I discovered him in a poem. My mother’s lover.

But that was not until I had made other discoveries about her.

§

I had been expecting the phone to ring every morning. She had been ill for a long time and the doctor in Varanasi had said – quoting a poetess I did not know then – that she would be with us until “salt melts in the hands”, by which he probably meant till the end of summer. He had not been wrong. It was the ninth morning of September.

“She left us last night,” was all that Tina had said. She would not use the words “died” or “expired”. Those were always used for other people; not for those whose cold lifeless feet we smeared with red ink for impressions of footprints to frame on walls next to our favourite gods and goddesses.

Tina refused to tell me anything else or even if she did, I had perhaps refused to hear because I had been making mental journeys of my own, like calling the Singapore Airlines office for my air ticket and leaving the trash outside the door. She had sent me an email, she said, crying; I, too, had been crying while talking to her but her tears sounded different, even odd, soaked more with anger than hurt.

I wouldn’t have checked my email at the airport had she not insisted for though I was the older twin, I had grown up listening to her; it was not the habit of pampering a younger sister, rather maintaining the illusion of being the older sister.

“Mrs. Srivastava used to write poetry,” her email began.

I stopped reading; Tina had sent me a wrong email by mistake, I thought. Curiosity egged me to continue reading; I could not understand why my sister would write an email about a poetess on the morning after her mother’s death.

“Yes, you are reading it right – Mrs. Srivastava used to write poetry. In case you are confused, let me clarify that she was the woman we called Mother. No, this is not a secret that we hid from you. We only came to know this morning, half a day before you…

When we were preparing to take her body to the cremation ghat, a few strangers arrived. Their white clothes led me to mistake them for grieving distant relatives. Soon, Babuji and I found ourselves marginalised in our own house. This group of men, led by a pot-bellied man whom others were addressing as Guptaji, let us know that we would not be allowed to take Ma’s body to the burning ghat until the television crew from Aaj Tak and CNN-IBN arrived. We were surprised, rather shocked. Neelima Bhua asked them why. That Gupta man shouted at her saying, “She’s not your property. She’s the property of the nation, of Hindusthan, of Hindi-sthan”. By this time I was sure that these were a bunch of mad men who had fled from the sanatorium in nearby Ranchi but I was too tired to take control. And Vikram was also not at home; he would reach Benares only at midnight.

Ok, let me cut the story short. This is what we learnt: that Guptaji was a publisher, that he had been publishing Ma’s poetry for the last twenty three years, that she had written under pseudonyms all her life and yes, that she was a ‘celebrated’ poet, an ‘asset’, ‘one of the most important woman poets in post-independent Hindi literature’. These are not my words but of those stupid TV journalists.

Do you realise how I feel? How Babuji feels?

How do you feel?

Why did she need to hide this from us? Why?

I can never forgive her for ….”

I couldn’t read any further; I felt like a student prepared for the wrong subject in the examination hall. Unexpectedness was only part of the curse, the most significant emotion, at that moment, was betrayal. It took me a long time to realise that what I had felt was not betrayal but the pain of exclusion; she had played word games with the world after putting us to sleep.

The flight was on time. I went through Security Check, opened my handbag and socks, let my most precious things go through the X-ray machine; my mother had done the same in life and yet she had hidden what was most important to her.

It would, perhaps, have been easier for me to accept that my mother had been a flautist, someone who had accumulated and then put all her breaths into a piece of wood to let the world hear her; that would have been easier to accept because, then, I would have been able to fill the auditorium with dark silhouettes of strangers. But the thought of her being a poet, someone who had made dealings with the world on a page in daylight in a language that I no longer use in my daily conversation with my American husband, my divided children or my colleagues in Boston, for a reason that I cannot explain, infuriated me.

On the plane, sitting next to the window, I began to think of my childhood, to search for her in a time when she was only ours, Tina’s, my father’s and mine.

