons with no
real ambition or payment except afternoon teas. A Newtonian
intervention of resistance, it falls away in slow motion.
In the presence of the iridescent butterfly,
lovers meet in a well-watered orchard, Keatsian
nostalgia prevails, impermanence of shared gum is thwarted,
trajectories of fountains are well-measured, seas controlled.
No one dies in storms induced by giant on-set fans. The background
violin is a foreground entity, its baritone loop balanced at the edge
of crises – burnt houses, violent spouses, fractured jaws.
In some blurry tilt-and-pans, it appears briefly nestled under a chin, edging melancholy partially out of the frame, into your popcorn.
The close-up of the doorjamb is a study in still lives. It breathes
an eldritch pause – the father who hesitates before turning
it and entering to smooth baby’s hair does not know you
taste the edge of your steel armrest. The wandering tomato in mid-shot,
a prop squeezed by the actress to suggest consummation,
is an affect, not object. It leans in later, unsliced, where her ear may
have gashed open. No spilling of seed-blood
evokes pain or teetering and no close-up of dismemberment
ensues. But the metal of this acidic wound is what you remember, outside
the movie-hall, where the snack vendor splays open the sealed sandwich.
Beer Bar Chat
Sister, there is an old woman strung to my saree ends. She keeps
knotting herself into the bharat scouts and guides manual’s
suggested scarf tying pattern. I keep trying to slink across dance floors
of restaurant-bars with grace befitting my moniker and my
expensive Bata high-heels. Your ruffle dress would be harder
for my stalker to latch on to; she ferrets out empty beer
bottles when my saree unravels, clinking them against counter
-change and yellowed ashtrays, but to undo your suede buttons
or untier your bunched up taffeta while counting soda cans
fished from between the drunk peons’ thighs would challenge
her. Our skills are reptilian – we must collude to produce
movement across fixed points on the chipped wooden stage,
where hers are avian – she must dismount from creophagic
bough and flit from host to host birdnesting brim-soiled glass,
screeching hey my waist was sinuous enough too once.
When the men look up, those eyes that are always filming raucous
leggy flashes in music videos fix on her, a once colubrine, now
unlimbed phenomenon. Perhaps the suction of bottles and cans
adheres her to our scales and flounces, or perhaps we guarantee her
both mooring and flight. Whatever we are, icons of this
intra-tellurian genus, remember: our stilettos are
running out and our propensity to hoard cheap sunglasses is endemic.
Never slide under the tables, for the relishing of bare-feet and beer
fizz and the fiddling of chalky bottle-caps is our truce with her.
Soar
I.
Three days ago, I watched
my favorite theater burn
to the ground, its livery of neon
bulbs thrust into road-lamps
and defunct fire-hydrants,
the rivets on the roof ripped
apart like a stockpile of bullet
shells, lodged in the watchman’s
throat, the soles of his rubber boots,
the back of his throat that held
the names of all the films
running full house. I watched
a kite descend on the rubble, picking
on copper wires that strung
together the masks of my beloved
character: the mime, a swansong
artist. He always appeared
at the end of noir films, flying
a diaphanous kite soaring into
the stands, where my wings twitched
slightly, in anticipation of fanning
out into the midnight lamp-light,
fluttering, and ready to take
off, to where my face dissolved
slowly, my feet no longer dredged
in the spray of smashed hydrants.
II.
My plea for ascension reeks
of respite: I scrub voices in
a news studio at night. Holding
a yellow light over tapes, I watch
for inconsistencies in smears
of metal – blurs between
carved frames. Today’s story
may be about mine-laborers
on strike, or the street worker
who was run over by a yuppie,
or the beer bars in coastal towns –
in spots where damp clotheslines
flicker behind a sweaty-haired reporter,
while a marquee of the latest
stock crashes flashes at the bottom.
I trim the edges where the threat
of background looms large – crows
hurtling toward the cameraman’s
lunch, errant children stabbing
the crew with plastic knives,
filmy rape-songs played on radios
splicing sound bites. Not even
once have I heard a still
wind, or the whistling of wild
sparrow, as much as I have weeded
out the sound of watching.
III.
When I was ten, an itinerant
brought on Sundays a bioscope
into town – a gazette of birds
skimming water as they landed
on its surface: gazing sideways
into the branches of a banyan,
alighting, exiting caves, tunnels,
frolicking on lily pads where
the rainwater congregates in beads,
pummeling berries the size
of their nests, or sometimes
simply nestling in straw,
incubating eggs. I watched their
faces closely, the trim of chins,
the hardness of their beaks,
the swell of their bellies, the contracting
of frame from winged to stationary,
the cloaking of eye with hood, webbing
of feet with a tough hide. Years later,
in the theater, I watched a heron
pick a mackerel out of a swamp,
and surprised, I watched as the hero
shot it down from the riverbank,
another victory for us voyeurs, living,
as we were, on the edge of our
reflections, our flight.
Ranjani Murali is a Chicago-based writer and artist. She received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. She currently teaches college-level literature and writing courses. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Fine Arts Work Center. Ranjani won the Srinivas Rayaprol poetry prize in 2014 and the inaugural Almost Island manuscript prize in 2015. Her first book of poems is forthcoming. Her work has appeared in Phoebe, Eclectica, Cricket Online Review, Word Riot, and elsewhere.