[Work in progress - III; intersection]

Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie

She combed her hair gingerly; she had never really believed it to be her own. Even her children seemed unreal. Anything of her seemed so unlikely even now. Her daughter walked past, her reflection passing behind her own in the mirror. Her naked midriff made Julia cringe. The sight of bare skin still made her stomach turn. Arthur did not share her revulsion, she knew. She also knew that it had always been only a matter of time. No man could bare his wife’s aversion for long, she knew. He had had a string of affairs – if one could call them that – or what they called in America one night stands. Of course, after he turned sixty-five and officially became a senior citizen, he lost his drive somewhat. Not that there was any dearth, she knew, of young and willing females, students of him, interested in righting the wrongs he had undergone, reversing the Survivor’s tale. His dark hair, now grey, and his sparse frame made sparser by time and fate, drew them to Christian Guilt; but then, guilt alone was not attractive enough to draw Arthur.
Their guilt did not darken their fair hair or white skins, or indeed lengthen their noses. Arthur had been carrying out his revenge, coupled with an atonement of his own. For when Julia had been in the camps, he had roamed free. Being Jewish in the forties did not, for someone like Arthur, guarantee hardship, it seemed.

A Year In The Life

There will be some this year who will remember
The sixteenth of this month
not as the day general election results came out
but as a long phone conversation from an airport departure lounge;
a friend leaves.

There will be some this year who will recall
running down the streets of Rome and jumping
fully clothed
into the Trevi fountain;
Even if you support ManYoo, who cares,
just take off your scarf and yell for Barca.

There will be some this year who will remember
the Sixth Pay Commission, some who will remember only
Sending money to sons in Europe
Sons with a taste for expensive wines.

There will be some this year who will not remember their age
when they were married off
(at thirteen, fourteen) to boys far away,
but will remember that puberty had set in already,
and so the young bride had no betrothal period,
But was sent off to her new home soon enough.

There will be some who will remember this year as the year
of finishing.
Finishing college, finishing off ties to a city that no longer exists
as home.

There will be some this year, like every year,
who when asked when they last held a baby,
will not have to think back,
but only look over their shoulder to see
new years.

[Work in progress - II]

To woo a footsoldier had never been her ambition. It had always been the pilot who had captivated her, the great myths of flying aces. She was in Paris in 1919, when Charles Godefroy flew under the Arc de Triomphe. She would never forget the sight; his face became a constant object of her conjecture. The face she had never seen, that of the buoyant audacity that came, perhaps, with the knowledge that it was all over. But that was long ago, even longer in fact than the chance meeting with the boy’s father in Marseille many years later. He was a footsoldier; in the strangest sense of the word – he saved her feet. It was socks. When she was dying of cold and hunger. He fed her a yellow soup and had red woollen socks made for her naked feet. She wore wooden soles in the days that followed, everyone did. Leather would have been considered a luxury. They were all over the place, feeding on the moneys that belonged to everyone but them. It had become a War of hunger and bare feet, of German soldiers and French food previously unpalatable to them. The audacity of her faceless pilot had been misplaced, as had been the confidence that it was all over. The War became a term reused, in all its morbid appropriateness, for a second War of heinous proportions, more even than the previous.

Who was she? She had herself lost track, all her identities confused in the drawing, redrawing of boundaries everyday. She was anyone, she was no one. He had never asked where she was from, she had never said. In all the silences was conceived a child, a boy, who never asked who or where his father was. But she told him anyway that he was killed in the War. Thus subsumed by the great universal persona of the War Hero, the identity of his father perhaps ceased to matter to him. Or perhaps he too, a child of war, was trained to look at the larger picture and be a stoic rather than dwell on personal effects.

