or yellow bullet holes in the sky? How the veiny shadows
of the jhaus crawled through the infirmary windows
onto the bed where they put me.
I screamed until Sister Mary Lourdes
bent over me with a syringe and then I stopped
because I knew that I was going to die.
III
After the fever had drained away and the pus,
after the swelling in the armpits and the groin
had gone down, long after I was returned
to the dormitory, to the sough of night-breaths
and girls crying out in sleep, I would remember
the ghosts. They came to me
when Sister put out the light and disappeared
into her cubicle. One by one, spirits of girls
who had died in the infirmary, who told me
their diseases, diphtheria or polio, cholera, typhoid,
the whooping cough. I was not afraid. Their
breath was cinnamon-scented, their cool fingers
like rain on my fevered forehead. Does
it hurt? they would whisper, bending
to kiss me, and hush now, though
I was quiet already. Some nights they wore
white, some nights their hands
glimmered like silver in the dark and smelled
of carbolic soap. They would lie with me
like my mother long ago,
their breasts soft against my face. Their fingers
wearing the Bride of Christ bands
stroked my back until I slept.
For a long time after I was well
I thought of them, wept silently
under my blankets, went sweaterless
in the Darjeeling damp to make me sick again.
Longed to tell someone.
But I was afraid of questions,
afraid of Father Malhern with the ripe red wart
on his chin, who came to exorcise the school
the last time a girl talked of spirits.
Afraid for Sister Mary Lourdes. And so
I held to myself that cool darkness,
and rising from it, those hands and mouths and breasts
that like grace had called me back.
Learning to Dance
A month before the Senior Social
at the Boys’ School, we girls
who didn’t know how to dance
were herded into the music hall that smelled
of old dust. Under the glinty horn-rimmed eye
of Sister Mercedes, we practiced
polka and fox-trot, while from behind the moldy curtains
our Anglo-Indian classmates sniggered.
How we envied
their short curled hair, their names
that dropped cleanly off the nuns’ lips:
Diane, Melinda, Margaret. Our hair hung
limp-braided down our backs
like our mothers’, tamed by generations
of coconut oil. Our names,
Malabika, Basudha, Chandra,
tangled as wild vines, caught
on the frustrated tongues of our teachers
until they spat them out. Brought up
on tabla and sitar instead of Elvis, we knew
we were the disgrace of the school. And so
we practiced the cha-cha-cha
as though our lives depended on it. Foreheads
creased, we tried to remember which partner
was the “man” and who
the “woman,” as Sister beat steely time
with a ruler against her palm. Thwack-two-three,
thwack-two-three, and we waltzed
over a worn-wood floor marked with large X’s
to make us keep our places. Lost souls in limbo, we stumbled
backward over heels, knocked knee
against knobby girl-knee, while Sister rapped out
The Blue Danube. A damp light
fell through the thick panes
onto our sallow faces, and Sister’s voice
boomed down from the high slanted ceiling like God’s,
Not so close, not so CLOSE, making us
jump and lose count. We were to keep
twelve inches between us
and the bodies of boys at all times,
or the unthinkable might occur. We knew
this was true, from the veiled warnings
dropped in Moral Science class
by hairy-lipped Sister Baptista, from the True Love
comic books we read under night-blankets
by flashlight. We knew it from holidays at home,
our mothers’ low-voiced conversations which stopped
when we entered the room. Boys’ bodies,
smelling of hockey, male soap, residual blood
from torn knees and elbows.
The thought filled our mouths
with the wet metal taste of fear
or lust. Even in that Darjeeling air, cold
as the breath of icebergs, sweat sprouted
between our clamped palms, our guilty fingers
left moist streaks on the white blouses
of our dancing partners. For years
we had watched from dark dormitory windows
the Senior girls filing into the bus
that gleamed yellow as a warning through the night.
