Indigo

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.