Vivek Narayanan

Somehow pesters the sadness of a dog—that ungiven guardedness at first report of day in a slyly chosen alley; not the cat hidden in the bougainvillaea blossom, not the bull barefaced into the lissome highway, it’s a madness less to do with mordant Englishness in a glum phototropic teat, more a perky realpolitik in over-familiar mottled skin. That hoarse howl at the garden’s shrub-ridden edge, that shawl a woman knits, waiting for a man who’s not her man—not a man at all—then crouching by the bedpost mewling. * When to be tame is at most a disavowal in proxy to the master’s unacknowledged fear: knowing fear as part of privilege, knowing privilege a state infeasible, the amenable innate animal to whom we assign the affectionate name —Bango, Napoleon, Spot—bounding resolutely into the black-red greenness of the middle sea— believes itself to be human in dogly garb, a non-veg incarnation of mortal virtue, no less than a wife, child, comrade in armless charms. We nurture this notion, lure it to the rug. * So even if it steal to the street trailing a fog- -dust deliberate, choosing mange over matter to be free—deranged, sheltering in a truck’s dappled shade, but dreading the hunger-dusk or charity at noon—if it claim its independence among curs, dodging some dog-chief, teeth clenched, lurking in building societies— it still will count the hand that carries the house in a fist, or follow, for a glance, a humanist. Paused between doorstep and forest, both gone; kept in equilibrium, the sadness of a dog.

Avocado trees on the moon.Aichigum, mullukumb, Billy Blue Gum. This is not exactly a confessional. My father’s wound was also my wound, dirt outside Vedanta Hall, blood in the dirt below the gutter pipe, blood like washing undone in my banian fold. I am not saying that blood was the thing. My father was singing. From the tall narrow barred window, the gravel driveway, in the heat, my father’s wound is jelly to the touch. I touch it now. * A broken tree on the floor. Tarzan says, “Tarzan save Vivek father wound.” “The shadow before State House, he will ride his bike no more.” Once, I looked up from paper and saw the clouds move. It was terrible, that clouds could move. The clouds moving reminded me of my father’s wound. I don’t care if you like this, * I am going to take my time. My father came back from a hernia operation, there had been a mistake, the stitches had to be removed. Every day I had seen him shaving in the bathroom, whistling Balamurali’s songs. * “If you’re going to write a poem about me,” my father says, “don’t forget to mention my daily yoga.” * There is a large glass door looking onto the pool. My father cleared that place up. Surrealism only matters if it’s real. I listen to Michael, Mr. Mister, Genesis. On Kyrie, I saw a massive bird block the sky while I blasted the song from the car stereo to the playground and the driver sat quietly. Did I mention we had a driver? He drove me around when my father had his wound and could not move. * I betrayed the wound. I see it half-formed, my mother washing him, his long painful yelps. This was scary, to hear those animal sounds. My mother went in there instead of me. Splashing. A red oval among the ripples.

Picture yourself, child, garred in a coign of the newborn city: father and infant brother dead though life, that other half of nothing, spills out the same from the hill into the harbour. You take your spyglass to the sea, late in the afternoon when the big hulls loom against the pier, watch the ladies overdressed on the embankment or the sailors tumbling from steamers into bars. There is a tunnel below where the cargo trains go. Could it be you found on foot without the tram for smoothness west on West towards Victoria where in the salt stupor of the market a veiny hand patted a fat amethyst eyeball in your palm? In the freshly planted suburbs, the smoke of wet dirt in gardens: “Those who do not belong here wear a uniform— consider this when sleep falls on you.” * The man who sleeps in your mother’s bed drinks tea with the British ambassador so the house is kosmos enough. In one room a calliope like an engine plays; in another, a stone horse smooth enough to ride or a carved wooden mask with a nose-hole stinging skin. There’s a monocle and a pipe, a flyer for Ruth St. Denis, there’s a feathery moth’s wing, part of a chewed-up but bright pink Europe. (You tick in sticky names the pages of your enemies— Plato, Ptolemy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Conan Doyle and the schoolboys who scrape you on the ground until your knees go red. You see a girl playing in the street and feel pity.) * “The poet, a fake, lacks conviction: he’s stuck with both absence and substance. These are the laws of things, this is the index finger, pointing.” Camoens who sailed in search of Portugal, Magellan who wrote his name in the sky elliptical— that was the country dreamed by pilgrims whose tears flowed into óur sea— it was ways to make every estranged brook feel special, to hawk deeds of Europe to Asia and vice versa. The cannonade drools and sputters to a stop, the ship pulls away from the cliff and wheels toward a new mass. The vespertine light drains by degrees into the night-time as if through bright perforations of stars. The lamps of the ports dim in economic sequence. on the tip of the land’s triangle where you killed the Khoikhoi for their cattle, the Dutch are bastards and those Brits to whom you owe, those bureaucrats and beautiful engineers, are very polite but rather shy. They slaughter hearts too, scientifically. But song remained at close of day. Song took root in the decaying estate: song in the house of faith, alone in the end, after the machines, after the former masters, after the fields, recaptured by trees, and the pedigreed dogs abandoned. * Helpless, the love of precision for territory. Helpless, your green discoloured bust on an island among commuters, on the corner of Commercial and Soldier’s Way. You are ever a stranger from Tongaat to Isipingo though the beaches have been seized and the cuter cottages turned away from loamy burial ground to face a reopened sea. But we carry Bambatha’s name in our mouths and inherit your teeth; the highway gutter-drawls into stacked flats or tin doors, curling dirt roads, satellite towns on satellite maps, and the moon is still red and the ancestors reach down like willows. You among them know well: smoking your cigarette, to spite the gods, writing, “They must eat my little boy or die,” as another way of saying, “Let every tongue be foreign.”

I want to be sweet and clear and free, as half a line of Auden, or an episode of the Powerpuff Girls; I want to be dew, and honest with mine, like Bob Marley, or Boesman the Boer. I want to swing and get it right at the speed of Pollock’s light, I want to be deep like Zulu, tight like Tamil, and trust my sense of Sanskrit true with little shame for its will. I want to dabble in the fields ignorant of what I was doing, rub myself on the ruins with a self-induced disease and gleefully lapse the hope to be heard. I want to fix my favourite English words into the forty-fifth century— haw, for instance, or luminary— hiding them in a snatch of prose… passed over in silence like Wittgenstein, no evidence for myself or Laura Riding, like Bharathiyar going mad composing, I want to dissolve into our language printing too little for my age; I want to be obscure but not leaden, flippant if I feel like it, then I don’t mind being called poetically shitty in a note from Manohar Shetty, writing into the time we’ve borrowed, singing from our utter boredom; I want to hold in me the heat of my combustion and leave this sweat-smear as a resurrection: I want to be sweet and clear and free, insouciant, insufferable, just like me.