Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
I’m wearing my mother’s sari,
her blood group,
her osteo-arthritic knee.
We’ve voted
for different men, same governments.
In dreams she plays
among trees of rubber and betel palm
outside a home in Myanmar
while I scamper down
dark service stairways
in Bombay buildings, sharp
with the smell of urine
and kesar agarbatti
smoking out of the breast pocket
of the seventh-floor madman.
She lusted after Dev Anand,
I after Imran Khan.
On television
both still sport
headfuls of black hair.
She treads nimbly
across language.
I vowel every now and then
into mouldering inertias.
I come undone
with muzak
or a compliment.
My mother’s made
of sterner stuff.
Sowing the same dream
in a different self –
the cussed logic
we both know
behind aeons
of parenting.
We talk Buddhism,
Lata Mangeshkar, plot pedicures,
late into the night,
and she watches me
ancient peasant
canny harvester,
her eyes bright
with defeat
as I grow stealthily
into her body.
Here it is then –
the treachery
of middle age,
of love.
It gets no closer than this, Mum.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is the award-winning author of four books of poetry, most recently When God is a Traveller, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. As editor, her books include the Penguin anthology Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry and the Sahitya Akademi anthology of contemporary Indian poets, Another Country, among others. She has worked over the years as poetry editor, curator and critic.
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