The House with a Thousand Novels

This is a house, L-shaped,

seven-hands high; soil-veranda—

with twenty-one novels in it.

Every evening, five daughters beyond the banks,

who rested like bees in other houses,

with higher lower or equal soil-verandas

and more or lesser novels,

lift a night-black iron cauldron

so that it squats on the hearth.

This is a house, with twenty-one novels,

forever spanning

in episodic form, like long yarns.

In the room facing the east, where the eldest son lived

an almirah stood, with termites battling against it—

every night, along with the odious I’ll-take-you-away-song

of the bespectacled inauspicious barn-owl;

proud, filled to the neck, with a thousand books.

Many of them were novels.

Popular, unpopular, pulp

erotic (hidden between old “important” newspaper cuttings).

This is a house with eight doors,

seventeen windows, no ventilators.

In summers heavy with sweat and skin

snakes creep in for coconut-water-cold soil,

coated cool with greenish cow-dung

the epidermis of the seven-hand high veranda.

Everyday someone comes in—

leaving rippling traces forever

like generational earthquakes:

A wailing woman leaves a story of oppression, licensedrape,

barrenness, adultery;

A married daughter, beyond the banks, comes back to

disrupt diaries;

A worker runs away, digging up hidden gold jewellery

from one of these story-ridden rooms.

This is a house, with

a thousand serialised novels

floating in the heavy air.

Someone shrieks everyday.

Someone reads the caws of the crow and expects guests.

Picks up a mosquito from the milk and prays that no one dies.

Lights a mustard oil lamp in the household’s prayer-room singing

pleading songs.

And children carry love letters for peanuts from here, from there,

leaving traces of story

to be ruminated forever:

with meals.

At night, around winter-fires,

the chewing and grinding of betel-nuts,

while lifting the iron cauldron

This is a house with a thousand novels

(or more).

Every window or a room that mourns for a vent

treasures a story in it, which

no worker can run away with;

more precious than gold

buried deep enough, deeper than

a spring, a well

so that it lives forever and grows

like tears, hair and serialised novels in journals;

inadequate to live anymore

in a wooden almirah eroded by termites.

- Aruni Kashyap