Vanishing Acts

by Ranjit Hoskoté

  blowing up in the mined darkness first light

  crouching over tents a trail of scattered boots the lens

  pulled back to frame scorched pilgrims huddling

  watchful as pigeons in their alcoves.

  Tear this night off me, as a surgeon would strip

  the sweat-soaked shirt off a wounded man.

  Someone’s printed his palms on my door,

  javelins guard my bed and whose are those bodies,

  driven into sand, scooped up with mudguards,

  and this horse, its neck dripping blood on my sheets?

  Give me plainsong, not reportage, he cried,

  locked up in a prison of rumours.

  The Abbot of Misrule

  The fear of sharp weapons keeps me at home.

  From the street, a clown in a Führer mask

  rakes the houses with automatic laughter.

  Our windows splinter beneath a volley

  of shears, scissors, daggers: the glass

  sprinkles, pricks our eyelashes, our hair.

  It’s got beneath the quilts, among the cushions,

  powdered the pages of leatherbound books.

  The abbot of misrule patrols the street:

  his laugh-track shakes our walls.

  A bayonet rips up

  the ear’s curtain:

  the last sound I hear

  is the buzz of a wasp

  crushing itself

  against the one pane left standing in its frame.

  Landscapes with Saints

  Mean as knives, his burnished limbs

  rotted and stank when the gateman came

  to call his number. Gorakh forgot

  his body was just a borrowed suit,

  one size too large.

  *

  He’s forgotten the river pilot’s song.

  He’s above parrot gossip,

  beyond the hawk’s warning cry.

  Wrapping himself in the torn fabric of sky,

  Kabir climbs on.

  *

  Dropping his nimbus in the grass, he looks

  at the boats riding the stream below:

  close enough to touch.

  When the road ends,

  Tuka takes a deep breath and leaps.

  *

  She sees a boatman rowing in sand,

  shielding his skiff from the ocean’s roar.

  Such a safe harbour, brother, sings Lalla,

  it saves you the trouble

  of charting your course.

  *

  His eyes would not rest on a quatrain of walls

  and scanned the desert air instead:

  mango trees balancing on their heads;

  himself, Khushru,

  a bird of paradise judged by earth.

  *

  Neglect leafs through his pages. Perfumes escape

  from phials left unstoppered

  on his shelves. Lead crumbles

  in Attar’s mind; his hands,

  wherever they rest, touch gold.

  *

  A torn cotton robe against the wind;

  his limbs, nettle-pricked, transparent as prayers.

  His name burnt out,

  Milarepa sings to himself

  as he travels the centuries.

  Miniature

  On the staircase, a courtier sprints in slow motion.

  At the window, the princess combs her long, long hair.

  In the courtyard, wolves devour her discarded lover.

  Under the roof, a page trembles at the snarling and cries.

  In the mirror, the foot of the painter’s easel

  shows he’s still there, holding his breath,

  recording the gleam of early morning sun

  on crystal and goldleaf,

  echoing, in the rosy tint of apples,

  the blush mantling the cheek

  of the royal bride.

  He knows where to paint the curtain.

  Passing a Ruined Mill

  in memoriam: Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004)

  His mind’s gone blank as a fax

  left untouched for months in a drawer,

  his faded words a defeat

  of grammar and the continuities we prize.

  Passing Lower Parel, the train slows by a ruined mill:

  my eyes settle on chimneys stripped down to brick,

  look away from crippled sheds, twisted gantries,

  rusting flues and cranes overrun by creepers

  that loop across the city, explode in prickly flowers,

  drape the windows of the room in which he breaks

  his hoarded silence with visitors whose names

  escape him. They pour tea into his hours,

  waiting for the clouded marble of his eyes

  to spark a relay in the burnt-out tungsten

  of his thoughts.

  *

  Can you see the window through your fraying blindfold?

  The window framed in straggling creepers,

  a sunbird’s nest dangling from the bougainvillaea,

  the surly gardener retreating, his shears still drawn

  to hack, and you in the window, fresh from the rescue,

  waving your wave of welcome

  that was always a goodbye.

  Months of slow fades until at last the curtain

  marks a patch of scrubbed violet

  through which the sky used to glow.

  My face is as good as another’s,

  the kind word acknowledged, soon lost to the clock,

  a ticking device, awkward in an awkward room,

  this minefield of objects that rituals alone

  can restore to sense: morning bath

  and towelling, bedpan and brush.

  *

  Clouds form his idea of afternoon. Having read

  only the tea-leaves in his cup,

  he dreams of books

  stacked on shelves too high to reach.