We grew up, my twin sister and I now realise, without stories. My mother must have been busy telling stories to other people, more important and more understanding than us, two little girls quarrelling, at bed-time, about who would sleep near the window. I remember my mother coming into our bedroom then, with a pen in hand, her hair tied into an unconcerned knot drooping near the end of a shoulder and playing judge, with almost the same verdict everyday, “Who sleeps near the window sleeps closer to God”.

We didn’t argue with her then but when we had grown up and moved to a new house with separate bedrooms for Tina and me, we didn’t give in so easily. “I don’t want to sleep with God,” Tina had said to her one day but my mother hadn’t been surprised. “I wouldn’t like to either,” she had answered without a smile and adjusted the curtains on the window before pulling the door behind her.

Our father was a Sales Manager who used to change jobs almost every two years. My memory of him is a blur of blue shirts always opening doors, doors of the house, of the garage, of the car and, sometimes, the bedroom. I try to remember him otherwise and I fail – the blue shirt and tie, the bluish-grey suit, sometimes the blue marks on his hand left by an outdated stamp-pad; only I can’t remember blue shoes but that is perhaps because I don’t remember looking at his feet. In fact, I don’t remember looking at him at all; children never look at their parents because they need no meaning to interpret two people who act as traffic police in their lives. Parents, I have discovered after becoming one, look at their children, study them in their sleep, in photographs and even during school sports or concerts, just to confirm, again and again, that the object of their love is worth their sincerity; perhaps.

“My mother is a housewife,” we said to friends in school or to quiz-masters in competitions, sometimes with embarrassment, especially when Rohini, the girl who came first in our class said that her mother was a scientist. What a blessing to have a scientist-mother, we thought; to live in a house full of beakers and test tubes full of important liquids, ‘doing’ something for the world, inventing new things and planning to go to Mars or Jupiter for summer vacations. Our mother did nothing; she didn’t even cook, except on Sundays; she only gave instructions to the maid; she only wrote something all day, all our childhood.

We find it strange now, when Tina and I talk about her, that we were never interested in what she wrote; it never occurred to us that she could be writing something important. “Important,” that’s the word they used for her in the obituary, “important writer”.

Why did we not ever ask ourselves that question? “What does my mother write all the time? Why does my mother write all the time?”

Perhaps because her writing never interfered with the rhythm of our child-lives; perhaps because of what she wrote, and sometimes in spite of it, she remained our mother.

Tina discovered it, only a part of it, before I did; she was always good at discovering new things; she even discovered her menstrual cycle a few hours before I discovered mine. And Love.

We were in a bookshop, only the two of us, looking for love poems; it was Tina’s idea, to surprise the man she loved secretly, with a poem on Valentine’s Day. We were about seventeen then and had tired of “Roses are Red, I won’t come with you to bed”; but her secret love was a lecturer in Hindi Literature and he loved poetry. We hated poetry, Tina and I, it only made our life more complicated by not speaking directly to us, we said. But Tina was so much in love with this balding man, she said that she could do anything for him, read poetry and speak in complete grammatical sentences, even during dinner.

There were hardly any poems about love on the book-shelves; Tina said that it wasn’t the time for love and I agreed.

We did find a book of poems at last; it was, however, in Hindi. Our Hindi was poor but it was enough to help us to translate the writer’s words into English and pass them off as Tina’s. “Good, Professor Singh won’t even find out that I didn’t write the poem; he’ll think I’m the perfect girl for him.” I remember that we paid only forty five rupees for the book.

“The writer must be a woman,” Tina shouted as we entered the house.

It was early spring and we had not carried any warm clothes with us; our mother scolded us as soon as she saw us.

“Ma, Tina’s bought a book of poems,” I said, trying to divert her attention. I had come to realise that she liked listening to poetry. She would turn on the radio in the afternoon on certain days of the week and listen to a man or a woman saying difficult words, painfully, the lilt of the far-away in their voice and whisper “Wah, Wah” as if she was speaking to them.

“Are you in love, Tintin?” Ma asked Tina. She called her Tintin just as she called me Tush-Tush, affectionately, but, in front of the world, even the maid, we were always Tina and Tushi.

