Zones of Assault 8171670636

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CHICAGO

CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE DIVISION

LITERATURE INFORMATION CENTER 400 SOUTH STATE STREET CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 69605

| |

THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

FORM 19

PUBLIC

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LIBRARY

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ZONES

“OF ASSAULT

New Poetry from Rupa Tabish Khair My World

Anna

Sujatha Mathai

The Attic of Night

Makarand

Paranjape

The Serene Flame

Tara Patel Single Woman

Sudeep Sen The Lunar Visitations

New Fiction from Rupa Anurag Mathur The Inscrutable Americans

New Stories from Rupa M. T. Vasudevan

Nair

Catching an Elephant

Zones of Assault Ranjit Hoskote

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CALCUTTA ALLAHABAD BOMBAY ~~ DELHI 1991

©Ranjit Hoskote 1991 An Original Rupa Paperback First published 1991

by

Roe ta 15 Bankim Chatterjee Street, Calcutta 700 073

94 South Malaka, Allahabad 211 001 P. G. Solanki Path, Lamington: Road, Bombay 400 007 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002 Cover illustration by Niren Sengupta

Cover design by J. M. S. Rawat Typeset in perpetua by Megatechnics 19A Ansari Road New Delhi 110 002 Printed by Gopsons Papers Pvt Ltd. A 28, Sector IX Noida

Rs ISBN

81

201

301

40 7167

063

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- -ROLOS& 56582

For

Nancy

and my parents

CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE DIVISION LITERATURE INFORMATION CENTER 400 SOUTH STATE STREET CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement

is due to the editors

of the following

journals, in which some of these poems first appeared: The Indian PEN, for ‘The Acrobat’, 19/7, ‘Two Women in Midsummer’; The Bombay Literary Review, for ‘Bandra Creek: Night Crossing’, ‘The Scarecrow’, ‘Zweistromland’; Kaiser-e-Hind, for ‘Assassination of an Artist’, ‘Hardwar’, ‘Report of War’; Indian Literature, for ‘The Village Elders’; Poetry Chronicle, for ‘October Lightburst’. ‘The Ride’ first appeared in the poetry section of The Independent. ‘Lament’, ‘Hawkfall’, ‘Wolf Rain’, and ‘Agenda for Saline Drifts’ first appeared in the poetry section of The Sunday Observer.

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Contents

ZONES OF ASSAULT The Acrobat Plum Eye Fall 1917

Assassination of an Artist October Lightburst Heraclitus . Fireworks

Jerusalem SUDDEN LANDFALLS Bandra Creek: Night Crossing Autumn Sonata Episodes Steelwire Snake Paranoia

When the Flowers Fall The Ride Strawberry Morning SIX ELEGIESy Two Women in Midsummer Hardwar The Village Elders The Scarecrow

11 13 14 15 16 18 19 20

23 24 23 26 28 30 31 32

a7 ao 4

42

Report of War

Zweistromland NATURAL HISTORY

49 51 53 55

Lament

Hawkfall Wolf Rain Agenda for Saline Drifts HOSTILE RESOLVE

59 61 62 63 64 65 67 69 71

Dream of a Parrot Icarus Insurgent

Kite in a High Wind Bridal Song Prehensile Logic Horse Hymn

Hymn Questioned Ceremonial of Spring Tiger Poem

THE LATENT PHYSIOGNOMY Leonardo Cable Downhill Ladder Keclamation The Names of Old Ships Noche Triste Mailing List Vector Geography UNFORESEEN POSTSCRIPT Last Memory Key

OF OBJECTS

75 oT 78 a 81 83 88 89

93

The Acrobat

Piebald in the harlequin light, Partly green and partly yellow In contradictory costume I whirl on the mat Marked out for an acrobat: An enthusiast for cartwheels And variable turns, I spin across the void that spurns The safety of firmer ground, Dizzy with the ecstatic rise-fall-rise.

Measuring out with every jump The march and hasty retreat Of men, women, horses, mules, Tanks rumbling through country lanes — Letting faces, masks, helmets, heads Flood across the screen: The absolute circus in picaresque hues.

I am the movement that reflects The reflection that moves — Pulsing in spifals old at once And at once new, With lilacs and roses just for you And behind your back The dagger of time uncovered Bares its glittering blade.

I hang in midair, in midair hang; Possibilities revolve around the thought I think In that single suspended moment. Lilacs and roses, I said. Who knows how the petals will look Until they have bloomed?

Fading illumination to astill point. All revolution ceases, glides to a halt. Plural metamorphoses of a thought: Two powder-blue hands Miming out history in the dark, Lightly glowing. Silence. Sleep.

Plum Eye Fall In Memoriam:

Lin Piao

Three birds glisten ona barkshorn branch Like black plums in rain. They watched you fall

That windy day when thunder Drove your horses, but the sun In your stomach played you false; Deciding to stretch its rays,

Splintered your jade bones.

That day, brother, they didn’t Squawk even. That, brother, is how they glisten Still on their branch.

But that day, brother, when the thunder Laughed, and the sun laughed

— they stared till their plum eyes, Swollen with; staring, Dripped soilward,

haven’t stopped dripping.

[07

When the guns fell quiet And the files started moving, When the imperial standards eagled Ina groundward dive And angry hammers slammed Into the sky, and mocking The florid architecture Of the castrated culture, Red sickles sprang From the snowbound soil:

When they thought the permafrost Couldn’t take liberty unaided And decided to help, When the whips came on And the gauntlets went red With dissident throats; When the teachers stopped telling And the students stopped asking And prayed together in loyal gloom, Was it bliss in that dawn To be alive? When the wing-span We had mapped out cracked up, Could we tell Where the freedom ended And the slavery began?

Assassination of an Artist For Safdar Hashmi; assassinated 1 January 1989

They got him that first hard crack On the coconut head. Split in sacrifice the halves Went bounding down bloody slopes, Down red shoulders arms outstretched, Pinioned in strict observance Of ritual: dragged from his altar, The rebel priest. They left him Splayed on iron ground, The bleached grass clotting a flood of wounds.