  Look, he’s standing square in a frame

  bleached by sun, peeled by rain:

  he’s never asked the weather’s permission

  to leave, now he lets go the window

  in which the landscape’s settled:

  two shards of pane, a shred of maroon kite.

  *

  The sea outside his window, he knew that sea

  long before God parted it for Moses:

  he’d probed the edge where shelves drop

  into trenches, he knew where

  the oysters slept, their dreams growing

  in rings around a stone.

  Who would believe he’d begun to dream

  the ebb would suck him in, that he’d forgotten

  how to swim? One last time he dived.

  When he surfaced, the havoc birds were waiting:

  they swooped down to peck

  at the few pearls he’d found.

  *

  That music’s made of chance, he found,

  ten years after the dance had claimed

  his steps, its canny measure turning around

  to fix him to the floor. That music maims,

  he found, as seedy grandeur pinned him to a desk

  high-piled with books, papers unread for years,

  letters to which no answer would ever be sent,

  the lamp hovering above his head

  a menacing crown, more fire than light.

  And there he sat, while the paper rustled away,

  shedding the weave of his words like a blotted skin.

  *

  Did you never climb a three-bar gate

  to pluck forbidden mangoes?

  Did you regret the gash that opened

  in your skin, wet with the hand-pressed

  rawness of gathered juice?

  He told a palmist he’d befriended

  that he suffered the commonest of chosen things:

  the need to make of sullen seed a tree.

  Your tree will shimmer, its roots anchored in p
assion,

  said the kerbside sage, but mind, it’ll bend,

  its branches heavy with poison fruit.

  He saw that truth, and said: Not yet,

  and stroked its prickly leaves.

  Golden Orioles

  for Anju Dodiya

  The window’s aflame with sunset

  but she isn’t looking or really there.

  She floats above the couch,

  a hypnotist standing by

  to catch her dreams. She’s shivering,

  afraid to close her eyes at night:

  Will her lids burn, her images escape,

  her eyes fly away, a pair of golden orioles?

  The wakeful hypnotist falls asleep at last.

  She drifts, the room too small to detain her.

  She dreams of flying naked through the air,

  unhindered by the costume of who she is.

  Dome

  for Masud

  Dates never change

  on the calendar of faith

  but light and wind are playing tricks

  with the past.

  Words split like isotopes

  in this peacetime landscape

  of abandoned courtyards, empty cradles,

  withered gardens, broken roofs.

  Only the madman, in his garland of dried flowers,

  has the right of passage here

  and the blind beggar who recollects nothing

  except the spider ticking in his wired skull.

  For a second, between two versions

  of an echo, the past doesn’t happen:

  the dome remains, a roc’s egg

  veined blue, shelled by wind.

  Confess

  to no crime of identity.

  Wait until the guillotine falls

  in the vast silence of the heart.

  Café Monsoon

  The clouds are his dominion: he’s been charting

  the monsoon’s course this evening, scanning deserts,

  pinning oases to the tablecloth, his compasses linked

  to his nerves, to the winds outside.

  Behind its double panes, the room is proof

  against squalls and dust devils.

  Weather striates the carpet: humid reds purl

  through gritty blues. He shades his eyes

  against thigh-bones bleaching in sand,

  small monuments he measures, bending to catch

  their music, far tremors of an absent sea.

  And he must hurry, this is no place

  for the slow salt statue he’s become.

  He flees the restaurant’s humming chill,

  the outside blinds him with sudden warmth:

  he’s stalled, stonewalled by water

  running down his forehead;

  two kidneys of steam

  frost his glasses. He rubs at each lens

  but cannot clear the dripping lawn

  that’s occupied his eyes this rain-dark night.

  He trains himself on loping shadows

  that close in, then snap out of reach.

  His mind is sharp

  but rain and the night are sharper still:

  his footsteps are shaky, the landscape indelible.

  The Sword-maker’s Lullaby for the Infant Prince

  The new sword recalls no blood,

  the old sword tastes again

  the wheeling seasons of slaughter:

  horse’s neigh, falcon’s cry, men crashing

  into ditches, arrows in their throats,

  heads rolling downhill on streams

  of flies, helmets catching the noon-glint,

  hedges of blade-glare, mowing, hacked.

  Old steel is best: hilt firm, fire-honed edge.

  It slashes through the honeycomb fabric

  of treaties and intrigues, dresses the torn flesh

  to sing in mummers’ tales.

  Cunning as poets, the oldest swords can drowse

  on your walls, but roused, will recite

  the butchers’ anthems burred beneath our tongues:

  yes, even yours, little boy among the dreaming spaniels.