“No, Ma. I want to be a writer,” Tina replied, unprepared for the question.

“And what’s the first book you’ve bought?” she asked, smiling.

“Sweeping My Self,” Tina and I replied together.

I did not notice it then but when I think of it now, I can remember that my mother had not even asked to see the book.

We had discovered the name of the poet much later. The publishers of Sweeping My Self could have afforded to spend on only one photograph – they had chosen the photograph of the brown broom on the cover over a photograph of the writer. But it is strange that we, who had grown up in the culture of naming a poem followed by the name of the poet, “Africa by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore”, “The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden”, had not cared to even find out the name of the poet of Sweeping My Self. It was perhaps because Tina had only wanted the words; she had not needed the voice.

The poet of Sweeping My Self wrote under a pseudonym, Kutumbi; it means a relative.

“What a strange name for a man, Kutumbi!” said Tina, the next morning at breakfast.

“A man?” asked my mother.

My father was away, on a tour, perhaps selling generators to managers in tea-gardens then.

“Yes. And I had thought that it was a woman …”

“But Kutumbi could be a woman as well?” asked my mother.

“Don’t be stupid Ma. Imagine a girl with a name like Kutumbi…”

“Why not Tintin?”

“Oh Ma … imagine yourself with a name … Kutumbi Srivastava …”

“I wouldn’t write with the baggage of a surname,” Ma had said then.

Now, when I think of the room in which my mother spent most of her day, perhaps writing, I can remember the faint smell of cigarette smoke behind the yellow curtains. My father was away from home on most days of the month, even missing our birthdays and annual concert day in school without regret; he used to be a heavy smoker and Tina and I came to associate the smell of cigarette smoke with his temporary return to the saltiness of our daily lives. But I can still remember the unsettling smell of cigarette in the damp house that hit our faces when the maid, Basanti, opened the door. We would think that our father had returned. We would take off our shoes and leave our school bags in the living room and go upstairs to his bedroom to meet him. But he wouldn’t be there.

Who smoked cigarettes while our father was away? Was it our mother or someone else? Was it the man whose “back was full of green grass in which Radha lost her toe-ring”?

Tina told me once, I think it was a week after I discovered the man in the poem, that she had a nightmare in which our mother was smoking cigarettes, one after the other, and stubbing the burning pieces on Cuddly, our baby pink teddy bear, and then stuffing her pillowcase with her poems, her manuscripts. I told Tina that the woman in her dream could not have been our mother; our mother always smelled of lemon, even her words smelled of lemon when she said, “Like a lemon I’m turning bitter with the world’s squeezing!” after a tiff with my father. But Tina has been insistent ever since that dream; she will have me believe that it was our mother who smoked those cigarettes; she thinks that like her writing, there are other things about our mother that we do not know.

Sometimes, especially when I have to scrape burnt milk off the belly of a steel vessel at the end of an afternoon, I begin to believe in Tina’s words. My mother, during these moments, becomes someone else, a woman strangely younger than I last saw her, a woman at the bus-stop whom men refuse to forget for two days, a woman swinging her legs in a sewing-machine in the middle of the night, a woman who stores cough-syrup in her wardrobe. I do not know why my mother is never my mother in my dream. After her death and after my discovery, she has become someone else for me, a pet name on a spine in a book on a shelf, like the name of an expensive but necessary drug at a chemist’s or, as Tina’s husband said to me over the phone, like a newspaper in an unfamiliar language in a foreign country.

Sometimes I feel that I am beginning to miss her, to think of her in the way my South Indian neighbour Bharati feels her mother in the style of her plait, in the hot flush of her ears, in her underlined horoscope that she scrutinises for new stories whenever her husband is away on a tour. I realise that I have begun to miss my mother the most whenever my car crosses a bookstore. Even the magazine vendor in railway compartments reminds me of her in a way I cannot explain.