Smeared with permanent red, Revelling in the offering, They laughed the laugh of angels

Unleashed behind the tacit face Of God; put away their swords, Inverted their axes, stuck flags To the shafts, And wheeling in a magic dance Of spring, celebrated Republic Day,

October Lightburst In memoriam: Chongtham Bedamani Singh, fighter for Manipur’s liberation, killed in an encounter with Indian forces, 1981.

They shot you in the October light — It plunged from the trees Haloing your head as it fell, Bombing the rocks, blasting the trees, Torching the snow where atrail Marked your wounds for centuries On your native ground.

No burial. A rustic signpost Calibrates the wilderness of shrubs (Twisted, thorned, twangled, Knotted into unwilling shapes) Near where you died.

Away from that solitude secreted

In the hills, here in the city, Inside the University | plaster Posters on the walls You probably scrawled slogans on; In this season of uprising It strangely seems I’ve known you For years. We never met.

They have seen you again Spurring your great red horse Across the rocky paths, The steed skirting the cornfields Goldeneyed in another October.

They have seen you again In the fields, taking in ponds, fences; But in the chrome and crystal citadels They haven’t heard the forests Bending before the storm Haven’t heard the hardest, heaviest teak Snap and crack in the gale.

The hooves of the great red horse Trample the fastidious crenellations Of a decayed defence; great blinding waves Billow outward from the fields — The mowing stops, the scythes are swords.

The burning light stings the Rt

day.

Heraclitus

Wasn’t that Heraclitus there, the hierophant of flux, Vanishing in a stream of molecules? Already his porch has become a temple, Its columns grinning out to sea, The temple, as we watch, shambles about, Surrendering pride and frieze to the slops and triggers

Of three regiments or battalions (I forget which), After which a bomb and two semi-natural calamities Have reduced it to a NATO arms depot.

Is it this form fated to achieve Stasis in brightness, uncancered by the traffic of blights? Material: volatile/inflammable Target status: within missile range; The form is liable to change. Hauled up over these hills, the warheads do little But make faces at themselves in the quivering bay; But, all the same, have locked us back In the cockpit of the same hot, sweaty expedition That has, century on flogged century, taken us out To dump our mashed skulls in the slag-pits of orators’ dreams. Context: analogous. Or better: the same. Place: the same. Time: different, Stranding us, between the eternal and the ephemeral’s claims, With only doubt and dust answering to their own names. QED?

Fireworks

The incendiary celebration Of long internecine feuds: .The artillery swings out In a sunburst arcing the gangrene landscape Of barbed wire and scoured craters; Under the flak and the shrapnel, Ripping a dark crease in the earth’s blanched side, Rises the bayonet.

Like the sprung blood that splurges From a soldier’s punctured chest, War spills over history. So many salmon, shoals of dreams Swim upstream, braving turbines and sluices,

To fan finally over the plateau, where — seeing They are sterile, have nothing to spawn —

‘The ice makes ivory of their bones.

19

Jerusalem

A man stumbled here once, A cross strapped to his back.

Later, nailed to it, he died; Rubies dripped down To the cold Levantine ground.

No spell has stanched them. Now they refract a Kalashnikov’s slanting flash, Lend local colour to an air-raid’s flurry, Underwrite the red alert urging you Back to the subterranean sanctum of the bunker.

No vow of silence binds the bunker To the cave-monastery’s rosary record: A bead for every year Unsullied by the ring of the voice. Here, forty factional war-cries Proclaim as many annual casualty lists.

It has taken us four thousand years to mature, To hone the fireflint into a warhead directed deep At the chocolate heart of the universe.

In this upturned field where the acrid barrows Of four millennia force a flush to the sun’s face, The forty years since your own world’s birth Are not even a clod of earth.

20

SUDDEN LANDFALLS

Bandra Creek: Night Crossing For N. A.

Windrush ice cements my skeleton collar, Windrush ice in fine strands spun Out to the deep heart of the sun. My soles earthquake above miles and miles Of girders clanging on embered tracks A red-eyed hymn of war.

The turquoise dreams of necking trees Have contoured again the huntsmen swinging Their carnivore lanterns, To toll spectretime.

Mirrored below, their bronze twins swim On wombdark water.

23

Autumn Sonata

Silence protrudes where the woods open Like green lips To reveal Parted brown ripping from red Branches

Throwing — Stops Abruptly Without Of sand,

out a polyglot shout vibrates where sea kisses land the softening of a veil and wind

No buffer. The shock Quivers a sonata Through recapitulated shots Of brushwood Closing Of the lens.

24

Episodes

1. Freak wires clot into black lashes. Hemispheres heavy with dreamless breathing Are ripped one from the other

An abyss grins, and in its gloating depths A vast red eye, a sea without centre Becomes

a killer swirl of waves on waves.

Unreasoning, a blink in history. Epochs are put To fiery sleep.

Trapped by crags stained blue with pilgrim blood

(the rocky jaws of a hostile god),

Veil of hair on veil of hair Are inviting fronds that wave and part, Unfold a passage to inland seas:

In whose shoreland forests, in luminous knolls, In the trembling thirst of turquoise leaves, Pll bury my face.

25

Steelwire Snake

Steelwire snake it glides, elides The consonants in afternoon’s lullaby, Ribbons across strangled rivers and limping hills, Coasting on in a diesel dream.

Glint of sun on falling water, Notched when the train jerks while blurring walls roads trees Into one ever-unfurling streamer Played out over the shooting rails.

Alongside the rails for a long time a tree, Squashed by the speed against the sky: Trunk aloof and planted square, but the roots A web dredging up spidery bridges, Subsoil etymologies linking object

With significance, object with meaning; Between symbol and substance you fling your arms Wide — and the branches answer, or try to answer, Straining to pull free of the crucifying embrace Of the trunk from below, armless embrace Of shared, continuous sinews and ligaments. The sweat of the branches stripes your window, The plains outside jerk up, the speed subsides A fraction.

