Nine nights

I.

My goddess is a patch of sky

between two raffia palms -

a bird streaks down like a spear

thrown by one of her arms.

My goddess is a curl of cloud

on the skyline somewhere

and the wingspan of a kite’s her crown,

tangled mesquite’s her hair.

My goddess is a snapped off stem -

an arrangement of spice

fortuitously made in the kitchen.

A rich bubbling of rice.

She is, and isn’t, made of clay,

she’s whole seasons, not just four days.

II.

She sends me a sign that I don’t

instantly recognise -

the mind admits only a want

to relate might to size.

I look at the sky and forget

the grass beneath my feet

and I think she’s a mauve sunset

where seas and heavens meet,

but the horizon’s just a line -

the limits of my eye,

a sunset is as much divine

as an earthworm or a fly.

She is broad as winds, warriorlike

and a stick thin match ready to strike.

III.

The temple dance of northern lights

she sends me through a friend,

and I watch the worship mesmerised

before I comprehend.

Likewise a different autumn night

there is a quiet fall

of moonlit shreds of small insights -

but their sum’s not small.

She’s among my friends and my folks,

the least of my brethren -

she doesn’t need to be invoked

and worshipped now and then.

She demands not one thing from me,

just lets me breathe and walk out free.

IV.

She sends me more, but by this time

I am on high alert

get clued up how she leaves her signs,

offhand, hidden by dirt.

She isn’t there in lotus buds

hundred and eight, or more

neither the soil we call sacred,

nor a foot drawn on the floor,

she sends me a pulse of light and dark

a scratch of old perfume

and news of distant loved ones marks

her grace within my rooms.

She’s a cell, a text, telephone ring -

a massive world of tiny things.

V.

She’s not a fast, she’s not a feast -

she’s core of grape and grain,

what goes into the mouth is least

for it passes out again.

She’s hard to trap, she’s hard to fold

in sandalwood and stone,

and eight rare metals never could hold

and claim her for their own.

She’s not the conch, she’s not a song

she’s not in lamp nor flame.

Nor is she the bell, nor overlong

chant of a special name.

No exact angle quite defines

her intimate bounds, and what’s divine.

VI

She comes to mind about this time

with all my womenfolk,

stretching behind in one long line,

half lost in incense smoke.

I knew no goddess as a child,

maybe not even now.

I knew her through my mothers’ smiles

an aunt’s kiss on my brow.

I knew her from the silky sands

that ran between my toes;

through elephant grass, savannah lands,

where the sandbur grows.

She’s woman, and burr, and long ago

she pricked my cuff and never let go.

VII

And now from time to time I get

distracted by my cuff

at the mass of spines that firmly sits

and won’t be shaken off

Does she like things neat? yet won’t let

me snugly button them up?

I finger the fabric and get pricked

her spines are somewhat rough -

but there’s a smoothness obvious too.

As we move from spot to spot

the garments change, the years, the views,

but the massed burrs do not.

She’s a spine, a roughness - in my side,

and smoothly endures through the ride.

VIII

The gods don’t come, they don’t return -

it’s me who comes and goes,

falters at the gates and then turns,

afraid to get too close.

The marquees are made of floodlights

and a thousand-strong crowd,

inside my space her touch is like

silk poured on a raincloud -

and when she can, she lays her hand

on my temple and cheek

though I may see the raffias and

a spear-like sparrow streak.

She is bird-flight, and animal-track,

but she doesn’t arrive, nor go back.

IX

She looks at me through the prayer niche -

her seal’s on calligraphed walls.

On the crucifix. On flesh and fish.

And gutters and urban sprawls.

Her footmarks weave the river bank

into its sunlit scarf,

her thumb print’s on the desert flanks

and on the ocean surf.

She loosens out the date palms coif;

asks neither wind nor breath,

a full moon night she quite shrugs off,

nips out the wicks of faith.

She’s never at home and always near,

she’s everyWhere and everyHere.

Today marks the end of one of the main festivals in my community in India, celebrated over nine nights. I got sent various images by friends and family members the past few days and looking at them this is what happened.  None of the pictures belongs to me, I don't know the copyright holders, credit where credit is due and I do emphatically wish to salute the amazing creativity and expression, kudos!

One of the things I like about my community is the pluralistic approach to religion - it allows space to the devout and the atheists and the agnostics, we are all God's children whether we believe in an Almighty or not, or the forms of our beliefs, or how we observe our festivals. India has been practicing live and let live for centuries, probably the most ancient community to adopt this as a motto, for all I know. But recently this pluralism has been under attack, which is concerning and saddening. 