I remember an obituary I read on the train from Delhi to Varanasi. It had appeared in the supplement of an English newspaper whose name was new to me; it was perhaps one of the many newspapers which had appeared after I had got married and left India, the kind of newspaper, as friends informed me in emails, which people bought more for the daily supplements of pickled gossip than the emaciated news pushed to the margins and bottom corners by half-page advertisements of things that had come to the country after I had left – cell phones, apartments in planned mini-townships and mutual funds. It was written by a man whose name sounded familiar to me. Abhimanyu Singh: I could not remember whether it was the name of a friend or relative.

“Failing Successfully: Atithi, the guest-poet at home”: this was the title of the obituary. It was a well-written piece although it came to my ears, perhaps because of my long stay in the United States, as the voice of a second language English speaker. I read the article at one go and it left me with a sense of unease, something I cannot put in words in any language I know, something I once felt in the proximity of a lake at night on my first visit to England, when the water could not be seen, only sensed from a distance because of the fearful reflection of the dull sky. The words in the obituary seemed to make an effort to remind me of someone I could not remember. Abhimanyu Singh’s words had wrapped the image of my mother in lace curtains making her seem even more distant after our late discovery, like blurred pictures of familiar objects in my mind, a toothbrush, a pair of blue-strapped Hawaii sandals, a pair of oil-fogged glasses, things I knew, could identify, but not put into a map to locate the woman from whom I had begun my journey into the world.

“Home is where we must make a name,” the obituary had begun with a quotation from Nissim Ezekiel, the Indian English poet, writing more than a quarter of a century earlier about returning to India to harvest a reputation. The comparison between the much-travelled Indian Jew and my mother who had never been abroad and had visited only four states in India in her entire life struck me as odd. My mother had known only Uttar Pradesh, where we lived; Bihar, my father’s ancestral home; Bengal, where we sometimes accompanied our father to the tea-gardens in the North Bengal Dooars; and Orissa, the place where my mother had once said she would be happiest dying.

Orissa, pick me up,

Let your trunk wrap itself around me

While the mahouts of the world bathe you

With their moonlight soaps…

Hurry up,

They are sending guards, I know,

To prove that I stole the wombs you’d lent to the papaya tree ….

When I see the books on her shelves now, I see them full of the Oriya writers, Mahapatra and Mohanty, Senapati and Salabega, their symbols of all-remembering tigers and deep silent wells and I begin to see how much she loved reading them. She loved Orissa: our drawing room cloth decorations from Pipli, their cut and paste routine that always brought other things from other places on the same canvas, which Abhimanyu Singh had related to the aesthetic of the patchwork in my mother’s poetry surprised me. It struck me, then, that the writer of this obituary was someone who had visited our house in Lucknow, someone who had known my mother. I cannot explain why that thought unnerved me instantly. I felt as if someone had seen my mother in the nude, seen her wearing a sari, through the keyhole. I know that it was a strange thought to have but I felt that my mother had been violated, that some thief had touched her stained undergarments. For he was right; my mother, I began to recollect, had indeed been “fascinated by disparateness, by dissonance, by disturbance”. Unlike most mothers of twins, she had never made an effort to dress Tina and me in similar clothes. In fact, she had insisted that Tina grew her hair till her waist while I had mine cut to near my ears.

I continued reading the piece. He had quoted from another of my mother’s poems, talking about her fear of heights, something I had not known about her:

People ask for ladders

To go and come,

Give me one,

Too,

I say,

So that I can see

The workshop where He

Shapes the toes on feet

Those, later, walk on streets,

And climb ladders

Through the skin-bruised indigo highway …

Singh’s translation was poor; or perhaps my mother’s words themselves had been vague making them look even more insignificant in a translation.

My mother had very little hair on her head. We learnt later, as we were growing up, that she had lost all her hair when Tina and I had been born. Only a few roots had remained alive after our birth out of which a few strands of hair emerged shyly and occasionally; I do not remember her ever blaming us for that loss. But, as Abhimanyu Singh had written, her poems were full of women who had an ambiguous relationship with their hair. His translations failed to convey the violence of the shearing of the widow’s hair, her shaven head, the burnt hair on the head of a woman who had tried to commit suicide; even schoolgirls’ pigtails; and another short poem on wigs –

Don’t pretend that you could have been my mother,

My mother’s body could cast no shadow,

She forgot to carry her wig with her in death,

I could lend it to you, her wig, you know,

In return for the sound of your pigeon’s gizzard ….

