issue 22: winter 2020
Kangra the Himalayan school of miniature painting, after the town of that name
"What Chinese art accomplished for landscape is here achieved for human love."
- Ananda Coomaraswamy
"...adulterers, who love each other with real love."
- Pablo Neruda
The lovers are in a forest. Her husband is away selling ginger and alum, his wife burns midnight oil and in the morning walks with her hair hanging loose to the temple.
They have spread a mat of leaves. Overhead a banana tree unfurls one tender green flag that falls into the silence, shudders once and goes still. Dew, tense as a maiden, calm as glass, deep as crystal, casts its thousand eyes up to heaven; the sun bares its teeth but cannot reach in here. ‘My little sister, Roll Up Your Eyes, who prays forty minutes to my twenty, was saying I’ll come back (meaning me, not her) as a worm if I see you again.’ ‘Tell her to mind god’s business or I’ll show her what.’ ‘What?’ ‘This.’ ‘You men.’ The afternoon ripens. A breeze comes fingering the new banana leaf; the leaf shivers and stops its mouth with a small green fist. In this climate the peaches fall before they go pink so pick them yellow and let them ripen in the bowl. One breast, now bare, she feeds him green almonds one by one, letting every third one slip between her teeth. Where is her other hand? He is wearing the usual garment loosely tied. His flute lies forgotten under a fig, but never again will she hear a single woodwind note without her heart turning over. One swollen fruit has split open along its seams while still clinging to its stalk, hidden from the pigeon by the modest leaf. Only the golden ants have found it: how blithely they range over the exposed sweetness as if they had for ever in that purple twilight! She has painted her nails red for him, something she omits to do for the merchant. He has freshened his mouth with anise. Darkly he lifts her onto the stem of him. Light as a spinning top she turns so that the babblers in the mango tree stop their babbling and stare. Moss green velvets the rain-drunk earth, hyacinths dot the pond. Bled-purple the clock-vine flowers on his forehead, brilliant the poppy of her fallen skirt. Is that cloud or a flamingo?
Is the artist a mere colourist? No, notice how his line leads you: the trunk of the mango he lends to the man’s foot as a brace, all nature the lovers’ trestle. Do the leaves mirror his hands, the fruit her breasts, or not? Witness the sly latticework of branches that reveals and conceals the lovers’ parts. And who is that peering through the cheetah’s human eyes if not the returning husband? Why do the black clouds on the horizon tear their open tresses if not for crying out loud? And what will we say of the serpent lightnings in the strip of stormy sky that leap the block of text into folio 12?
This is an excerpt from Red (Pan Macmillan, 2006).
Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of Zelaldinus, a collection of poems from Almost island, and most recently Asoca: a sutra. Penguin published the 30th anniversary edition of his novel The Trotter-nama last year.