26

Houses zoom into focus. Their walls fill the windows, Slam into your face.

A start of fear in the pit of your stomach, A churning dread at the roots; You are solid again and no more streaking, No more a hurtling part of speed. You settle back into the body Left behind in the chair. The houses slow down. You could almost take a tile off, or knock a pane. The shooting rails are narrowing down

To a spot, the great wheels will have a stop Will stop Stop —

And you get off, Looking for friends.

ad

Paranoia

Pink eyes burst from the clouds And all things are changed Are made bloody. The gore splurges and splatters Over the white sheet; The seed-cloud bursts: Sticky spore butters the burning toast Crystal daggers sprout from the embers Dripping blood-blue shadows That slice my hand as I Lift it. My dread hand lifts The bowl of sky Off the hooded moon I run My finger over its dark side, Sharpen my long nails. My Mandarin handshake Daggers into your palm My kiss Poisons your virgin breath.

What will operates My own?

Mesmerised by serpents — Black shades sussurating beneath The unruffled water,

They dance in a sinuous wave, thralled In a trance beneath the blood-red clouds

28

What will operates? My own, In the horrible dawn.

29

When the Flowers Fall

A silence pins the air down, So it can’t stop the winds switching places. Can’t stop the white tips of wings Touching one another, etching A map of warmer countries.

Then when the rains have finally gone, And geese slap through the leaf storm, Leaving their piercing cries to drop To the forest floor angrily, Some feather that has floated back from the flight Streaks the air in the absence of rain: The pinned air that still flutters Soundless as stoneweighed sheet.

And sometimes, when the flowers also fall, Some fall in pairs.

30

The Ride

The long grass wafts its secrets To the sun listening behind A cloud. The wind sighs

Along the stream; a silent bird Commands the sky.

Swooping down the waterfalls Suspended in the clarity of air, The bird plunges and glides Closer to the quick-breathing surface Of earth, plunges and prods its burnished beak Into the nectar glade of day.

The long line of trees is splashed With purple fire, And hot and foaming and pink

From the ride, somewhere A child is born.

31

Strawberry Morning

A fruity tang pervades the mist, Infiltrates the sleeping air; The sunlight can barely shrug off Its rug of fleecy clouds; The streets wear a bleary look Of improbability: The clatter of a kettle that a hand hasn’t reached Lucidly suggests that no one Is conclusively awake yet.

Summoning myself from reverie I step over the moss to her garden, See the white chairs bobbing In the sea of round grey pebbles Again, after many dawns; She waits under the spreading tree For me to cross the pebbled sea, And the brown eyes, looking up, smile Before the lips smile.

My lips are a willing mirror. Somehow,

She knew I’d come today: I cannot fathom how, _ Nor particularly want to: The garden is complete in itself now,

Sa

Closed to When she Waves of Porcelain.

analysis. comes to the table, light bounce off the blue and white It’s a strawberry morning.

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SIX ELEGIES

Two Women in Midsummer

Two women in midsummer Sharing their loss In traditional white.

Walls, their bricks baked brown, Relieved now and then By pictures fading into cool green remembrances.

Idols in a corner, somewhat dusty; The shrine is patient Through forgetfulness and dried flowers.

Two women in midsummer Adrift in a garden, In rank weeds, unaccustomed perplexities.

Dark eyes gaze out blankly Past the steam shivering over the coals, The embers smoulder redly, unnoticed. |

The courtyard where they had sung And splashed around in orange and yellow Is starched and crisp and white.

37

Two women in midsummer Stare across a many-pillared space, A wordless space, a nameless space.

Even the crimson stains have gone.

38

Hardwar

The Ganga flows, The bathers bathe, And the long-accumulated silt Of more than several sins Slowly settles To the tolerant river-bed:

Moving in with heaps Of other junk —

The jettisoned debris of previous lives, Which seems to pass, But touching down, circles And leaves its mark.

ag

The Village Elders

Together they huddled Around the fire, in the crispness

Of a blue and wintry day; Around the fire at the foot Of the gnarled tree

(So they said) of Life: Four old men, And afifth Who waited beyond the mossy perimeter, Outside the circle In which they whispered The elements of their secret conference.

What they said I do not know; Long after they had hobbled away, I was left with the rustling waves Of their confabulation; The boughs bent before the wind, But told me nothing; Strange, because the old grey tree Had heard it all, and the crackling fire Its orange

tongues, mocking,

sang out:

They knew! They knew!

40

The Scarecrow

Crowbar-spined, crowned with a mop of straw, The scarecrow scratches his crotch In a field of rapidly diminishing corn. Not intimidated by this relic Propped up by ancient law, Bands of marauders merrily loot the grain, And, cocking a cheeky snook, Depart.

The scarecrow remains, brooding Over fiendish schemes to barb the field, Or fit another handle to his cactus shield. Ringed in by the blaze that invites itself Summer and autumn from the crackling dry forest, The scarecrow achieves the equipoise Of a solstice, pondering the best course Among several courses. The marauders and the blaze compete, Alternately splitting and combining forces, Aligning ranks in the warmth of knowing That when scarecrows stay scarecrows Devoid of animation, The corngis anyone’s claim to stake.

4]

Report ofWar

Kosala, 900 B. C.

The river has choked on bodies

Theirs and ours; keeper of the vagrant hours, The owl snores himself hoarse.

The fowl of air, the fowl of trees Have fallen to the wakefvl breeze, The epic sorrow

of stonecut

eyes

Floods the plateau with its tears.

In its stride this tide of tears Sweeps up and away the thatchroof homes Of tribals hunting on hills that flatten Prostrate

at our conquering

feet.

Prone mountain, pigstuck carcass

Of a black god whose black throne Is dung under our raiding wheels,

In windhit stone his broken back a dyke.

Then, then the forked sword of fire Parts the forest’s ashen thighs, Shaving the fronds off a hidden cave, Like a golden parakeet our ritvik cries,

42

But what libation from what spring Will he drip his altar with?

