Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

When you put on the mask the thunder starts. Through the nostril’s orange you can smell the far hope of rain. Up in the Nilgiris, glisten of eucalyptus, drip of pine, spiders tumbling from their silver webs. The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones. You finger the stripes ridged like weals out of your childhood. A wind is rising in the north, a scarlet light like a fire in the sky. When you look through the eyeholes it is like falling. Night gauzes you in black. You are blind as in the beginning of the world. Sniff. Seek the moon. After a while you will know that creased musky smell is rising from your skin. Once you locate the ears the drums begin. Your fur stiffens. A roar from the distant left, like monsoon water. You swivel your sightless head. Under your sheathed paw the ground shifts wet. What is that small wild sound sheltering in your skull against the circle that always closes in just before dawn? Note The poem refers to a ritual performed by some Rajasthani hill tribes to ensure rain and a good harvest.

Benegal, 1779-1859 The fields flame with it, endless, blue as cobra poison. It has entered our blood and pulses up our veins like night. There is no other color. The planter’s whip splits open the flesh of our faces, a blue liquid light trickles through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyes refuse to forget where once the rice parted the earth’s moist skin and pushed up reed by reed, green, then rippled gold like the Arhiyal’s waves. Stitched into our eyelids, the broken dark, the torches of the planter’s men, fire walling like a tidal wave over our huts, ripe charred grain that smelled like flesh. And the wind screaming in the voices of women dragged to the plantation, feet, hair, torn breasts. In the worksheds, we dip our hands, their violent forever blue, in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests for the East India Company. Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains. After that night many of the women killed themselves. Drowning was the easiest. Sometimes the Arhiyal gave us back the naked, swollen bodies, the faces eaten by fish. We hold on to red, the color of their saris, the marriage mark on their foreheads, we hold it carefully inside our blue skulls, like a man in the cold Paush night holds in his cupped palms a spark, its welcome scorch, feeds it his foggy breath till he can set it down in the right place, to blaze up and burst like the hot heart of a star over the whole horizon, a burning so beautiful you want it to never end. Note Paush: name of a winter month in the Bengali calendar The planting of indigo was forced on the farmers of Bengal, India, by the British, who exported it as a cash crop for almost a hundred years until the peasant uprising of I860, when the plantations were destroyed.

After Francesco Clemente ’ s Indian Miniature #16 The sun-face looms over me, gigantic-hot, smelling of iron. Its rays striated, rasp-red and muscled as the tongues of iguanas. They are trying to lick away my name. But I am not afraid. I hold in my hands (where did I get them) enormous blue scissors that are just the color of sky. I bring the blades together, like a song. The rays fall around me curling a bit, like dried carrot peel. A far sound in the air—fire or rain? And when I’ve cut all the way to the center of the sun I see flowers, flowers, flowers.