My own devotion quotient is irretrievably flawed, I leave my family members and friends to intercede on my behalf, and they do a fantastic job - the evidence is amply clear in my life. I'm deeply grateful for that. Therefore, I find it preposterous this vicious effort now to herd us all into one 'right' way of observance, to create one path where there are obviously many. 'There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.' The clueless have a claim to a way and a kiss too!

Happy Festival to you, whatever it is you are celebrating today. May all our prayers in all their various ways find their mark.





And we are getting together for the Halloween at Write...Edit...Publish later in October, see you there.

Malfuf wa Malik : Graffiti, Gems and Holidaymaking

Listen here to Ghalia Benali collaborating with Belgian, Iraqi, Moroccan and Indian musicians to produce a uniquely Arab-Indian-International blend of music that’s beyond mind blowing. The album is called Al Palna (Palna is a Hindi word meaning ‘Cradle’) and she is singing a track titled Hayyamatni.  (you can listen to Ghalia and Dina al Wedidi singing the same track but without the Indian instruments live in Cairo in 2013 here)

Ghalia Benali is a Tunisian singer, songwriter, dancer, design artist and performer, born in Brussels in the late sixties. She grew up in Zarzis in southern Tunisia, and returned to Brussels to study graphic design after completing high school. She embarked on her musical career in the nineties and soon climbed to fame abroad. She has this hypnotic voice, nuanced, deep and passionate. I remember reading somewhere that a soprano is not the natural range of most Arab female singers, they tend towards the alto. I haven't been able to discover why that should be so, but I am happy that it is, if it is. Just a personal preference, nothing to do with the quality of their, or anyone else's, music.

Ghalia is a self taught musician, influenced by not just the Middle Eastern greats, but the cross currents of world music that ebbed and flowed all around her in her formative years. Her mother listened to Indian and Arab music, her father favoured Western classical, she herself was exposed to Middle Eastern folk traditions and other musical ones rooted deep in the cultural fabric of her native land. As a result both the East and the West and the Middle meet in her art.

Holidays. A certain, sudden spring. And the making of both.

The Arab Spring came to Egypt in January 2011, on a day that my child returned from a school trip to Luxor. A handful of parents, just those of that particular year group, went to pick the children up at nightfall and waited and waited in the dimly lit school grounds. An empty school devoid of the happy bustle of learning and light is one of the most forlorn places to be. We rattled around, tired, impatient, bored and fed up already. The teachers texted almost continuously and conscientiously about the snarls and the protests blocking the main highways. I was probably not at my patient best.

They finally came in at around ten, three hours late. We thought nothing of it at the time, Cairo traffic has a formidable reputation in the congested department. And the airport was 50 km away from us. Then things took a scary-beautiful turn a few days later. The anger escalated, the protests continued, we were evacuated, the President fell. And returning, I saw graffiti for the first time in Cairo streets. The Revolution ultimately failed, but not before it created a lava explosion of art – visual, audio, written, performed. Watching a revolution unfold is a concentrated life lesson, whether you are a part of it or just a bystander. Two personal milestones happened unobtrusively during that time, my child spent his first night away from his mum, he and I both grew up a little, and my book of Bengali shorts was published during the Kolkata Book Fair in January 2011.

That whole year was a concentrated learning opportunity in ways more than one. Tagore’s 150^th birth anniversary was being celebrated and the Indian Embassy in Cairo organised a yearlong fiesta of his works, documentaries, poetry readings, seminars analysing his life and times. I went along for as many of them as I could, obviously. One particular literary event stands out – a seminar on the poetry of ‘Tagore and Shawky’ – not only did I get to know about the correspondence between the Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawky and Tagore, I heard living, established Arab poets recite from Tagore’s works, their own works, past Arab greats, a veritable bonanza of poetry. All that year my newsfeed had translated snippets from Gitanjali posted by Egyptian friends; an Egyptian who had lived in Bangladesh stood up and declaimed a Tagore verse, impromptu, at one of the events, complete with the Bengali accent; someone sent me cuttings of past articles in Cairo newspapers on Tagore - ordinary people, not poets and intellectuals superkeen on the arts or anything. I had no idea the following Tagore had among Egyptians and I was blown away.

That year was the first time I heard of Prof Galal Amin too. He was the main speaker in one of these events.

Galal Amin is a well known economist, and has taught at both Ain Shams University and the American University in Cairo. He has also been visiting faculty at US universities. He is a serious social commentator but his essays are threaded through with a dry wit, quite delightful, while being informative and intimate.