From the damp, unrazored caveroof, Immemorial visitation of unsphinctered bats, It drips like the ichor that drips From a god’s gashed flank.

The cindered trees meanwhile let fall Their charcoal apples, their branches lopping In the bony lethargy of a corpse. The river has choked on bodies, Theirs and ours.

43

Zweistromland The Land between the Rivers: germinated from a lead

assemblage by Anselm Kiefer, artist

I Between my palms scald and struggle The redhot coals of hours. Toes — mine, Frozen, prod the pebbled stream; Hoping, from their garnet sleep, More embers to provoke.

Provoke them. Each ember an ancestor. Each ancestor a smoky flame

To lick, curse or call benediction: To exercise my brother’s ghost.

Ash greys the scanner. Flits from Gunship to fractured gunship. Ash of lead, ash of zircon, Ash only can the land afford. Ash only I could rake from my brother’s pyre.

Pyre which white-hot, hollowed

Skull Of a bull, pyre which glows,

44

Throbbing glows between the torpid Arms

Of drowsy rivers, throbs above The gore.

Blood no longer but caramel shroud Smouldering on the long line of pyres Our wakes Sluggish, numbed, unruddered our wakes We reeling ships.

Prows snapped off, reeling ships That have’ beached here in sooty dunes Beached here, have run aground miles away From brothers. From brothers’ pyres. In a tree-hung village Ships reeling, ships trying to reel trying to vertigo memory.

Il

How long do we bleach our hulls On these sooty dunes, pitching at A sunrise that can’t cauterise Our barnacled backs? Pitching, Waiting to fully forget. Waiting Like shiftless tramps.

45

- Even where the fine cracks are free Of flitting ash No drop drips. No drop drips

To lease a little sea to landlocked lips.

The wind’s a dry and hacking cough.

On walls which have trudged To this village to die, A fire’s dried grief Has left its carbon ghost.

46

NATURAL

HISTORY

Lament

A poem for Jehangir Sabavala

In this first and final hour The forest’s beeswax is not yet sun, Has not yet smouldered, risen to fire, not yet Blown away. In this first and final hour let the black sword Of my cry Fall among the twelve tribes. Let it scatter Their tents across the flinty plains, Loose their ponies to the winds. Let the black sword of my cry tear child from mother, Cleave banner from flagstaff, chieftain from concubine, Let the plunged stake of conquest and the soaked altar of triumph Know

no perpetuity.

So let the cowl of night smother the incursor tribes, But let it not muffle at the day’s rubric The toothless lament of those who bear The branding on their shoulders, the whistle of the whip

Within their ears; who walk stoopingly in foreign lands, Tightening their scarves against the windy shrieks

Which that day fought the vultures off the dead. ;

Unloose the scarves that stave off the windy shrieks. Let the welts on the backs of those who flee

Become the runes of those who survive;

49

The spoor of migrant feet, the salt lines Threading the way back, the way now sealed by ice, Now sealed by the swirling reprise of the sea.

In this first and final hour Let my cry

Be the whitened wingbeat of waves.

50

Hawkfall

In September the spartan rain Makes its annual pilgrimage north

From the seamouth and the ivory ribs of ships, To where the river’s fount tears its closed lips Apart, to bubble and murmur, and to strain

To catch the distant shivering of the cloud that floats In this cold morning’s sky, This cold morning which gleams and gloats, Throws bronze slivers of itself into the brook’s mirror: And as it fastens its vice around the distant cloud, Is hawkfall To the sheep lost in the hillside’s thickets.

And I do not know why the rain then turns Away from the apricot-gold of the caught cloud, From the hawk arrowing into the bur-spurred flock; Do not know if it turns from fear, or from fear Of knowing that soon, soon It shall have to spear the hawk toatree: A tree anchored by rain-ragged roots to the sun, The sun itself wrapped by the rain In the tattered sail of the floating cloud.

And having wilted the edges of the earth to look Like a photograph that has barely breasted

51

A tide, the rain knows itself about to drift back, Spent, to where the ships’ drying ribs will spike it.

And the rain is too spent to want to know Whose hands will pass over the sagging sky and rent slopes It has left behind: whose hands, not knowing which Is which, will pick

The sun from the stricken tree, launch again The hawk from the mortal cloud.

52

Wolf Rain

As we groped our way in a wagon in the night, Loaded with hay which could not wink

In the dark, we saw workmen shovelling dirt Into shallow pits. But the guards were dozing, So we passed quickly.

Rainhit my eyelids shuttered and rainhit My shoulder receded into shell, And from the tracks spooling into the past behind, I moved away, into the compartment, rainhit. Tried to write. The drizzle nosed its way in Through the grille, made the pen skid So the purple ink spludged across the page, Graphing centuries.

] have not seen the stars for centuries It has been raining. When a hundred years meet a hundred years Anywhere but on paper, they explode: The crannies between the blasts Fill with memories that the wolf can’t touch: A marriage under the trees — the groom smiles — The bride is hidden by marigold blotches.

53

I forgot to put down how the wolf hunted me. Danger lurked on every turning of the stair, But slunk away like the wet sand sucked Slowly into a crab-hole, or the hair of the bride

Whose blood had come by then to splurge In the serpentine waters of the canal.

The groom, I think, ended his coal-wracked journey In the salt-mines: here, one can never be certain. It was in the canal, when I went to look, that the wolf finally Waded out to fix me with phospher eyes, like an owl’s In the haunted midnight of a field.

I cannot recall how he swam closer: my eyes had closed; He traced his claws over the fine hair of my nape. The graph so scraped showed me the purple marsh In which I stood: it was canal no more. He spoke of many explosions, each as it grew, Fused again with his own tail, to his own design. I splashed through the thick rain he had brought with him, Chased by a hyena-laugh as he threw his mask away.

Since then, I have seen neither fireworks nor stars. I ride, I write.