Long after they left, we smelled their perfume
in the hollows of our bodies. Their starched ruffles
scratched our throats, our breasts. We heard again
the bus start with a roar, headlights
outlining needles of rain, tail-lights like
smudged drops of blood
receding into blackness. We lay sleepless,
thinking of the slight tremble of boy-hands,
stubbed nails, lips fuzzy with new moustaches. The dance floor
opened like petals, the music was a wave
in which to drown. We tossed as in fever until
we heard them return,
giggles and whispered secrets, the spent triumphant odor
of sweat and hair spray. Now that moment
was ours—or would be, if only
we could learn to tango. So
we practiced side-steps on aching toes
and prayed for a Cinderella nimbleness, we
closed our eyes and believed in the sparkling arms
of princes, one for each of us. We sway-circled
the room, around, around, each ring
drawing us tighter toward the center,
that rain-lit night when all secrets
would be revealed, we held our breaths
until Sisters voice disappeared
under the red roar in our ears, we whirled
to the future on our blood-beat.
Going Home Day
The early December light that burns through fog
to turn the ice peaks of the Kanchanjangha
into a fairytale silver is like nothing
I have seen. This longed-for last day, it carries
the smell of blue eucalyptus, wild jasmine,
the smell of home. It has transformed
the dormitory, squat and grey as prison,
corridors the color of snot, chipped floors
stained with the smells
of urine and fear and dark monthly blood.
Now it faces us, airy and innocent,
emptied of night-memories, weeping children
who balled the ends of blankets
into mouths for silence. Look how its panes
glisten in farewell, soft as filled eyes,
how its green trim
matches exactly the waxy shine
of the holly below. Were we to step in
to the dim foyer where Christ hangs
in gilt-framed agony against a fiery sky,
he, too, would be smiling. And the nuns,
black-robed witches who carried
&nbs
p; poison apples in their pockets, who could turn us
to toads or worse with a word, have become
as ordinary as our mothers. In this light
they are suddenly older, smaller, a little
tired, a little looking forward
to when we are gone. The frish-frish
of their skirts is like the sounds
made by our mothers’ saris as they
rush up and down counting heads, making sure
we have not left behind
lunches and airplane tickets. We hear
in their Irish brogues our mothers’ tones
as they call to the driver to tighten
the ropes that hold our bedding to the roof,
to go slow on curves. They
hug us goodbye and press holy pictures
into our hands, and the light slants
onto their faces so the lines
at the edges of their eyes shine
like cracks in ice. It shows us they believed
they did it all for us,
those endless church Sundays, the stained glass
yellow as jaundice, the incense
thick as a hand pressed over the mouth. Those ruler cuts
on palms and backs of legs, the awkward, pained
alphabet of their love. For it’s a hard world
they’re sending us into, hard
and dangerous as diamonds, aglitter
on the other side of these protecting hills, and
they only wanted
us to be safe. The light tells us this
as we wave goodbye, as we promise
not to forget. Calm and pure
even through the bus’s dust, it wrenches
at our insides. This light, young
as it never will be again. Rainbows
on our lashes as the driveway recedes.
the blurred gables, the tiny figures
of the nuns. The light
has filled us all the way, like water.
We are clean and glowing and amazed
with it, amazed to find that we are weeping,
wishing we were coming back.
The First Time
You were four then and impeded
by innocence. You did not know
what the whispers meant, and adopted
was just another sound. Your child-heart
opened its crimson chambers like a poppy
to the april world. Daylong
you followed second brother, fetched, carried,
pushed him up the gravel drive
in his yellow wagon. Horse to his
rider, you were happy
to travel the length of lawn until your palms
and knees were raw-red. So when that evening
father’s car turned the driveway into a wall
of orange dust and second brother
ran, calling baba, baba, you ran too.
Cicadas cried in the brush. Assam bamboo
threw splintered shadows across the flash
of your thin brown legs, your high echo.
Now father swings second brother up,
manik, my jewel, they are laughing
into wind and sky, their teeth like diamonds,
and you tug at his pant leg, pick me up, me
too, baba, me too. He swipes at you
backhanded, get away from me you little
bastard, that word you don’t know bursting
ahiss against your eardrum. You
don’t even know to duck from his arm’s
arc, muscle and whiplash bone
slicing the air. Spilled on the ground,
flat as a shadow he could step on,
you look up,
stunned animal eyes. And we
each frozen in our separate frames, caught inside
the evening’s indrawn breath: the chauffeur
with his careful face; starched and correct,
the houseboy carrying father’s whiskey-soda;
mother silhouetted
against a sky scarlet as a wound. She makes
no sound but from behind I see
the fists in the folds of her sari
clenched so tight I know the white nails,
tiny curved blades. Know
the scars they leave. Father holds out
his hand for his drink. The dying light
catches the glass, its crystal curve
blurry with moisture, catches
a single swelling drop
which gathers itself on his blunted nail
and falls like a star.
