‘With grace, we go to paradise’: Five poems that span the trauma and fractures of life in India

DNA

They came from the Papal State
and hadn’t been to a kindergarten
and exclaimed,
“Little men! We should be in Gulliver’s land.”
The “men” suddenly grew up
as if by mutation
and took the fathers
down the ages.

Till,
a sense of still being there
gripped them, and they hastened up
only to be frozen
in test tubes.

Truth

The blood mixed in the soil
is not lost—
God’s will reigns over planes.
The devil pollutes the day with tentacles,
the sea roars truth forever,
the son bears the father’s burden,
and love pampers rocks.
The lost wealth shall return.
In markets, fruits abound.
The bee sucks honey there.
With grace, we go to paradise.

Aura Aura Aura

Bengal!
Land of effulgence and horripilation…
Dominatrices,
flagellating momma…
Smouldering alphabets, and tear-stained cacti;
I do not know what!
Gilt-edged speech and soaring IQs,
Naxalbari and Nischindipur,
thorny-fish and mishti-doi,
swamps and stigmata!
I am your son from the desert,
Give me only…
Taka! Taka! Taka!

Memoir

Mathru devo bhava

But what I remember most is
the day she called me
and showed me her breasts
with scales setting in
circular pyramids of
translucent flakes.
With the labyrinths exposed
inside out
like a sea anemone.

I am an albino, colourless
but all her other kids are green.

Domina

On a gabled roof
of claymore mines
a crow perches—

I could never understand
this artistic obsession with pain.
Its sunflower blooms solar
till a woman on the internet
showed its priority
when she passed a DC current
into someone, strung up
just to take it,
writhing up and squirming
in ruined catharsis of all sorrows.

Excerpted with permission from...

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