  Long-distance Call

  It’s raining in my sleep when the telephone rings.

  The wire crackles and there’s your voice

  at my ear, clear in my misted hand.

  A satellite bounces our words from orbit to orbit

  as we spin. I’ve woken up as mortal

  as when I slept; you, call made, slip into bed.

  Our cities are our cells, our case and tense,

  local time the text we’re fated to read;

  but between the snatches of news we exchange

  the earth’s been well thumbed.

  Paete, Laguna

  for Patrick Flores

  The carver? You mean the Redeemer’s right-hand man. Not a merchant of torsos, hardly that. More like a surgeon, I’d say. He’s studied the lesions of hate, greed’s eczemas, and does sutures if you repent. That’s the Virgin waiting for her diademed head, and those three saints, baby-naked, should soon be wrapped in satin. He’s walking among them, sawdust in his hair, checking lathes, gouges. His nails drive deep into wood made flesh.

  He’s handing out scripts to angels, taking them through their paces from raw prototype to flight model. Innocent of paint, gilt, lace and haloes, his martyrs grieve and lust as common clay. He’s crafty. He won’t save them from what awaits: bonded to their slaves, they’ll stand for ever in a chapel or cathedral, piety’s gardeners, wielding instruments of healing and devious hurt.

  He counts out the weeks in bruised fingers, wax plugs, lacquer skins, ivory pendants, turning these prayer-soiled bodies, these impious arks of lovesong and lament, into sovereign powers that arbitrate between men and their fate, guard their journeys. Even he, their carver, prays to them: that’s rough water he must cross, its black islands rippling, gleaming like the humps of rutting bulls, and he must swim it in the long fall of light parsed with the raining shadows of gulls. He kneels to the powers he’s brought into the world of sweat and strained muscle: they deflect the bullet from his heart, lift the crumpled shroud of night from his face.

  They’re heavier-than-air now, heavier than the kamikaze crows diving in squadrons towards the lake, pecking at the afternoon trawled up in a net of smog. They can depress the earth with their footsteps. They can glide through bolted doors and wall-eyed windows that stare from cracked facades, fly to console those who kneel and confess, begging to be redeemed, to be hatched again, preferably from a golden egg. Tactful parents, they can watch over children who hunt rebels in southern jungles, blow up citadels, hurl grenades in such fast motion that you cannot tell whose side they’re on, whose cause they’ll die for.

  Shooting is believing, any moving target promises salvation. They trade binocs for AK-47s, these children watched over by saints, aim rockets at tank convoys and helicopters, take a break from their monitors to spit out wads of gum, spent magazines. Does Counter Strike wake the saints to martial visions? Do they grunt, curse, bellow in their cerulean dreams? Riding in carriages, their wheels squelching through blood, do they direct parades to church, alighting to the beat of snare drums, climbing to their high niches, receiving tributes of hymn and penance?

  Outside the church, it’s raining shadows: the gulls are homing, their parole withdrawn by night’s magistracy. The saints play the flickering game of shadow and candlelight in the nave. Only their eyes are real, the eyes of children sparkling in wooden masks. The saints have annulled the seasons this evening: news of conquest and massacre is not whispered, the choir sings heaven’s praises undiluted, the morning shall be laid white as a tablecloth. Redemption is a fine red stroke petering into misty skyline.

  Their pasts are safe with their maker, and their dreams: he’s put them away with his tools before shaving, bathing, choosing a starched new shirt for Mass. Night scares him, but with sun in the windows, he’s a relaxed connoisseur, cherishing the crooked timber of hu
manity, the regularities of the misshapen day.

  The Orientalist

  He went back to drafting policies of state

  but never forgot the courtesan in the Sanskrit play.

  She wrote him letters on pages folded

  in triangles like betel leaves

  but did not wait for the beloved and spring;

  creepers soothed her, her lamp-lit hours passed

  among the scented shadows of lovers.

  Quietus

  Silence is clean, a frigate leaving a harbour

  with no siren wailing.

  Silence is a tureen that needs no scouring

  for the last stains of grammar.

  Silence is fire,

  a threat with no reprieve.

  Silence is a panther

  that stalks us through jade eyes.

  The Interpreter

  He receives no mail, leaves no forwarding address;

  without passport or destination,

  catches flights at deserted airstrips.

  He interprets signs that no one cares for

  any more; chases after the receding horizons

  of the world that used to be home.

  His hands tremble, his shoes are scuffed,

  his mind divided into zones

  of unexploded shells.

  One day he will forget the passwords:

  trapdoors will yawn between his nouns

  and the things they named.