Blackout
Calcutta, 1971
I
All that year our windows
were crusted with thick inky paper
that smelled of soot, taped and retaped
as the glue evaporated
in Bengal heat, and their edges curled
like love-letters held to a flame.
And still the war went on,
till those who could
left for hill towns with names like running water,
names you could believe in,
Mussoorie, Simla, Darjeeling. We stayed,
lay in sweat-seeded dark, elder sister and I,
under a mosquito net without a breeze
to stir it, and listened
to the heavy insect whine of bombers.
Behind my closed lids I saw them,
stingers poised above our cities. They released,
from bloated bellies, poison-silver eggs
that fell from the sky into the pictures
of sister’s history book,
Nagasaki, Hiroshima, a fire like a giant flower and the melted
flesh of children’s faces.
II
The nights we couldn’t sleep, sister
told me stories. They weren’t real, she said, but
I knew. I heard them all the time,
the shrill conch-snake whose scream
could shatter eardrums, the fire-breathed monster
whose step shook the earth.
The Red Lotus prince who battles
the Demon Queen, I knew, wore khaki
like the Mukti-Sena and carried
a Sten-gun. And walking skeletons
wailed each day
outside our blacked-out windows, a bowl of rice-water,
little mother, just one small bowl.
III
In a dream, or a snapshot stapled to the brain,
it shudders the walls, that giant blast. A jag of glass
nicks sister’s cheek and her hand
hovers over it, wet, unbelieving. But I can’t
stop. The moon is climbing through the hole, a moon
I haven’t seen in months, a huge, full moon. I reach for it
past shard-filled flooring. Color
and smell of fire, but cool,
like the night air now on my face.
And in its center, just as sister said, the old
moon-woman with her wheel, spin, spin, spinning
them out, like a long thread of blood, all tangled up,
the stories of our deaths.
Note
Mukti-Sena: literally, liberation army, was the name of the Bangladeshi freedom fighters.
Rajasthani
Four poems after the photographs of Raghubir Singh. (The photographs that inspired the poems were all taken in Rajasthan, India.)
Two Women Outside a Circus, Pushkar
Tiger Mask Ritual
Villagers Visiting Jodhpur Enjoy Iced Sweets
At the Sati Temple, Bikaner
Two Women Outside a Circus, Pushkar
Faces pressed to the green stakes
of the circus fence, two village women
crouch low in the cloudy evening with their babies,
breathing in the odors of the beasts
painted on the canvas above:
great black snakes with ruby eyes,
/> tigers with stars sewn onto their skins.
Beyond, a tent translucent with sudden light,
bits of exotic sound: gunshots, growls,
a woman’s raucous laugh.
The Nepal Circus demands five rupees
for entry to its neon world
of bears that dance, and porcupines
with arm-long poison quills. But five rupees
is a sack of bajra from Ramdin’s store,
a week’s dinner for the family. So the women
look and look
at the lighted sign of the lady acrobat.
In a short pink sequined skirt
she walks a tightrope
over gaping crocodile-jaws, twirling
her pink umbrella. Inside the tent,
the crowd shrieks as Master Pinto the Boy Wonder
is hurled from a flaming cannon. The women
clutch each other and search the sky
for the thunder-sound. Ecstatic applause.
The band plays a hit from Mera Naam Joker
and the crowd sings along.
The women gather their babies and head home
to the canvas of their lives: endless rounds of rotis
rolled in smoky kitchens, whine of hungry children,
slaps or caresses from husbands with palm-wine breaths,
perhaps a new green skirt at harvest time.
But each woman
tending through burning noon the blinkered bull
that circles, all day, the bajra-crushing stones,
or wiping in dark the sweat
of unwanted sex from her body, remembers
in sparkling tights the woman acrobat
riding a one-wheeled cycle so immense