Amrita Pritam

It's really something from the past— when you and I split up without any regrets— just one thing that I don't quite understand . . . When we were saying our farewells and our house was up for sale the empty pots and pans strewn across the courtyard— perhaps they were gazing into our eyes and others that were upside down— perhaps they were hiding their faces from us. A faded vine over the door, perhaps it was confiding something to us —or grumbling to the faucet. Things such as these never cross my mind; just one thing comes to mind again and again— how a street dog— catching the scent wandered into a bare room and the door slammed shut behind him. After three days— when the house changed hands we swapped keys for hard cash delivered every one of the locks to the new owner showed him one room after the other— we found that dog's carcass in the middle of a room . . . Not once had I heard him bark —I had smelled only his foul odor and even now, all of a sudden, I smell that odor— it gets to me from so many things . . .

Lots of contemporaries— but “me” is not my contemporary. My birth without “me” was a blemished offering on the collection plate. A moment of flesh, imprisoned in flesh. And when to the tip of this tongue of flesh some word comes, it kills itself. If saved from killing itself, it descends to the paper, where a murder happens. Gunshot— if it strikes me in Hanoi it strikes again in Prague. A little smoke floats up, and my “me” dies like an eighth-month child. Will my “me” one day be my contemporary?

Me—a book in the attic. Maybe some covenant or hymnal. Or a chapter from the Kama Sutra, or a spell for intimate afflictions. But then it seems I am none of these. (If I were, someone would have read me.) Apparently at an assembly of revolutionaries they passed a resolution, and I am a longhand copy of it. It has the police’s stamp on it and was never successfully enforced. It is preserved only for the sake of procedure. And now only some sparrows come, straw in their beaks, and sit on my body and worry about the next generation. (How wonderful to worry about the next generation!) Sparrows have wings on them, but resolutions have no wings (or resolutions have no second generation). Sometimes I think to catch the scent— what lies in my future? Worry makes my binding come off. Whenever I try to smell, just some fumes of bird shit. O my earth, your future! Me—your current state.

There were two kingdoms only: the first of them threw out both him and me. The second we abandoned. Under a bare sky I for a long time soaked in the rain of my body, he for a long time rotted in the rain of his. Then like a poison he drank the fondness of the years. He held my hand with a trembling hand. “Come, let’s have a roof over our heads awhile. Look, further on ahead, there between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.”