Socially speaking, summer holidaying in Egypt has been characterized, like many other aspects of social life, by a striking dualism reflecting an obvious contrast in the way of life of the upper and lower classes. No wonder that Egyptians have coined several words based on the noun for summer season, sayf. Thus, where an English- or Frenchman would speak of "taking his holiday," the Egyptian speaks of tasyif, "summer holidaymaking," which means specifically, spending the summer at the seaside. Egyptians even have a special noun for people who spend the summer this way: mustafin or musayifin, as well as a word for the summer breeze, meaning, literally, the "breeze that comes from the direction of the sea," bahari, whose praises are continually being sung. Egyptians attribute to it the power of restoring the soul and of healing the sick, they may even entrust it with carrying messages to and from a beloved person.

~ Whatever Happened to the Egyptians, Galal Amin

As a non-Arab and a Desi, I can tell you I am into waterscapes (I was born on the East bank of a river, not far from the seas) and so I get this - Egyptians are inordinately fond of waterbodies. Most Arabs are, considering much of their lands are arid and inhospitable. So that's no surprise, all humans probably have this affinity for water, given that they...um...promptly perish without the sweet version of that commodity. But extolling a particular kind of breeze? and assigning it a postman role for  love notes? So totally charming, so Egyptian! And also - Indian.

Nothing's lost...

Le Morne by Mira Boolell Khushiram

The light falls aslant on the slope where

folded between the silence of stone,

a hundred footfalls of restless men

mill in fear. Not a trace remains

save the spill of that sand coloured tongue,

and a sudden shadow of a cave;

the crisscrossed trails of hurried escape;

a persistent keening of the waves

a lament formed of sea, rock, terrain

an untamed yen in a twinge of air

a squeeze of breath, and a freefall plunge,

just for a flash and then they are gone.

Yet nothing’s lost in the universe -

the yearnings for freedom. Silence.  Words.

Today I'm writing to another watercolour from Mira's Mountains of Mauritius series, featuring a different, dramatic perspective of Le Morne Brabant, thank you Mira! I have written about it before in this on-going artistic collaboration of ours. Read about it here. And about the legends of the escaped slaves, or maroons, on this site.

Torn

I’m torn between two poems, two oceans,

five countries, half a dozen rivers, two

dozen houses, forks in desert roads, motions

in parliament. Between the forks of due

processes. Between me being me, and you

being you. Between emotional quotients.

From wingtip to wingtip, from limb to limb

I’m easy to tear, separate into

segments along my perforated rim;

steel’s superfluous, a flicker will do –

of fabric, winds, porcelain grin, an eye through

a fanlight, a word, a long drawn out whim.

 

Torn between two stanzas, just now, and thrust

into matryoshka dolls, nested disputes,

between assets and titles, diamonds and dust,

isms and schisms and their hydra-headed fruits

and it’s easy to throw me, blind on the routes

of zigzag lightning between duty and trust.

Remembering Zeinabu

Credit

At dawn I woke to a translucent dream,

and Zeinabu was bending over me -

her eyes tender unfolding hibiscus,

her smile the sharp edge of a naked blade.

You recall Zeinabu, don't you? She comes

often, to my bedside, banyan, angst, verse,

she is the rose that goes by many names -

Zenobia sometimes, Janhavi, Jean -

as per the moods of the seasons and stars.

Today she handed me a light console,

smiled her sharpest smile, most mysterious,

whispered, “no walls. Water, everywhere. Still.”

She used to stop by the golden windows -

calabash with endless rafts of butter

in a buttermilk sea - and ask strangely

pointed questions. She was the old, cracked pane

refracting rainbows off her own edges,

shattered raindrops on her limbs and torso

collected into rivulets, into

the fluid breadth of language as they fell.

The roofs were archived in her, the broken

brick arches, the crumbling sphinxes that spoke

with the mouths of kings. Two mourning doves played

with her left shoulder, she gently set them

down on my balcony, “these might bring you

something.” They didn’t stay long, pecked the rattan

of the seat, kissed her hands for the last time,

and took flight, invisible in seconds.

“They can be,” she sighed, “a bit annoying

really, why I can’t fathom.” She came with

dawnlit tombs hidden in her braided hair,

the forks of wide boulevards on her forehead.

She brought baskets of fruits - figs, guavas,

split them open to flesh-pink, offered me

an uneven quarter, and asked after

my mothers, my children, the dusty bloom

on the innards of my wine kegs and cups,

inscribed rice grains, and bullets, flattened by

ricochet, collected at my feet in

poison pools of metal. Where street children

played at hopscotch and tag in the debris -

there was nowhere else to go. “How’s that one?”

She asked after the gun-fingered, ten-armed

members of our furthest clans, our peoples.








India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan are reeling from the worst flooding in South Asia for decades. The losses are staggering. More than 40 million people are affected, and 1400+ people have been killed. Please click on this link here, and/or here if you wish to help.