54

Agenda for Saline Drifts

A world I knew: treading its saline drifts

(So they won’t bite my heels) I must haul Dry brickloads, keeping them dry. In the holes of this world’s beaches I must dip olive brushes, and having climbed Its rocky sky, when I dive, must fall Through the shining grey skin of its sea:

Swimming to find Drowned itself. So Its powdered body Buried under solid

the trench where the shell I knew I can finger the creases and ridges has impressed on a bier of shale water.

Then I must hover, my feet scalloping the sea-skin, Till I find my axe: Then hew and hack till I have let every crease and ridge Crumble or float in the sun-sharpened air, till I have given them life.

55

HOSTILE

RESOLVE

Dream of a Parrot

Droplets flick from the parrot’s flinching wings: The sky’s electric whips keep him in place.

Whips which strop his feathers till he Shirks his greenness to give the banked flames room

Becoming a furnace-heart on a shrivelling branch: Voice of the gurgling geysers that burst the brake Of earth’s crust, to declare Mutiny in the time of the plague.

A furnace-heart from which reams Of steel streak out to take the place

Of wings, to answer whips, to make dust Of droplets, and not to flinch.

Nobody’s standard but his own, Coming unstuck from the pasty mud crown That rain and sun have clapped him with

‘ The parrot shreds the dropsied rainbow, Speaks his own voice, which now is no echo Of the taught song, the expected prattle. It will take more than a sigh and a shrug 59

It will take more than a sigh and a shrug To pass by when the parrot begins To hammer down what hemmed him in.

When the lava pits are stoked at noon, And mutiny erupts in the time of the plague, It will take more than a squeezing of eyes

To stand the blue heart of the blaze.

60

Icarus Insurgent

All night they fished the sound for his bones: The clanking gossip of their hooks, Drawn and thrown over the sides of coracles, Killed the quail’s black sleep.

In the morning they set his mother’s creaky brown table In the garden And threw his big bronze wings on it.

now Icarus, they said, you drink up your milk and tuck in tight.

That night, fishing: their nets Dragged along the glinting shelves Of the nymphs, weighed down By big bronze wings.

They rode hard home on hooves that cracked the darkness, Trailing their tattered nets behind,

Shadowed by the dry wind in the wake Of flapping big bronze wings.

61

Kite in a High Wind

Kite in a high wind Strains to God. Towline tug sharpens earth’s wet call: Earth’s wet want is spread On the patchwork quilt below Heaving.

Kite alone, shot through with wind, Swings in a tight arc of guilt: Torn by towline recall and call Of God. Then sky is all Bowl that is gulf, inverse basin of heaven: Wisps of clouds flag the spinning air Where kite was, kite’s shreds are. Then only wind Stays to console earth, To hug the girth Of a patchwork quilt whose many squares Lie tattered by avalanche grief.

Then, purge’s sole survivor, The towline trails on the sky like a creeper — Or héadless sperm, drifting pontoon bridge: Climb that curses its own gruff gradient now Wail unvoiced.

62

Bridal Song

Girl on a swing

by orbit made catapult

goes stone on a straight sleek trajectory till she hits the long invisible spidersweb of the dusty

years of judgement. An amethyst glows on her dress like blood blooming in snow. The thorns don’t show till the priest’s persistent chant has echoed seven times seven in her ears and the fire has played

sacred witness, given away nothing, made no case, but been neutral, offering a balanced view. The scales dismantle their faulty weights and measures, but take their own time, the wait filled with children impatient to break from her egg: each time the parachuting of more of herself till of herself only that remains which has mastered the gleaming discipline of vessels. Then she has fulfilled the ring’s nope, its grip so tight that neither soap nor anger can get it off her finger. Then she is adult.

63

Prehensile Logic

Often on these tart branches we’ve hung our pink limbs, For monkeys to grab at through gold-rimmed glasses: Tuned to their frothing, loose-lipped approbation.

But behind the bargain’s back, sometimes, though latched To leafless shadows, unjointed arms and elastic thighs Have swung themselves high like mad rackets, Gone long glides from the skull’s malign grip.

But performance prefers its own prehensile logic: The skull straps down every nudge and shove and crick; And all the private desires we’ve dragged about these floors Are called to order, damned for infirmities. The ivory glare bounced from the sovereign deadhead Is all the illumination we’re marooned here with, Is all the grudging goal we’re left.

But now and then when the branches tapdance With unhinged windows, the choking anger of palms and heels Makes a ragged arena of the night, hangs a garland Of entrails around the moon. There is a chance then, That in the pit, unguarded by monkeys’ glassy squeals, The skull is tingling with unfallend fractures — Turned thin egg by its own chill threat,

Its own chill adieu to come.

64

Horse H: lymn

No shelter from your foaming drives, the night Offers no respite. Drives that break The axles of dreams, splash muck on the sacrifice. Was it for this the milk-ocean spawned you, Gave you into these, its impatient churner’s hands?

The fire-god has given notice. My hermits chant At flame-pits stripped to faggot-bone By his absence. The sparks, absconding rebels, Leap to the stoking of your silver tail: Charred pastures chart the bite of your breath, The campaign of a mane that is wind.

My voice has never served to rein you. Unquestioned,

You have reigned in my name. My seal Is no more, and far less than the hoofprint That cowherds now brand their cattle with: The stamp dreaded in all the villages of the flood-plain. Even to the river in spate is vouched Some anger, some ferocity it can force From the snow’s long ride to the swallowing sea.

To this king yemain the drumming of hooves, The swishing of a mane that is wind.

65

Not once have I climbed into your dun saddle, Nor stirrupped you to knock-kneed senility. I doubt I could, and doubtless that is why I do not even make the attempt. I am fond of my crown, not fond of wetting My fallen face in the mud of my subjects’ laughter. Like an angry god’s bowstring, your throat shafts its arrow: A twanging neigh vaned on my complicit silence. Ganga quakes in her flowered bed: even sleep Is a fugitive, crouching under blue trees.

