Where I am is a boat without a pilot,
sculling through cold water.
*
Start again. There is no safety in numbers.
The sixty-four saints stand paralysed
in the authorized version of the legend.
No footnote explains the hunting songs
or the red skein curling downhill
in place of the river.
Script thrown away, I’m on my own.
The detectives will find me
when a rainbow prints itself
on the litmus sky at noon.
I clear my throat,
the movie stops.
*
The hours have stopped in my veins
but late-night travellers still rush past me,
through me, to reach the midnight express.
My country’s been swallowed
by a sky darkening to cloud and sleep.
The sixty-four saints have formed a caucus
of havoc birds, the rainbow is a stanza
they refuse to sing. Close to the tympanum,
the horseshoe weather taps cryptic clues.
On every clock-face,
the hour hand and the minute hand
go on mating.
*
Wakeful, all eye, the havoc birds read
the scroll of earth unfolding,
every fleck a signal:
prey, home, danger,
hiding-place.
From a great height, each bird watches
its shadow falling
to its death.
*
I vanish, again, in the darkroom.
A lamp exposes
my heirloom bones.
On a park bench,
a gardener finds a surplice,
drooping, ravelled at the seams:
my skin, abandoned in flight.
Corpus
He hissed a quick breath in my ear:
cradle knowledge, farewell wish.
The world welled up in my eyes.
Deaf to the fall of colour,
the hangman stuffed my fists
with newspaper cuttings.
*
Ripped open, the body that I loved, ripped open:
no simple mirror, nor mind’s projection,
it struck down my reasons with sudden fevers
no thermometer could gauge, no drug restrict.
I leave it on this slab, cast-off shape,
marionette for rubber-gloved hands.
*
The image is a trauma
buried deep inside this animal
splayed on a zinc-topped gurney,
moulting, blood’s debt left unpaid.
Go, taxidermist,
cut through fur to the bone.
Poste Restante
Instead of addresses, the postman finds
a child pumping a thirsty hydrant,
and a barber’s throne, twisted by fire,
marooned in a side-street;
to the north, a dented milk churn
sits across the road from an upset pannier,
buns scattered; past the traffic island,
a leather suitcase, handle wrenched off;
to the south, a public library,
stack on stack of carbon ghosts.
The letters fall from his hands
like homeless prayers.
At the Ferry Wharf
Mandovi
I
Like animals in a sanctuary, images survive
in the eye, outliving pogroms and inquisitions,
falling prey to occasional poachers
but otherwise beyond extinction.
Take the bridge that once spanned this river:
I could see it if I stood here, where the tawny sand
meets the waves crumpling at the burr-tufted feet
of the casuarinas. I step on the wharf,
expecting the chug-chug-chug of a motor on the surf
and the bobbing of a cabin shackled to the shore,
the shell of an ironworks barge
that sank forty years ago.
Now that the bridge has fallen, the salvage crews
have trawled stories of barrage, sluice and waterfall
that the engineers could never have heard:
how could their soundings have detected
the drizzle of aboli around ruined chapels
in the night, the sharp fragrance of tulsi
around brick columns, from basil roots
buried under the whitewashed cross?
Or the shadow of palms by the river, lime-green
prototype of eternity, the sleep no one survives.
I’m crossing the river. I don’t know the way
or what awaits us on the other bank.
Laterite blocks on fire in the sun, the dust
a red stain no soap can remove from the white
of refugees’ clothes. No architect could draft
this home again on his pencilled board:
our phrases change colour, melting to riffs
on the master tongue of time,
which changes its tune when it crosses the river.
Where I sit, in this quietus of catamarans,
a man could drown, split keel-wise
on a coral reef. But his stories will keep
until, astride the foaming lions of their office,
the predator-judges of Revelation stir out.
II
I came prospecting for emeralds and found a slave economy
of stone heads dangling from temple gateways:
relics of trussed victims, sandalpaste-smeared,
appointed sentries to the monarchs of heaven
when Mangesha and Shantadurga came down,
bejewelled expatriates from the mountains.
Then the Portuguese caravels made landfall
and the crucifix, ivory against the candlegrease,
took them for its sextons.
Under the fumbling thumbscrews of aspirant saints,
the river, like its gods, switched sides again:
it lapped up the susurrants of a convert’s parlance
but the bonemeal of old poetry sticks in its craw.
The river is a commissar of memory:
it empties a flagon of red, mine-blasted earth,
wolfing down cargoes that arrive
from inland seas whose ebb and flow
the scan-lines of the satellite probe
cannot arrest. That is the river I must cross:
my boatman reluctant, his passengers
a madman, a surveyor and a priest;
a brief crossing their dream, but sliced moons lie
scattered on the rucked iodine tide like scimitars.
III
I’ve thrown my atlas away, dragooned borders, built
railheads on the route back. I’ve surrendered
to a periodic table that baffled me as a child.
Summoned as sacrifice, nailed to all I recall
with slivers of the rawest mango steeped in brine,
I counter the crossing with surmise that
the lantern sun will let me slip
into this water that remembers only
darkness after darkness and hoards the light
far below the diver’s reach, this water that drowns us
to redeem us, carries us away
and brings us back, but never whole.
Fixed between a palmyra barricade
and the heaped green tide, I wait for the smells
of pickled fish and oil-troughed wave.
Diesel fumes suffocate the landing. The drumbeat
of boiler and rail takes over.
As I step aboard,
river, pier and fishing village
dissolve in the stern, machine-tooled music
and the boat stands shaking like some beast
panting from the jungle’s ferocities.
I
hear its engine throb and stall
like a lover’s candled heart.
A gull circles above the squall and hull-thump
of a motor that’s gunning to move but can’t
and I grip the shuddering wheel of this ferry
that is not there.
Canticle for Tomorrow
after Lal Ded
Lynx-eyed, play blind.
Prick-eared, be deaf.
Polished, lie dull
among the dull.
Survive.
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin…
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinbooks
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk
PENGUIN BOOKS
UK | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2008
First published by Penguin Books India 2006
Copyright © Ranjit Hoskoté, 2006
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Carlos Peixeira Marques
ISBN: 978-0-143-06185-4
This digital edition published in 2016.
e-ISBN: 978-9-386-05784-6
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Vanishing Acts Page 13