She wore the shoes he had got her, wooden like everyone else’s; weren’t those his personal effects as well? The child itself was, in a way, a personal effect of his. But the child, the boy, never wore out. He kept growing, and growing more and more (according to his mother) astute. He began, early in his life, to see the poetry in her gestures. The worn out soles of her shoes became an emblem to him of her longstanding suffering at the hands of some mysterious Fate that seemed to have struck all the men and women in Les Pennes-Mirabeau some years ago.
Or so she thought. Who knew what was really in the mind of this boy, fatherless in a war ravaged land, with a mother who seemed not ordinary, less or more than the norm, he couldn’t decide.
When she looked at the ruins whenever they travelled a little further inland – and there were still plenty in those days when he was growing up, a provincial boy as yet unaware of his mother’s urban and even international exploits in her day – he would catch an odd expression in her eyes, not wistful like some of the other mothers, not sad like some of the older crowd, not angry like some of the menfolk. One day he asked her, Why do you like ruins so much?
Never thought about it, I don’t know, she said.
As he looked at her, as she only half answered his question, as if the ruins meant something to her that he would never understand, it came to him like poetry can come only to a ten year old: Because the walls are crumbling.
The boy knew nothing of her shoes or her socks, other than that the sole was worn. Yet, prophet-like, he seemed to know that the ruins and the shoes on her feet were siblings of a sort, born of the same parents: the un-knowledge of a future, the uncertainty of the present which made her wear her shoes as if they were her most prized possession. The boy would grow out of his provincial upbringing, joining history less dangerous than that of his parents but as exciting to him nevertheless. In 1968 his mother thought the world had forgotten what War was, Every generation needs a War. They never know the value of a loaf of bread, a pair of woollen socks.

For the next generation, 1968 was a war. Having collectively lost from their collective memories the experience of death, hunger, squalor and fear, they became a generation of l’academie. Death was no longer real. It was the death of the author now, more than anything else that the youth of France, yet another mythic body, would worry about in the evenings, over coffee or a glass of wine in the Quartier Latin, a single glass of wine no longer manna out of heaven, no longer a luxury paid for with the family jewels or a painting or two.

[Work in progress - I]

Running


It was all the running. She had been running all her life, which is why her soles were always worn down to a thin sheet separating the ground from her feet.
Why do you like ruins so much? he asked.
Never thought about it, I don’t know.
Because the walls are crumbling.

She had been running from walls, the same ones, perhaps, that rose up between them. For twenty-odd years it had been the same story: he’d ask questions and she’d never know how to answer them, or be constantly surprised by his naïveté.
She remembered the first time she had laid eyes on him in the hospital; how different she thought their relationship would be. She would be the queen, nurturing him and teaching him her life, while he fell in love with her and her old fashioned ways. As it happened, he turned her life around, and not vice versa. She had to learn the new, grudgingly always. He was the new, he could never understand her squeamishness at any novelty she was expected to learn while he experienced it for the first time.

He was a poet, after all, she thought often. Or was he? She was rather too prone to see in him the poet she desired in herself. His littlest remark would instantly become poetry in her mind.

So when he casually remarked, perhaps even laced with the teenage disdain for our mothers’ old habits that creeps into the most loving of sons and daughters, Because the walls are crumbling, she heard it like a metaphor, and found herself a prisoner of her son’s versaic speech.
Her first reaction was to look down. At her feet. These shoes were so comfortable, so comfortable that she had ceased to think of them as shoes and begun to think of them as extensions of her own feet. Running shoes. Well, any shoes could be running shoes if you ran in them.
She thought it funny – not in a laughter inducing way, but in a way filled with irony, like her poetry – that he should have spoken of her shoes as the key to her life. Not that he had spoken of shoes at all; he had merely made a comment about old buildings. Nor had he, we know, meant to make a statement about her life at all. Or his father’s. Nevertheless, when she wanted to see coincidence, she would. It was that way with her. She considered it an asset as a writer to stumble upon the unobvious, the fortuitous, the subtle, what was beneath the surface. Not that she was a writer, any more than the boy’s father had been in the wool business because of his one pair of socks. One swallow did not, indeed, make a summer, but one pair of socks made a child.
It was a long time ago, and their separation had nothing to do with the War, or politics or finances or ambition. She merely found it socially convenient (not to mention the tale giving the boy his first taste of good, homespun imagination) to say that the father had been in the War. Nobody asked questions after that. Nobody even asked her if she was from around here. While it was possible that she had belonged to the erstwhile enemy camp, the mention of the War as she mentioned it was now guaranteed to meet with sympathy. No one would look upon a mother, or a woman with child as an ex-war criminal. Even if she had been a Gestapo in her day, she would still be welcomed into the fold. She was as French as any of these fools around her; perhaps why she was in the War in the first place.
But that was quite incidental to her meeting this man. She was no soldier, she could have been any old peasant girl from across the border. Borders, coasts. She had never said where she was from, he had never asked. The great lingua franca between them was in place, the Great French Tradition that she knew only too well.
It all started with the socks. She was cold. She was adrift in the streets of Marseille in 1941.