My shadow saw her last, biting the tasteless underside of her lips,

While trying to tie herself to life, desperately, with the uneven end of her long plait,

Standing, falling, standing, like water’s cousin, dancing, without joy, in the middle of a lotus leaf,

Without the borrowed conscience of a wig

In her life, my mother had betrayed her self; in her writing, she had refused to be her other; in life, she had been the tidy bun of hair hanging sleepily at the root of her neck; in her writing, she had slipped, with the agility of a barber at mid-day, into various wigs, wigs fashioned out of fragments of strangers’ roots.

Abhimanyu Singh had said that my mother had failed in all that she had attempted to create: the series of seven line poems that she had cheekily titled Sonnet – The Daughter’s  Share were too full of half-suggested meanings to demand a reader’s attention; her longest poem, Future Tense: The Despot, had, cruelly, been called “an elephant’s miscarriage” by an influential reviewer; two of her most popular collections, I’m God’s Elder Sister and Fingerprints on a Sugar Pot, in spite of being minor bestsellers, had been accused of being “telegrams to Kalidasa”; and her last book, Love’s Laboratory, a collection of dialogues between men and women in various relationships, the men speaking in rhyme and the women in blank verse, had been thrashed by a critic named Shukla as “an insult to Indian womanhood, to her time-honoured image of sobriety … making the writer one of Vatsayana’s courtesans”. I laughed as I read these sentences; perhaps my mother, too, had done the same. But, all these failures, Abhimanyu Singh maintained, these gulfs, big and small, between intention and result, had given my mother’s poetry that ineffable charm that perfection has often snatched from the best craftsmen, Alexander Pope and, sometimes, Byron.

My mother, Abhimanyu Singh had succeeded in convincing me by the time I reached Varanasi, was a great lover of incomplete things, of the half-burnt candle, of masons who ran away from work leaving behind unfinished buildings, of undeveloped film rolls or negatives, even ruins and, unresolved court cases. His obituary quoted from her poems liberally and the words in those poems constructed a woman who was only the name on a spine, of a book, rather than the woman I thought I had known, with a broad discoloured beige belt near the base of her spine worn to help her to stand erect when she got up from a chair or sofa. She loved birds, he said and I believed him; she loved the colour of poverty, darkish yellow, the colour of bile vomit, the obituary said and I believed him; she loved stealing flowers offered to gods in temples, he said and I believed him; she loved tearing ends of envelopes, he said and I believed him again. I had no choice: it was as if my parents had shifted house while I had been away and I had come to a place for which I was expected to have a memory. All I could have done was succumb to belief, to neighbours’ myths about the sounds in the kitchen in the new home and I did that.

I think I know what pigeons say

When we talk of the heat or cold

I think I heard one say, today,

While getting wet in the late rain,

How sad men feel time and again,

That they can’t fly, that they can’t eat stones,

That they can’t live without breaking alphabet’s bones …

What could my mother have meant? It was painful reading her poems in Singh’s article: I felt like someone reading a letter from a loved one in the shorthand. His interventions, wise as they must have been, made him look like a goldsmith in my eyes, a man beating and boring through fine sheets of gold to get the shine on the light’s side while leaving the underside unmade and undiscovered. This was my first encounter with my mother’s poems; and he was telling me a fable about her, a mixed fable in which the sour grapes were really sour and the thirsty crow refused to put the stones in the pitcher to drink the water and yet both the fox and the crow turned out to be Not-Yet-Good creatures. I was irritated. They had burnt my mother’s body before I had even been able to reach India; I would not let a stranger comb out half-truths from the soles of her slippers. Little did I realise that I did not have a choice, that this man, Abhimanyu Singh, whose name came to me like the sound of the referee’s whistle leaving me unsure of beginning or ending, had won the race by increasing the distance, leaving me confused and unprepared. He had introduced my mother to me in a way that all future introductions that I would make on behalf of my mother to the world had been rendered redundant.

