An excerpt from my 2013 book-length poem, Here

Canto II

A dream: a poem that sounds like a warning —

Seidel’s The Sickness, which ends on Eighty-Sixth

Street, near the Park, one ordinary morning:

An early soubrette, a fuming bus: a fixed

Routine. In this dream, there’s nothing to do for hours

Till the Met opens — what draws me there is always

The same: the Egypt exhibit, the Sphinx that glowers

Knowingly, Pharaoh, Anubis, the Hebrew slaves

Who etched the scallops in each gryphon’s wing —

 The spectacle of God’s chosen people at slaughter —

Courtesy Cecil B DeMille, presenting

Charlton Heston in a skirt, while Pharaoh’s daughter,

Anne Baxter, and her maids, fretted in Technicolour.

I begin there, in New York, or there, in Egypt.

Anywhere, you might say, but here, in duller

Light, and an obscurer story, where the whip

Played the starring role, and often still does.

So I’d better get to it: there are still fields

That remember the mud between the forlorn toes

That threaded furrows, behind the iron wheels

Of oxcarts pregnant with cane-stalks, and whispered

Bhojpuri curses beneath acidic breath,

Or love poems – whatever came through the blistered

Betel-stained lips stank of violence, threat.

Then evenings, on dirt floors swept with palm fronds,

The oiled joints of tawny bodies squatting outside

The smoke-blackened tin-roofed barracks, murmuring songs,

Low and primal, smooth rum, bhang, the slide

From history into the samadhi state,

Gazing at the saffron-faced horizon

Where black-limbed havan smoke hung frozen, in wait

For the haughty Aryan gods to realize an

Offering had been made, then coaxing them

With tears and music, but they never came,

And the whispered strophes dissolved into pablum.

The blue-skinned gods were stunned by shame

That ten million fierce-moustached kshatriyas armed

With the Vedas, fed by the headwaters from Shiva’s

Top-knot, could be effortlessly damned

By a hundred thousand chinless, blue-eyed reavers,

And they pretended not to see the havans

That flowered from the lonely Caroni Plains

In fragrant ghee, or hear the plaintive bhajans

That wavered like the flickers of wood-torch flames.

The slender, manicured nails slowly grazed

The indigo chins, as they lounged in Indra’s demesne 

And wordlessly the mercuric eyes blazed

Assent, like jewels in velvet: sudras weren’t men. 

And left them to diabetes, uxoricide,

And a thick-fingered crushing boredom, whose cure

Was ganja, rum, the Manas, a child bride.

They took a century and a half to find the door

Out of those fields, and god knows how much more

To forget them.

     So much for history.

You could still see the cane fields from our

Back porch as late as the 80s. By then the mystery

Of the rough-edged past had become a silky fetish,

And you saw the younger coolie doctors in Koortahs

And heard the tinny music, and felt the rush

Of memory incarnating Hema and Mumtaz

As Sita and Parvati, invoked and worshipped

Every Wednesday in the Hylite drive-inn,

When they let coolies in by the carload, and slipped

Them fliers for yagnas and satsanghs — the hives in

Which their droning could meet, mingle and multiply,

Like the accordion folds that wheezed the mournful

Melodies that softened the strophes from the dry

Epics—as penance for the indulgence in scornful                                                                             

Lowbrow peasant leelas, where Amitabh  

And the crooning, fair-skinned Bollywood simulacra

Were molecules, dancing to re-form the drab

Barrack compound, so coolies could re-make a

A gold-leafed pastoral, with devas in brass,

And bestiaries of Aryan-animal hybrids.

The gods became works of art in the age of mass

Reproduction — an orgy of eyes and limbs on all sides,

Oozing the pink-skinned beauty peasants crave;

The sapient sadhu became a hedonist

Decked in organza and tulle, as he traced the grave

Ash on each forehead, the sacred thread on each wrist;

And they brought the robed charlatans from Bharat

To babble the Sanskrit words, as they fed Agni

The ransom, and petition for a new concordat

For a New World. The gods blinked and weighed the sagging

Clouds, heavy with gold bibelots the peasants

Offered, like a low-born lover offers stars,

Then laughed a little; the coolies were like infants.

Heaven had changed after an age of wars

And only fragments of their magic remained:

The prayers, offerings, and flags were mere ornaments

Now. They’d grown bored, the epics had become mundane

And kingdoms of stone and magic dwindled like incense.

But the robed charlatans, the scared thread

And the offerings to Agni, now properly proffered,

Had to be honoured. They stirred, sighed and bled

Their ichor into the ether, and prepared to suffer

A final, absurd round of incarnations

To walk the improbable spaces of crumbling Maya,

Near her navel, in those far-flung stations

Where their lost children sat, drunk and crying.

But in the profane cane fields, the peasant body

Could not practice austerities, was too enmeshed

In the syrupy world; avatars became godly

Satyrs whose immanence succumbed to flesh.

I remember Hanuman, the monkey god,

In the body of a red-eyed government clerk

Who carried a flask in his back pocket. He would

Caress the bottle’s curves and complain about work,

His children, his wife, Ravana’s ugly sister

As his breath became coarser, his words thicker,

Until, in tears, he would kiss, then choke and twist the

Bottle’s neck, and dream of how to trick her

Into taking the children and leaving forever,

Giggling, splitting the human face apart

For instants, as the liquor strained to sever

The monkey’s laughter from his stubborn heart.

Every day, I passed by Ram who beat

The gold-skinned Sita bloody, but she stayed,

And Lakshman who staggered down the main street

Sometimes at night, singing, unafraid,

Of the marigold faces of trembling peasant girls

Whose fathers, enflamed at night by spirituous fires,

Consumed the innocence spun in the whorls

Of petal soft cheeks, and crushed them into Apsaras.

The older women understood the words

And shook their silver-streaked heads; some cried a little

And would never say why. These instants were the surds

Etched on the veils of a karmic joke, the riddle

We lived in – a fragrant island of neon, afloat

On black water, a Republic of smoke

Ruled by a white-masked god with a black-skin coat
Where slant-rhymed heroic couplets deposed the sloka.

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