Riddle

Riddle me this
Riddle me that
Riddle away a night more
The Riddle is a personality trait with you

You are defined, a phantom, by an absence:
Riddled me an unanswer.

If riddling were a game of chess, my friend,
You would be grandmaster.
In the divided realm you inhabit, they would put away their
Cynide pills, detaching them from their arms,
And would ask, again, to be part of your coterie.

But riddles are not a game of chess,
no more than I was Kasparov to you;
The coterie speaks a language I do not understand.

The riddles have been shelved, like you and I,
Who forgot how to speak, for riddling.
Teach me again, this new language,
Before I leave you again,
And riddle me an answer.

Retribution

There was a dream I used to have, it was set in my bedroom, the big old one in the block of flats, number 11. There were snakes on the floor, and scorpions. Not that I have ever seen one, but I knew what it was. And most of the floor was on fire too; everywhere you could step there was danger.
A was talking about Kukrail the other day, Lucknow’s crocodile park. How could I forget the dreams, the ones with ghariyals, little baby ones, like lizards, but so much more hardy, better survival skills, better teeth. Little ones in glass domes, giant covered petridishes.
Kukrail is famous for two things. This park, and a naala.
In number 11, where our phone number, I remember, was 611378, which later became 2-611378; there were lizards. There are lizards here too, in 3/42, but there is no me, not the same one who used to collect lizards’ eggs and watch them.
There was a little soapdish, the kind you get in fancy hotels (this one was from the Zürich Hilton, as it happens), in which I had some suds solution and would put in eggs and wash them.
There were weevils too, that used to breed in the storeroom. They had a home too, the flat sheet of sponge that I took to them.
We forgot how to live with critters everywhere. Nobody particularly enjoyed it, except me, I think, but we were never as overly bothered by creepy crawlies until now.
Yesterday there were ants. Everywhere. Crawling up your leg, drinking your sharbat, eating your lunch, sharing the bath with you.
I might have had nightmares; I’m pretty sure I would have, had I slept at all. Dreams of my retribution, death by ants, the man eaters that even Livingstone would have feared. Fifty or more carcasses underfoot and a hole full of Flit.
Urban memories have no depth; perhaps if I had lived in Kaladaikurichi or in Gangaikondan like my old Thatha, the ants might have moved me to put some aata out for them to eat. In this house that had begun to cave in many years ago, the ants are a false friend; crowds with no depth, only blackness. No quaint legends here. They can move you, yes; to call pest control.

A Day In The Life: Aprils and other days

Meeting an old friend
From here and there,
Unshared memories spill over
into cups of tea;
a cigarette and a half on the Tube:
Busker made a choice,
got arrested the night
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Meeting an old friend,
No memories in common,
So much more to swap
Like casettes, before CDs
could be FedEx-ed across the oceans.

Meeting an old friend,
Pipe, hookah, shorts and corduroy,
Picking up the game of chess shelved years ago.

Meeting an old friend with a new friend,
A new friend with an old,
Taking manual photographs of
Fingers, hair, teeth, shoes.
No faces, only words.