I waited.

I had other stories to hear. Only no one would tell me.

I continued reading the obituary:

“Mrs. Srivastava, as the postman called her, took refuge in pseudonyms. Hers was not the fear of rejection or criticism of the nineteenth century women writers which demanded a cloak for the self; her guises, significantly not just the refuge of a single penname but a few, were not the multiple personality disorder that a critic has recently accused her of. Rather, the dance of her selves, from Anjani to Kutumbi to Atithi, marked a trajectory of her changing aesthetic as the meaning of her pennames imply, the unsure stranger of the first collection Coming to the letters to her relatives in the third collection Letters from a Lizard to the hesitancy of the surrogate mother in Blue Eyes, Blue Blood: Yes, Yellow. Her writing, time and again, talks about the problems of translation obliquely: in the poem Punctuation, North Pole, South Pole, where she talks about her unease with the way her daughters have stopped using punctuations when speaking in their mother-tongue, she ends with the biting last lines:

It’s like dieting, a new fashion, speaking without commas or semicolons,

Only full stops, endless, a handful at a time,

Like cornflakes in milk, emaciated, sweetened without sugar,

Chiding me, my round Hindi alphabets, for being obese,

The unwanted grease of the matras threatening to kill with a ‘heart-attack’

Her short poem, Mrs. Basnett, My Tongue-tied Translator, begins with an Englishwoman knocking at her door with a bouquet of bougainvillea, a flower she had never seen in a bouquet; the encounter between the two women is narrated in a few nouns rather than adjectives, “sugar”, “spoon”, “shoes”, “socks”, “stabilizer” and “skylight”; this gives way to the climax of the final lines:

I scolded her, shyly, trying to extract a smell from the bougainvillea,

That I could not stand being translated

In a lonely language where I had no friends

Whose names could begin with the last four letters of the alphabet,

W, X, Y, Z

This, of course, was another way of refusing to surrender to what she had, in another poem, called ‘the piracy of poetry/ By long-distant swimmers with bad breath/ Across the Channel/ Tempting us with chairs with a comfortable backrest’. This short-sightedness was her failure but as another woman had proved before her, ‘Without failure, no ethics’.

She died, without pleas to anyone, her two fingers touching her blocked nose.”

My mother had failed; he had been right, as I was to discover, when I reached home.

No one came to receive me at the railway station.

My train was late; I had expected Tina or her husband to come. Most of the coolies were drunk after Janmasthami and I refused their services. An auto rickshaw took me home through the deserted streets. The gate was open as if indifferent to new comings and goings.

There was no one downstairs, only Tina’s three year old son whom my mother used to fondly call Keeda, meaning worm, lay sideways on the divan, sleeping. I called out Tina’s name and then my father’s. No one answered. I suddenly felt scared and ran up the stairs.

I do not remember what I had said when I reached my mother’s room. I only remember seeing Tina sitting on the edge of the bed looking out towards the verandah. She did not respond to any of my questions.

My father had burnt all my mother’s manuscripts before Tina had been confronted by the smell of smoke. It was not anger, he told me later; her things, the sticky words which had been dearest to her had to be burnt like her to be allowed their journey from her room to her new home; it could not be otherwise, he said later.

That night I lay awake beside Tina talking about things we had never spoken about, death, spirits, planchettes and our mother. We spoke about her in a way we had never done before, allowing her passages to the deepest parts of our memory where only those who have no more journeys to make live, there in that invisible region behind moist eyes from where recall seems easiest but is actually impossible for no child can describe a dead parent except as the protagonist of an imagined fantasy about an underwater circus where only one thing remains real, the relationship with the parent. Suddenly conscious of our tears, we tried to avoid talking about her, as if words would bring greater sorrow, not realising until we had stopped using her favourite words, the conjunctions, that she would come to our lives from then on, like a favourite tune, unbidden but always welcome.