Bring me, as I survey these acres of trampled topaz corn, The hundred-stringed harp. Let iron bells clang In the chilled air above shrouded slopes. I shall leave no account of triumph or compassion On the contemptuous faces of cliffs that know better; No strata of hieroglyphics for digging grandsons To puzzle over; no riddles in three unknown scripts. Only this my music.

66

Hymn Questioned Lemma contra Rig Veda: Mandala X, 121: To the Unknown God

At first the sky suffered only the golden egg of sun. Then earth and air Leaked from the shell as it cracked. Is this the God whom we shall worship?

The brightest gods wait on his words or else their breath Shortens in a spasm of fever; Immortality sleeps in his shadow, and death. Is this the God whom we shall worship?

Lord.

Lord of the first cry and the last cry, Lord of the cries between. Is this the God whom we shall worship?

The tecton tocsin of continents riveting themselves To the floors of oceans proclaims His glory. The flood is his voice. Is this the God whom we shall worship? fi¢

He set the shrike to prong the shells, The clouds to bubble trees from mud; He tickled the abyss to cough up stars. Is this the God whom we shall worship?

67

The taut horizon thrums with tremor: The storm wrangles with the sun’s weather; His arm is on the tiller, for one, the tether For the other. Is this the God whom we shall worship?

Rock grates on rock, piles pebbles on shores. On water coast the golden shell-halves of sun, On water plays light, on water the gods survive When the famine is his anger. Is this the God whom we shall worship?

Even the water ripples at his mercy. His whim works the tides and the harvests. Pleased with himself, his own best candidate, He shines. Is this the God whom we shall forgive?

68

Ceremonial of Spring

Tienanmen Square, 4 June 1989: for the massacred

I lopped my childhood’s ears to wear Two that could bear your name, gerontocrat. I knelt at your orations, begged dragons to breathe Your face on my window.

Today the profile on my pane Blocks my view of the square. Today the sibilant orations slither through the streets, Disinfecting doors, covering the smell of death.

In the square, like flagstaffs flattened After the spring festival, the bodies gather dust. In the square stands Shakyamuni, From beneath whose matted hair From beneath whose knitted brows

From beneath whose brimming, burning eyes The dry lips spell a curse.

Your cupolas have begun to crash, I believe; the river is pushing

Your boats back, and the northern famine Offers no reprieve.

69

A cobweb of fissures has spanned your face: It may hush the blow when my fist goes through.

Soon, I will see the square. I shall be Shakyamuni.

70

Tiger Poem

In this green dream, language and I Face each other alone. Language is forests and hills, I, tiger.

River flaming up from the crouching dark, I make bloody incursion upon dell and slope. Ravines and gorges grow from the mauling Of my paw.

Then string and horn call to each other

Across the thick mud at the edge of language: The creek ripples with the din of drums, Horsed gods follow me with torches and guns.

My spoor fades in the rain, above broken branch-traps. I fasten my cliff against riding gods and rooted hills, Calling slope to heel and light to order.

Then whoever Should wither And the leafy Should plunge

should grasp blade and clamber up, in the amber blast of my eyes; hate of the way up itself the big guns in a whirling of lost cries.

When, damned vespertine omen on the rapier skyline,

71

A temple found by the failing light Explodes in the craters of my eyes, As if, on that horned and jutting tableland, Nothing else could have flashed and stopped My stride.

As if the clap of rock met with ray Alone of all the land’s voices could have stayed The certain death of my prey; And stayed my huge, bounding leap Over the ashy sun.

Thwarted, a target chased down the howling night,

I roar still into the wilds, this anthem of war.

72

THE

LATENT

PHYSIOGNOMY

OF OBJECTS

Leonardo

Sun-drunk Tuscan air and the blue glaze Of Virgin’s robe and Infant’s gaze: The brush fleshes the impossible As it lands from what could not be On the strand of what has been made.

Now come out to this burial of wind Here to these damp cacti and cypresses:

Support my drugged head, my fantasies as they Buffet these rocky shores.

Vulture, risen from amber earth, Misheard bird, omen of my misbegotten birth, Fluttering at my mouth, suspect index of my Irrationality: Come, let your talons strop their guardian anger On my cold still silverpoint. Strip the pompous Plans that plate my deluges.

Or fan your wings On the redychalk in which my strident face Is cooled, tempered, offered by way of axiom To disciples of the theorem and its corollaries.

This is a face of etched lines, hard - And confident as history.

v5

Fan it so the particles sift and rub away Ingrained determinations. Fan it so the nose Is fractured, and the eyes peer to suit A prodigal presbyope. Set doubt aquiver in the wrinkles of the cheeks And let the thin lips loosen, to ask the mirror’s left-hand code

If anything was ever done.

Let history bealittle afraid. Let it peep From behind a tree, with a child’s eyes, At the immensity of your black wings When they eclipse the sun.

76

Cable Downhill

Time is tense-tight. The cable, played rigid as arail, Screams down the steep plunge of the height Slicing fire through the grease. No doubt assails its wind-whelped ride.

Then the remote crank loses control: Breaking its fall, the slope bucks into aroll Slacking the cable on acliffs lip, Cruxed midscreech half-slide half-skid.

Uncoiling again from the repaired crank, The cable drills the whistling air: Sharp, straight, certain as the blade That draws a swill of blood down the cut vein, It scorches the track, meteor to abrade Rock to gravel, leash-scorning, disdainful of rein.

Breath and pulse beat wide of this groove: Scuttling tense, time is on the move.

77

Ladder

The ladder with its sprung rung pistons its breath Far down the earth’s sore red throat; On its other, upward thrust it lobs A globule of starblood that hasn’t decided Where to be born.

The sprung rung like a trigger makes taut Its hostile resolve: the ladder buries both itself And enmity in warm core-mud, to seed. It sleeps long enough to become atree; But even before the sprung rung can spark root, Shoot yellow leaf, like an augury

The starblood starts riots in villagers’ veins.

