the table, standing up, holding out his hand, looking into my eyes, saying, Pleased to meet you.
His voice is educated, frank, completely unexpected. There’s a foreign lilt to it, as with those who’ve been to the American School. Very slight—he wears it like a set of summer clothes. As if it could go up in smoke.
But his body, his eyes, his entire way of being, makes me think of someone who’s been lost at sea, lost for a long time, or else wandered out of the forest, as if he’s been in the forest and learned something there.
There’s not a shred of fat on him, it’s all muscle and sinew, coiled eye and glacier bone, as if he’s covered every inch of land, burnt off every strip of fat through breathing.
So now there’s this wild animal dressed in human clothes, with a set of keys picked up from the table and a wallet stuffed full of rupee notes.
When I went back to the house from the ghat that day there was ash all over my body, all in my hair and in my clothes. I reeked of smoke. They’d been looking for me, my mother was panicking. She beat me, stripped me and scrubbed me clean, and I cried for an hour in her arms.
Varanasi looks like the scene of a plane crash in my sleep. Small fires are scattered about, seen from above, scattered on the banks where the debris still burns, wherehomes have been wiped out without warning, where bodies are strewn. Night falls in Varanasi and pockets of fire still rage from the blackness, their flames reach up to diminish the stars, spewing sparks into deep space, souls orbiting the terror of this world.
There are lingams everywhere in the Varanasi of my dreams. On top of every step, at every ancient corner turned. It’s a virile city, teetering on the brink. And on the other bank it is barren like the afterlife.
The Ganga is a river that flows backwards in time.
In Agra, in our crumbling ancestral home, six years old. I’m the same person I was when I was six years old. The same fear, the same watchfulness, the same cowardice too, the same sense of doom. The same desire to jump over the edge.
I sleep next to my mother when Father isn’t here. We sleep in that same big bed in the silent house, silent as soon as the fans are off, eerie beyond belief. She pulls me towardsher, murmurs in her sleep, twitches like a cat dreaming, whiskers in the hunt on some imaginary breeze, stalking the grass over the hill when the sun goes down. She bares her teeth at the squirrels in the eaves, and then she cries, so sadly that I lie with my breath held, listening to her moan.
Sleep, the only time she’s really awake, the only time she truly cries. I love her. She never cries like this in the day. Never pities herself or bemoans her fate, never knows what has become of her.
She liked to bathe me in the old days, took great care with it, and one day she sat me down on the cold metal stool, opened my legs, and pointed between them, then said, If a man ever tries to touch you there, an uncle or a servant or a cousin, anyone at all, you fight him off and you scream. You run. You don’t let anybody touch you down there. That is the worst place in the world.
I’m still in pigtails.
I’m running through the fields in my tartan dress, theone brought back from Singapore, which he said was Scottish.
And the thunder breaks inside the sky, like the crack of an old record player. Skips across the surface, clicks. Follows a pause by the peal, rumbles between clouds the way the belly sky rumbles, mourns and quakes. Belly sky of tectonic plate. Rupture and rent.
Rent the blackness, billow the sail, on a ship of ocean ink.
The rain pours down on to the fields.
From thunderous chest of sky, on to the page.
On to childhood, my love.
A cadaver.
A labourer dead in the long grass. The sack of a cat from the side of a well, a rat killed by dogs in the short grass.
And in the house down the street they had a son.
So they lit fireworks.
They lit rockets and crackers and bombs.
Smoke on
His voice is educated, frank, completely unexpected. There’s a foreign lilt to it, as with those who’ve been to the American School. Very slight—he wears it like a set of summer clothes. As if it could go up in smoke.
But his body, his eyes, his entire way of being, makes me think of someone who’s been lost at sea, lost for a long time, or else wandered out of the forest, as if he’s been in the forest and learned something there.
There’s not a shred of fat on him, it’s all muscle and sinew, coiled eye and glacier bone, as if he’s covered every inch of land, burnt off every strip of fat through breathing.
So now there’s this wild animal dressed in human clothes, with a set of keys picked up from the table and a wallet stuffed full of rupee notes.
When I went back to the house from the ghat that day there was ash all over my body, all in my hair and in my clothes. I reeked of smoke. They’d been looking for me, my mother was panicking. She beat me, stripped me and scrubbed me clean, and I cried for an hour in her arms.
Varanasi looks like the scene of a plane crash in my sleep. Small fires are scattered about, seen from above, scattered on the banks where the debris still burns, wherehomes have been wiped out without warning, where bodies are strewn. Night falls in Varanasi and pockets of fire still rage from the blackness, their flames reach up to diminish the stars, spewing sparks into deep space, souls orbiting the terror of this world.
There are lingams everywhere in the Varanasi of my dreams. On top of every step, at every ancient corner turned. It’s a virile city, teetering on the brink. And on the other bank it is barren like the afterlife.
The Ganga is a river that flows backwards in time.
In Agra, in our crumbling ancestral home, six years old. I’m the same person I was when I was six years old. The same fear, the same watchfulness, the same cowardice too, the same sense of doom. The same desire to jump over the edge.
I sleep next to my mother when Father isn’t here. We sleep in that same big bed in the silent house, silent as soon as the fans are off, eerie beyond belief. She pulls me towardsher, murmurs in her sleep, twitches like a cat dreaming, whiskers in the hunt on some imaginary breeze, stalking the grass over the hill when the sun goes down. She bares her teeth at the squirrels in the eaves, and then she cries, so sadly that I lie with my breath held, listening to her moan.
Sleep, the only time she’s really awake, the only time she truly cries. I love her. She never cries like this in the day. Never pities herself or bemoans her fate, never knows what has become of her.
She liked to bathe me in the old days, took great care with it, and one day she sat me down on the cold metal stool, opened my legs, and pointed between them, then said, If a man ever tries to touch you there, an uncle or a servant or a cousin, anyone at all, you fight him off and you scream. You run. You don’t let anybody touch you down there. That is the worst place in the world.
I’m still in pigtails.
I’m running through the fields in my tartan dress, theone brought back from Singapore, which he said was Scottish.
And the thunder breaks inside the sky, like the crack of an old record player. Skips across the surface, clicks. Follows a pause by the peal, rumbles between clouds the way the belly sky rumbles, mourns and quakes. Belly sky of tectonic plate. Rupture and rent.
Rent the blackness, billow the sail, on a ship of ocean ink.
The rain pours down on to the fields.
From thunderous chest of sky, on to the page.
On to childhood, my love.
A cadaver.
A labourer dead in the long grass. The sack of a cat from the side of a well, a rat killed by dogs in the short grass.
And in the house down the street they had a son.
So they lit fireworks.
They lit rockets and crackers and bombs.
Smoke on
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