As Tina fell asleep in the early hours of the unlit morning, I suddenly saw my mother walk across the room and take out the pillow from beneath Tina’s head, shake it and take out a piece of paper from its inner fold. She looked at the piece of paper and then dipped it in a bucket of Robin Blue liquid.

I screamed.

When I opened my eyes that morning, I found the maid Ramdulari’s face close to mine, as if trying to see where all the sleep had come from.

I, who has never believed in spirits or even the soul, began to believe in the dream. A piece of paper I had seen only in a dream would perhaps not have acquired such significance had my father, unthinkingly, not burnt my mother’s handwriting the previous night.

I found three sheets of paper tucked in a pillow that noon. It wasn’t my pillow, neither Tina’s nor even my father’s; but that dwarf Ramdulari’s.

I do not know why I have never tried to investigate how those pieces of paper found their way into the pillowcase of an illiterate maid.

I realise that I have, since, given up on understanding; I only look for pale ring-marks on the fingers of people who walk into my dreams without shoes.

The sheets of paper revealed a long, incomplete, unpublished poem.

She had written it for herself, a rare indulgence for a ‘famous’ writer, and bared her soul without recourse to the beam-balanced ethics of autobiographising.

I translated it, almost immediately, and thus poorly and almost thoughtlessly, over the phone for my American husband.

‘Life will not stop here,

Not even after you die, on the way, to the next station;

I’ve told the guard

He’ll wave the red flag

And the world would know,

Only after me though,

That you’ve disappeared without your husband’s last name …’

These were your words, weren’t they, in that letter

You wrote from Cochin?

I decided to lose the words before I lost myself in them

As my hands had, so often, without your permission,

Lost themselves in the warm depression

That you left behind on my brown sofa

On solitary afternoons

I’ve also lost other things ever since,

Abhimanyu,

Domestic gestures that you, worldly life’s bachelor, wouldn’t know:

A catalogue of prayer flags,

An ashtray full of burnt words,

A bucket with a broken handle, full of myth-wet clothes I forgot to hang from the clothesline,

A clay flower tub in which I had planted the grass from your back,

The grass in which Radha, love’s eternal loser, lost her toe-ring,

And my daughters’ ribbons, black at home, white in school,

Black and white,

Ribbons which tied me to the posters of my bed every night

And a few other things too,

Things you made me lose,

Things so precious that they caused discomfort;

I have thought of losing you too,

Losing you like I once lost those things,

Mindlessly, without adverbs;

Then I have hidden you

Which is just the same

For isn’t hiding about losing

From view?

Don’t move from behind the curtains I say,

Don’t;

When you enter the classroom and open the book

To page number seventy two,

And ask Lakshman or Urmila

To read out the words

Which, as you say, sounds like the warm gasps of breath beneath a winter quilt,

How do you feel?

How do you feel to snatch them out of my mouth

And put them in the mouths of strangers

Who care for them as much as they do for bird-droppings?

You, after the world, called my solitary hiss, poetry,

You, with the world, called me the tree-hole’s poet,

I laughed,

I hadn’t bargained for more

Poets do not love men, you said once

And I agreed,

Persuaded by my favourites,

Kalidasa and the bumble bee

I loved once

You, who came crying into the world, fifteen years after me,

Were still at your mother’s breasts then,

You could have been my son, unfit for this late love,

That would have been better,

Perhaps

Dying with a disease whose name is so difficult to spell in English,

In what would perhaps be my last autumn,

The last season of sunning my thoughts, with the pillows, in the yellowing backyard,

I think of that moment of

Coincidence in the corridor

Near the Town Library

Where we first met

You had come to look for a book of poems

And I to look for left-behind bookmarks

I found a reader who read like a saint

And you a poet who had forgotten how to count backwards, you said later

We were looking for neither

Abhimanyu,

I met you

When I had tired of the world’s monologues,

I (wife, mother and the late parents’ second daughter)

