issue 22: winter 2020
Constancy vi
Before god
Before the dead
Before children
Before a world
Dance.
Before Before Before Write.
Before Before Before Before Ravel.
Before the sea drowns
Before clouds conflagrate
Before the phoenix drops
Before thorns flower
Write.
Before you leave
Before I lose
Before it rives
Before they blaze
Ravel.
Before you leave home, banished to a land named Alone
Before I lose my voice — voice that will roam spheres seeking yours
Before a border rives language from love, marrow and bone
Before words blaze through veins in jagged tongues of fire
Ravel wild cursives from a pledge
Retrieve its letters — vowels, abjads and all
Send them to safety, from lip to lip to heart and lung.
Before the sea drowns, gills clogged by a reign of blood
Before clouds conflagrate, scorch the seasons, rain dark light
Before the phoenix drops her song, sealing the casement to dawn
Before thorns flower in bronchioles and branches crowd airways
Write it all — little stories, giant histories, a few myths
Tie them to cottonseeds, so they fall in distant hands
Etch a copy on memory’s palms: call it the human crease.
Before god dies, smile trampled, a thousand arms crushed underfoot
Before the dead return like moonlight, trailing white ash and regrets
Before children swap marbles for slugs and swallow darkness at meals
Before a world of straight lines and ironclad right owns your eyes
Dance, dance on vanishing shores between night and half-light
Return, return to nest like stacked spoons, lock chest with spine
Twine hip and thigh, knit ten fingers, purl the lips — once more
Before the battle.
This is an excerpt from Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (HarperCollins India, 2015; Arc Publications, 2016; Archipelago Books, 2019).
Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including the invented fable The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet, and the principal scriptwriter of several dance productions, including the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), choreographer Akram Khan’s dance solo. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the Mahabharata in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for fiction, was shortlisted for the 2016 Atta Galatta Prize for Fiction and highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. Akram Khan adapted one chapter of the book into a dance show, also called Until the Lions, winner of the 2016 Tanz Award for Outstanding Production. Another adaptation of the book, this time for opera, has been commissioned by Opéra national du Rhin in France. The dance shows she has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world, such as the Palais des Papes (Avignon), Esplanade (Singapore), Sadler’s Wells (London), Théâtre de la Ville and La Villette (Paris) and L.G. Arts Center (Seoul). Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals including Granta, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Magazine, Poetry International, Indian Literature, The Wolf, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and the Forward Book of Poetry 2017. She is a 2012 Sangam House Fellow, a 2013 Toji Foundation Fellow and was awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015. Her latest book is Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (2018), a travelogue in verse, written with Mumbai- based poet Sampurna Chattarji, and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet and Roshni Vyam. Also a dance enabler, Naïr’s closest associations have been with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet as executive producer of works like Babel(words), Puz/zle and Jalet's Les Médusées, a site-responsive series of performative evenings at the Louvre Museum, and as co-founder of Cherkaoui's company Eastman.