Arundhati
Arundhathi Subramaniam is the author of two books of poetry: On Cleaning Bookshelves (Allied, 2001) and Where I Live (Allied, 2005). She has also co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of contemporary Indian love poems in English, and written The Book of Buddha (Penguin India, 2005). She lives in Mumbai.
Her poetry has been published in several national and international journals and anthologies, and translated into Hindi, Tamil, Italian and Spanish. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship for a writing residency at the University of Stirling, Scotland, in 2003, and a Visiting Arts fellowship to tour the UK on a series of poetry readings, organised by the Poetry Society, in 2006. She has done readings of her work in India and at international poetry festivals in Italy, Spain, Holland and the UK. She has since 2004 been the National Editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web.
Active in arts management for several years, she was in charge of Chauraha (an interactive arts forum) at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, from 1994 to 2007. She writes for various publications on the performing arts and literature.
WHERE I LIVE
(for Anders who wants to know)
I live on a wedge of land
reclaimed from a tired ocean
somewhere at the edge of the universe.
Greetings from this city
of L’Oreal sunsets
and diesel afternoons,
deciduous with concrete,
botoxed with vanity.
City of septic magenta hair-clips,
of garrulous sewers and tight-lipped taps,
of ’80s film tunes buzzing near the left temple,
of ranting TV soaps and monsoon melodramas.
City wracked by hope and bulimia.
City uncontained
by movie screen and epigram.
City condemned to unspool
in an eternal hysteria
of lurid nylon dream.
City where you can drop off
a swollen local
and never be noticed.
City where you’re a part
of every imli-soaked bhelpuri.
City of the Mahalaxmi beggar
peering up through
a gorse-bush of splayed limbs.
City of dark alleys,
city of mistrust,
city of forsaken tube-lit rooms.
City that coats the lungs
stiffens the spine
chills the gut
with memory
City suspended between
flesh
and mortar
and foam leather
and delirium
where it is perfectly historical
to be looking out
on a sooty handkerchief of ocean,
searching for God.
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2005
HOME
Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
never worrying
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside.
A home that I can wear lightly,
where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to fill in the crevices.
A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting.
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2005
TO THE WELSH CRITIC WHO DOESN’T FIND ME IDENTIFIABLY INDIAN
You believe you know me,
wide-eyed Eng Lit type
from a sun-scalded colony,
reading my Keats – or is it yours –
while my country detonates
on your television screen.
You imagine you’ve cracked
my deepest fantasy –
oh, to be in an Edwardian vicarage,
living out my dharma
with every sip of dandelion tea
and dreams of the weekend jumble sale…
You may have a point.
I know nothing about silly mid-offs,
I stammer through my Tamil,
and I long for a nirvana
that is hermetic,
odour-free,
bottled in Switzerland,
money-back-guaranteed.
This business about language,
how much of it is mine,
how much yours,
how much from the mind,
how much from the gut,
how much is too little,
how much too much,
how much from the salon,
how much from the slum,
how I say verisimilitude,
how I say Brihadaranyaka,
how I say vaazhapazham –
it’s all yours to measure,
the pathology of my breath,
the halitosis of gender,
my homogenised plosives
about as rustic
as a mouth-freshened global village.
Arbiter of identity,
remake me as you will.
Write me a new alphabet of danger,
a new patois to match
the Chola bronze of my skin.
Teach me how to come of age
in a literature you have bark-scratched
into scripture.
Smear my consonants
with cow-dung and turmeric and godhuli.
Pity me, sweating,
rancid, on the other side of the counter.
Stamp my papers,
lease me a new anxiety,
grant me a visa
to the country of my birth.
Teach me how to belong,
the way you do,
on every page of world history.
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2005
HEIRLOOM
My grandmother,
wise even at eight,
hid under her bed
when her first suitor came home.
Grave and serene
her features, defined
as majestically as a head
on an old coin, I realise
through photographs,
clouded by the silt of seasons,
like the patina of age
on Kanjeevaram silks,
that in her day,
girls of eight
didn’t have broken teeth
or grazed elbows.
Now in her kitchen,
she quietly stirs
ancestral aromas
of warm coconut lullabies,
her voice tracing the familiar mosaic
of family fables, chipped by repetition.
And yet,
in the languorous swirl of sari,
she carries the secret of a world
where nayikas still walk
with the liquid tread
of those who know their bodies
as well as they know their minds,
gliding down deserted streets
to meet dark forbidden paramours
whose eyes smoulder like lanterns in winter --
and return before sunset,
the flowers in their hair
radiating the perfume
of an unrecorded language of romance.
The secret of a world
that she refuses to bequeath
with her recipes
and her genes.
From On Cleaning Bookshelves, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2001
THE ARCHIVIST
Beloveds are best documented
out of the corner of the eye
where the retina bleeds
into the imagination.
You have the freedom now to archive
all that the taxonomists haven’t yet sharpened
into points, cleaved into zones --
the austere collage of seasons
that is his face,
and the caesura of the navel
counterpointing the serrated comma
of a forgotten appendix operation.
Breathe deep
the wild marsh scent of groin,
wonder at the obstinate gradient
of toe and middle finger,
observe in the gentle curve of calf
and flank, the karmic imprint
of a life that once lolled negligently
on pillows of silk and goose-feather
Recognise too
the puzzled snarl
of pain that suddenly
winters the eyes
Perhaps it would be wise now
to tell him of your love.
Profundities are best uttered in profile.
From On Cleaning Bookshelves, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2001
5.46, ANDHERI LOCAL
In the women’s compartment
of a Bombay local
we seek
no personal epiphanies.
Like metal licked by relentless acetylene
we are welded –
dreams, disasters,
germs, destinies,
flesh and organza,
odours and ovaries.
A thousand-limbed
million-tongued, multi-spoused
Kali on wheels.
When I descend
I could choose
to dice carrots
or dice a lover.
I postpone the latter.
From On Cleaning Bookshelves, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2001
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