Had become a plant,

Always spoken to,

Whose silence was taken to be as natural as the green hide of its body,

I was learning a new language then,

Of an imposed maturity,

In other words, on how to draft a report about the theft of childhood at eighteen,

I had learnt two languages already,

The first, speaking under water, with bubbles, like a fish

The brown language of secreting unwanted resin at the nodes, the second

But this was not sufficient

The master at home knew only one,

The language of numbers, in ledgers and account books

He was impatient with my slow learning

And my daughters, my paper-boat twins,

Who I thought had come to me like two quills dipped by Saraswati in her milk ink-pots

Spoke only in English

Which came to my ears residually, like eavesdropping,

They grew up, suddenly, without informing me;

I,

Who for so long had hidden my words from them,

The people I lived with, the crew of my soul,

Adopting pen-names like cheap masks,

Changing them, nervously, like the parting of my hair,

Wanted to tell them, my daughters,

That I was also more than I,

Or perhaps less, if they said so

That I, who they had seen as a tablecloth that could not move

Unless re-moved

Had another life

Beyond night and day

Beyond the domestic lifeboats of saucers and nail cutters

That I could,

If only they spoke in their mother’s tongue

– In Hindi, the only language in which the word for ‘life’ and the ‘love’ are the same,

(“Jaan”) –

Be the words on a printed page

In a bound book

From which their favourite teacher,

Abhimanyu Singh,

Read out a poem or two

In ‘Compulsory Hindi’ class every week,

Where they sat as close to his table as possible

To see the words move from the page to his eyes

And then from there, without show of passages,

To his lips

They sat there

Looking at his lips

Touching the words

And they wished the words were longer

So that they could see him being touched,

As if bitten by a mosquito,

Making the poem seem like an auditorium of bites

I heard them, often, talking about you,

One wishing that you spoke about love in English,

The other asking me once, while I hung the mosquito net,

What “Abhimanyu” meant,

And on discovery of how your namesake had been killed,

Hacked by geometry and trapped by the enemies’ mathematics

In a concentric code which only let people in,

Killing them by making them enter,

She had cried

And bought an English translation of The Mahabharata

With her pocket money the next day

I wanted to console her,

Ask her not to cry,

To tell her that the ‘chakravyuha’ that had killed Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu

In Kurukshetra

Was only a poem

Which enticed a reader in,

Leaving him without escape,

With only the possibility of surrender

To the soft quick under the poet’s dirty nails

I wanted to tell them other things

To show them my poems,

The half-torn tickets of my solitary afternoons,

I even wanted to tell them

About you, the invisible bat’s shadow on my dark night

But their words made me insecure

Like the water near the brim in a glass,

Incapable of translation

Only you let me be a cloud

Let me change every moment before you could give my shape a name

These are things you already know

But don’t forget that I am a poet,

That by calling me a poet

You have asked me to repeat what you already knew

Without sounding like a multiplication table

Or a wife’s nagging,

That you have asked me to mimic,

Though with the illusion of distance that the glasses on your nose creates,

The rhythm of the breeze squeezing out sunlight from my wet clothes

And the metre of my asthmatic breathings

The Poem

My poem,

My horoscope of uncombed desire …

This man, to whom she had dedicated one of her poems, calling him Sahrydya in the title, the writer’s other heart, for whom she had brought down her once-lavish curtains of guilt, in whom she had found what we, her “blood’s bakery”, had not been able to give her, the incompleteness of a relationship that she so valued, like “torn slippers … stopping me in the middle of my pilgrimage … stranded in the bliss of non-fulfilment”. Abhimanyu Singh, the man whose name she had taken for the first time in this poem, had provided her poet’s soul with an invisible scaffolding of  azure hinges without the noise of a creaking footnote; he had lit the lamps of her heavy-hipped evenings while we had chased kites in darkening skies; and he had loved her without lying.

He, her dark-striped confidante, I still find it difficult to say, had been my mother’s lover.