78

Reclamation

The land is a wolf's grey paw reaching out to grab Bay and breakwater. It grips hurt headlands Above seabite and claws out The grasping promontories of reclamation.

Slag piles, throp of hoes breaking ground, Mortar mixed with blood of brick: Exploded view of site, which when bird Encompasses it from air is an oval glass at high resolution Grained opaquely with grime.

Now drills drone and shop-basements begin To be ploughed. The crane vanguards the offensive, advancing Boom by beam from the bare angle of the road. Its herald the jet blast of asphalt and fuel Chokes seatush, grass, breath.

Once the air demanded no ransom, Gave of itself without diesel threat, Let the trees be, and the streams.

Now snouted in masks we dare The logjams of soot-fast roads.

79

So though a heaped pit of cinders is this earth, Still bowl of our birth, sum of our wanderings it remains. Remains until, hurtling their massed reserves Up concrete ramps, thundering down hot causeways, Bold traffickers, the builders come.

80

The Names ofOld Ships

Ancestral glory cannot guarantee

A free life on a frigate-bound sea: Lobsters explode like shells all over these decks, Tracers writhe like trapped snakes across these bows; We scarce can tell our maps from our imaginings.

The names of old ships hang limp from lichened spars, A dull sky’s gaunt comets:

The Resolve, the Enterprise, the Victory drag imperial sail, Slowed, worn, but goaded on by the grim determination

Of dead men.

Now, on one dreadnought we fix our sights, Following its nose as it parts the waters, Patrolling the waves with broadside and depth-charge, Its aqualunged Poseidons make eagle-gazed inventory Of storks, crakes, gulls, and other targets.

For the slanting strike of their guns. Shearing by force of habit From anchor to windhauled draft, the dreadnought leaves Buoy and harbour-light to swimmers swinging free Of the thick sea’s blankets and the sirens’ cries.

81

Flecked with ash in the backwash of the sun’s drowning, Further and further over films of oil, sputtering mines, It bears its freight of possible fire.

Till night is middle-aged, and the good traitor on the watch Signals the trailing raven to swoop low and let go

Its avid revenge. Exact recompense, gleaming once by Orion’s stars,

It sends up a volcanic midnight; of whose blown gales, The tatters still lap red and purple at dawn’s spume. Flaming, speeding, in the pause between Its own demise and the sun’s upping, The corpse ship flies far into the phosphor night, A cloudy hulk among keening floes.

82

Noche Triste In Memory of Friends

I

The tree has come of age this spring. It has burst the roof, full-blooded, to let the sun Fall through its branches on dead brick arches. Thickening through the crevices, roots spread Like Christ’s arms, sap drained By centuries of chill.

Dawn and the dying night play chess In the courtyard. Standing in the atrium

Where the pool slept after the rain, Squared by one bound and the other bound I have stopped believing the world is round.

Feathers consecrate the theatre where cannibal eagles whirled:

Masked gladiators, flaking moments tinctured with blood On the rising steps.

Notching creaky doors and clotted ponds in passing, The feathered snake yawns to throw the dice, Waits for the bitter wind to make its move: In the mutual ruffling of scales and temper, The dice strike together, sparking annual complaints.

83

I] The rock’s long-dragged battery brunts up In whirring dust and hobbled walls. Noiseless, A boat whisks its wake across the plateglass sea, Noiseless, a blue net trawls the tiles of the church.

Outside the fort a charcoal wave sends A shoaled catch up to the gunmetal air:

What can this gesture mean, on the cloudy morning after The gods have fallen?

From the fort’s turret out over the creek-bridge, I watch the birdcrowned prince flee, weighed down By his saved wagons of gold. Musket and pursuing pike meet helmet and mace, noisily. At his half-hearted turn-around bridgehead, the prince Is hit By the punctual boomerang of prophecy. The eye follows the birdcrown which crosses the creak alone.

A smoking citadel and seven sinking pylons Are left behind. And though the turret is greased yet With yestercentury’s torching, All this might have been a weather report From another planet; and besides, The prince is dead.

84

Il The Was In a Next

fisher’s arm as it heaved the catch today iron-hard like the arm cold scabbard in the conquistador’s grave, the thick-lipped well.

Its pulleys tripped by creepers, this unwinched old well Is a mouth the jungle cannot cry through, Even the kissing twin-trees that twined as they grew Are caged apart now, under the mind’s curfew.

This mind, a marble veined with conceptions, Exerts itself to hold this frieze of quays, this dodging Flotilla of waterfronts, serration of terraces: Is shown up when some brave figures

Escape the chisel’s shaping punch and point, Dive below the mind’s strangling reefs.

Then this same mind, unwilling to call itself sepulchre, Leaves its horse free to roam, is no exacting rider: So, clattering by an inn of a winter’s night, the hooves ignite On the cobbles, the marble thought of a marble brain.

Thought-prodder, the nimble horse brings its rider back To a stable neither can forget:

85

Home is an empty house. The garden brims and shuffles

Where we buried the Dog; a candle burns For the buried Cat. When the need aches again and steers like a fever, I find I must go to the Roman excavation, Find my friends among the gone. The gone who hover as I supervise the harvest Of the heads of men whose lives Had been gentle: honourable men with pointed noses Whose one ambition had been to grow Trees that would ripen the summer with lyric: Senators with clear eyes And dull fortunes. IV

Bilious oracle of the full still air, Turn the key in the door of foretelling, Let our eyes smart with vatic vapours.

Before the uncial epitaphs Reckoned over by another Dog and Cat must be two Enfeebling sea, calling the Now among the tamarisks,

on the deadshells can be orthography, poles, eclipsing fort, thermal armies that roost to combat.

But when the acid beaker of combat is poured out, Gulfing the dry-sucked hollow holding claw

And field-gun apart,

;

What can bridle its surge, quench its retching throat?

86

Fins on fire thresh in charcoal sludge: For the foundering rayfish As for the sunbird trailing its tattered wing Over snapping tides, Will there be place to beach or glide, To come to rest with a degree of grace?

