Poetry at Sangam

Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.

AMMI by Tabish Khair

1.

How does one write you? As performing the rites

Of domesticity, which was the route your life took,

Or as calculating the rates of change, how much more

Onions costs, and learning to say farewell by rote?
 

I dare not pen you, claim you as a son, for always men

Have read what the leaves of your life mean;

Father, husband, sons, all caring in the main,

All plunging you into the darkness of the ‘mine.’
 

And the metaphor of ‘mother nation,’ or the high station

Placed on you by religion, the glibly touted notion

Of paradise under a mother’s feet, those million reasons,

Well-meaning and wrong, that ignore your person,
 

I won’t take their recourse. Like numbers on the Bourse,

They hide the slant of your smile, the sweat on your brow.
 

2.

I have written long poems on my father and grandmother, but you

Have always been too real and too subtle for words.

I can describe the high arch of your soles, which makes you walk slowly,

I could tell about the saris you wear, or your girly love for bangles,

Your deep concentrated reading of the Quran with faded covers;

I could describe the intricate dishes you would cook, pullao, firni,

Before my father, hurt by a hard place, bewildered by his sons,

Became a partial recluse in the garden he had planted for you

(And that you took care of, despite water-shortages, and still do).

I could tell about how difficult it is to get your fingerprint now

With the whorls of your fingers worn away by kitchen work,

Or the shakarparas you make every time I visit to take

To my children who do not speak your softly reclining language.

But nothing I say will ever be you, my words on you are futile

As the fingerprints that electronic devices fail to exhort from you:

Between your world and mine stretches the bridge of absence,

On which a word has to be selected in silence, dropped with care,

Into the unending roar of the white water rushing on below.
 

3.

Epact
 

is too short a word, too pat

to fill the chasm between

your shy moon of faith

and the overbearing sun

to which I woke at thirteen.
 

But it is the only word I know,

and will have to

do.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Born in Ranchi in 1966 and educated in Gaya, Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is now an associate professor at Aarhus University. His scholarly books include Babu Fictions, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness and The New Xenophobia. He is also an award-winning poet (Where Parallel Lines Meet; Man of Glass) and novelist. His recent novels include Just Another Jihadi Jane (published as Jihadi Jane in India) and Night of Happiness. 

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