Srikanth Reddy

Some years ago a procession of men calling themselves the sky-clad came to this district to build a hospital for birds that had been damaged by the rains. The landholders here my grandfather among them decided against it— it not being our way to intervene with monsoons which is why to this day the birds here grow so damaged & wise, or so our tutor said gravely before stepping out into the sun- washed coriander patch to watch droplets work down stems one by one, small storms suspended, while over the rooftiles came breakers of mist making our whole house to him drift back like the high prow of the viceroy’s steamship he watched sail off with his youth. Inside I still could not find the main verb the chariot wheel performed. I thought it was silver. It bore the king with 100 heads across a battlefield red with his wounded up to the end of the beginner’s workbook then blue-skinned Rama bent his bow then his raider’s arrow met the axle & then I could not stop laughing as through the doorway my mother scolded the aphasic houseboy who peed into our green watertank (black putti, untouchable) arcing the thin golden stream & singing ooo-ee ooo-ee at our ruin.

The bear stopped dancing & unscrewed his head. He held it upside-down in the dusk. She reached into her pouch for a copper piece, but instead pulled out the silvery piece she’d been saving for some special occasion. A limited issue, stamped on one side with a profile of the prince; on the other side a water wheel did not spin. It glowed in her hand. Her hand grew heavy with it, & the salts, & the bittersome oils of her hand. Was this the occasion? The others were there with their fists in their pouches & the weary bear held out his head as if it were an offering or an object lesson. It was neither. It was ripped, with russet handfuls of animals’ hair pasted on & a secret eye slit recessed in its open maw. The wild old man in the bear suit parted his lips & out came a snatch of extinct birdsong. The musicians clapped. He’d learned it as a boy growing up in the mist-proud interior where he would call & call until the violet males in a frenzy swooped into his breathtaking nets.

The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj (pronounced -oy) & the accusative, -on (plural 0ojn). Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Adjectives end in –a & take plural & accusative endings to agree with things. Ma amiko is my friend. All verbs are regular & have only one form for each tense or mood; they are not altered for person or number. Mi havas bonajn amikojn is simply to say I have good friends. Adverbs end in –e. La bonaj amiko estas ie. The good friend is here. - A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament &A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. I first came across Fundamento Esperanto, the text which introduced this system to the world, as I travelled abroad following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar,The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto, Zamenhof’s pen name, translates as He Who Hopes) & since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. - Mi amas vin, bela amiko. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. I’ve never unrolled a blueprint onto a workbench, sunk a post, or sent the neighbor’s kid pedalling off to the store for a bag full of nails. I’ve never waited ten years for a swallow. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about purple martins. - As we speak, Esperanto is being corrupted by upset languages such as Interlingua, Klingon, Java & various cryptophasic tongues. Our only hope of reversing this trend is to write the Esperanto epic. Through its grandeur & homegrown humility, it will spur men to freeze the mutating patios so the children of our children’s children may dwell in this song & find comfort in its true texture & frame. It’s worth a try. As I imagine it, it ends in the middle of things. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; men clapping in fields to scare away crows; an unending list of warships:The Unternehmen, The Impresa, The Muyarchi, Viec Lam, The Przedsiebiorstwo, The Indarka, The Enterprise, L’Entreprise, Entrepeno

It’s dark in here, the dark inside of a man in the dark. It’s not night. One hears crows overhead, dawn fowl caws, the shod soles again treading their sunlit plots above. One grows dotish-fond of such things. Long live the things, their ways, their roots pushed goatish & gray through the skull, in this earth that gaily spins though one has crossed its smutted green threshold to reign in a crate. We have done no wrong, my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled, sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jaw. Once I sat on a stool as my grandmother told me of heaven. She cleaned fish for our living. I saw how her rusty black knife unseamed the sunset in each belly—coral, ochre, carmine, raw, lice-infested sunsets in a pail. So many nights. Night in the kitchen shack, night at the crumbling edge of our milk-pond province, a blade, lone cricket raving in the lawn.

Then the pulse. Then a pause. Then twilight in a box. Dusk underfoot. Then generations. — Then the same war by a different name. Wine splashing in the bucket. The erection, the era. Then exit Reason. Then sadness without reason. Then the removal of the ceiling by hand. — Then pages & pages of numbers. Then the page with the faint green stain. Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded, is thrown onto a wagon. Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else. Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else. Then the page scribbled in dactyls. Then the page which begins Exit Angel. Then the page wrapped around a dead fish. Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean. Then a nap. Then the peg. Then the page with the curious helmet. Then the page on which millet is ground. Then the death of Ursula. Then the stone page they raised over her head. Then the page made of grass which goes on. — Exit Beauty. — Then the page someone folded to mark her place. Then the page on which nothing happens. The page after this page. Then the transcript. Knocking within. Interpretation, then harvest. — Exit Want. Then a love story. Then a trip to the ruins. Then & only then the violet agenda. Then hope without reason. Then the construction of an underground passage between us.

Drawn in outer space on a ceiling of night, a hinged balance held true. That balance —its mechanisms worked into the unknown— emerged in the star systems which turn in union without history as we know it on this planet. I recognize it to the East said I to the West, not made, not given, over the world. Devoted observers, it seems to me a just structure. John 1:5 And my search for peace underground now come to an end —constraints accepted in spirit as well as in letter, the line spent, the theatres in abandon— I viewed the balances more clearly than ever before.

I tried to cut through all our hurried centuries, lost in a forest within. Men broke by war emerged in frightful shape— more than human but also less, they were quite aware, the sovereign dead, that time is like a window opening up the sad patterns of never. As one they advanced— Lloyd George Georges Clemenceau Adolph Hitler —through history. But the past does not follow so straightforward a path said I (predictably in Italian), and, burning under their masters, they proclaimed the world a pendulum. It is possible, but this gives rise to the often-heard complaint that repetition is unavoidable. Still time issues into today, little fathers. The years, I believe, can be shaped with one’s hands. The world —its obscure moving fields, Persian tragedies, and countries in peace— I had to inform that council of the lost, remains an instrument, a valve instrument, which, when waning, is perfectly clear in the pit —and, being given to such classical concepts as freedom and necessity, laboriously continued in the traditional way— I believe I believe .

It was a forlorn eve, my descent wintry. In that foreign midnight, I sounded the chanceries of doubt as day drove up in an ordinary yellow cab. To my astonishment, I seemed to be blindfolded but the clock —talk     talk— continuing called me, a voice ever stranger in complaint. With my staff I came to the first step, sanguine indeed, and dressed in a well-cut Western suit —quite the best I saw on anybody during my whole stay in that unstable regime. There were people in plots bowing to creation. Please I protested, I had not come to stay, You will go in said Nobody, all will be quiet. I looked down and could see thousands crowding into the grounds —my     my— and climbed into the burial site. Within the twisted rows of graves, the teeth of under, some spoke of hatred and some of hope. Blind, they wept on command, in wheelchairs, on crutches, waving stumps. It was rather haunting— the gates of shadows, the path unlit, and ahead, also dark, an abandoned fortress. Carried along by the crowd, our way lit by flashlights through dim corridors, I said Citizens, no     no. Ahead, a door opened. I recognized the old council sitting round a table, some in religious collars, the atmosphere a court. Chairing the proceeding, a tall, bearded figure uttered a few words in German, for my benefit. He had lived for a time and remarked that I needed to be dealt with. Listening quietly, I tried to avoid any show of emotion. This clearly displeased him. He seemed to expect me to present my own commentary. I said in reply the following, shaken and uneasy, the slim thread of truth but little help . . .