Coagulate with retting leaves, the crypt In which Christ died is veiled From fishermen’s stolen stares. So curtained, the plashy mass on the bier,

Waspwarm with desire, Drugs itself with form: Seeping lymph, curving hard muscle and setting marrow Into the half-breathing marble flesh. But doused with limefire, the thermal armies sense none: of this:

Threat and answer, womb of despair and hope, The sarcophagus for the moment maintains A sibylline silence.

87

Mailing List

The postman never called before to deliver my life, Asleep on my doorstep in striped pyjamas, Never called before to bring me a skull

From down the lane, or wind cupped in his palms, Culled from northern passes; Never called before to give me a tree Left me by some dead legate of the isles, Icon of serendipity.

But now the postman calls daily to serve up my life, Only, it’s a warhead at the tip of a knife; Now he calls here to hand me acase, It carries the ears of my audience in salt; He stops by to unload a crate, It has a border marking and holds a few rocks That made it by the last mail-train to leave Those scattered villages of mine just below the snow-line Before it rained war-planes And thunder broke the hills.

88

Vector Geograph Ly

I] On a giant prowl, the gaunt hills’ vector geography Punctures earth’s carapace:

Raking a row of shrub-holes on its slow race

With clouds that, becalmed, sag like dried udders.

The signature scrawled by pylons on hamlet and town Cannot sentence these apostate hills:

Surveyors, scribbling to keep pace with the plainlong prowl, Fall far short of the outbound peaks.

Cramped by the going’s austerity, history here is scalar Neither dead nor germinal, but only a squat god On a burnt mound: his four eyes stare at creation Gathering bee-hive. Splatting crowcrap

Metronomes his meditation.

I Trawling its anger through pit and crevasse, Earth is all the while a crab, Patient but prickling with primed pincers. A cancer ready to answer those, who, in younger times, Clipped the hills’ wings and whittled the moraine banks

89

To brittle slope-strung skeletons, Agued and avalanche-prone. The same clippers and whittlers who now pin moths In black albums, pepper-spotting atlases With clusters of maximum ore.

Dissenting conquistador got up in scholar’s robes,

In roving study, half-Hannibal-wise, I translate the hills’ march: Reversing the shocks of prurient census and seismograph With cursive phrase, and epic semaphore: A tongue and script that speak for the sierra, Are no kin to the signature of pylons.

Il Baking in a buff oven of sky-sealed sand, Earth swells from crab to turmeric scarab

Rounded from sun’s hot breath, hot flesh of hills, Beetling above theodolites, itself its journey’s amulet. But even these sphalerite hills, springing, swaying-sacred In the dance of light are less than what I need. The pen will not, for instance, stay On the journal’s ruled Appian Ways; The nib has had enough of gypsying with hills: It will draw upwards now, plotting from scarab- a Its further vagabondage Conscripting in its train

Lumbering elephants of nouns, nimble gazelles of adjectives: Army, forage-troop, caravan climbing to the Alps At the top of the page. 90

UNFORESEEN

POSTSCRIPT

Last Memory Key

In memoriam: Alan Gordon Twigg (1963-1991) dear friend, fellow aesthete

You took off in mid-sentence, promising to be Back by the week-end. The words left hovering in the air came down

As the wheels of a jeep Rutting a remote road, scudding, whirling on Before the behemoth truck rammed it, Splintering you through the windshield.

Blood, shards, steel skewers: so much Like the Hollywood scenarios you broiled at In your reviews.

I wish pages had flapped, instead, And drops dripped in a sepia silence Tinged with ultramarine and the throb

Of homing pigeons, weeds waving the while In glassy water. A Tarkovsky departure calibrated In leaf stir, long walks.

At my touch the cold screen glows Your name in phosphor green:

Radium guide to a maze of stories half-written, Opinions half-hazarded, we will only half-know. 33

But, opinions apart, we knew what had been Hazarded when you came back, punctually, By the week-end, in a box.

The monitor sits squat and dead in the corridored evening. The password you punched in before you went Can’t break the code, Can’t beat the system. 28 February - March 1991

94

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ZONES

OF

ASSAULT

Ranjit Hoskote’s Zones of Assault is probably the most complex first book in the history of Indo-English. This complexity, which is genuine, may

be found

in its images, sound

patterns,

emotional

depth

and

specific perceptions, The major themes include historical and political violence as well as dimensions of the individual being treated with a tough, modernist

Romanticism.

Hoskote’s poetry is both direct and allusive, realistic and metaphorical,

plain and elliptical. The crucial events, which form its context, become seeds for meditation on universal agonies, as well as on myths which are then subverted. The references and resonances range from Roman imperial times to Renaissance art, from Greek civilisation to our Vedic past, and recent Chinese and Indian politics. Hannibal, Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci, Safdar Hashmi and Lin Piao figure here, both as themselves

and as icons modulated into wider narratives. This is also, at one level, a poetry of landscape, of battleground, floodplain and mountains. The vitiated coast of and near Bombay (where the poet lives) and a Central Asian terrain — inherited from Hoskote’s ancestral past, which is Kashmiri — playa significant role in some poems. A surrealism that is strongly associative and with powerful epic dimensions is apparent in several sequences. Zones of Assault returns repeatedly to India as a presence, in subtle, modified way : sombre pilgrimages, shadows of Hardwar and the Hindu Kush, accounts of internecine

carnage,

the subcontinent’s

infinite potential

for violence

come through. The poet takes great risks in all his stances, and justifies them with his mature seriousness. — Nissim Ezekiel

Ranjit Hoskote was born in post-graduate work in English of Bombay, and is a Fellow Politics for his B.A. degree. India, Bombay,

Bombay, in 1969. He is currently doing Literature and Aesthetics at the University of Elphinstone College, where he read He has been attached to The Times of

as its art critic, since

1988.

His reviews

and articles

also appear in The Independent and The Sunday Observer, among other journals.

(ks,

Rs.

ISBN

i

81 7167 063 6