First Look: Works in the Making

LITERATURE: Vivek Narayanan
Forthcoming (2008)

Vivek Narayanan’s second collection Lectures in Indian History is a quirky, lyrical excursion into our recent past. On some trips with the poet (who refuses to be photographed) we encounter familiar objects of affection such as the Maruti 800 (“For me, you will not/go out of style. But the world has come in/to your cocoon, and the lanes you once made short/have lengthened again”). Others, with such entities as the State Bank of India and the Ugandan editor Rajat Neogy, are unforeseen encounters. Narayanan says, “The collection also has a couple of back-handed odes to bad poets — like Vajpayee and Abdul Kalam.”

ELEGY FOR A MARUTI 800 (1987 Model)

In car years, you’re 95
and although death is a nothing
for you that were never granted life,

on the sharpened asphalt now you fling
me, make new and darker
sounds, almost as if stuttering, muttering

and as your indicator
lights blink and flicker erratically apart
your insides rebel, your carburetor

clogs, your very engine is but a heavy heart.
Each trip to the mechanic
man brings the same news, each little part

fixed only opens the seam. What magic
trick of articulation
kept you together for years, then left you? It’s

the elements, they say. Nothing escapes erosion.
O my dusky-blue Maruti 800
object of my accidental affection

what hopes we invested
in you, not a car but a dreamthought!
Do you remember that highway night when I begged

and begged you alive? For me, you will not
go out of style. But the world has come in
to your cocoon, and the lanes you once made short
have lengthened again.


MR S., ON FIRST LOOKING INTO PARTHASARATHY’S CILAPPATIKARAM

On my street, the little peeps of carhorns reign. Far from above, from the balcony from where I am political, admittedly,

it is very much like being squeezed in the arm. And yet, my total memory torments me, oh that I might

like Kannagi

chuck my burning breast at the untrue city

in the metre of sweet-mango-fruit, sour-mango, sweet-mango, sweet-mango-fruit—

it is late in the current century; our esteemed Master Subramaniam, without wife, without issue, holding pen in hand with sweetly concentrated Kannagish grief, without necessarily due cause, without register-entry, nearly though quaintly political, without kingdom to reign or release, entirely at the mercy of the elected warlords and their respective sub-warlords without once being known to them by name, without neither rein of nor consequence to his words, sitting at the laptop without sitting, unstable as any system organic or synthetic, fraying at the edges into ether, reined in by little more than luck, bravely resisting the daily teleportation, without need nor power to provide it,

without much hope of unaccidental death, with enough mango fruit, sweet, to tide the monsoon through, with light touch of winter in the veins, without fear but rather a latent dread, without any semblance of practical politics and yet somehow political, with love for the mysteriously unmysterious grey hornbill its ridiculously archaic beak, waddling ungracefully still in a tree-hole of the refumigated garden, without an acre of land or a pigpen to call his own, with infinite sensory register but without much by way of names or gradations for such data luscious in the slow dusk, smog beautiful and deadly as a visual siren puffing up from unseen manufacturing units, particles like diamonds in this dusk, like gems leaping up from an anklet that once she our Kannagi wore, that once and forever led to her our Kannagi, being recognised without being known which is to say being misrecognised in the walled city where everybody was thought to be known,

which is to say tragedy always in the guise of a stranger, an anklet like some kind of fake identikit; which is to say, Mr. Subramaniam, our friend, our friend in our own image without rein of horse cart, without ticket to space station, which is to say let us nevertheless not mask our bourgeois difference, which is to say not without the ability to register a certain grateful daily quota of iota pleasure, not without the sweetness of sweets, the fruitiness of fruits, the cheapness of pens even one is remarkably picky about one’s choice of pens, which is to say rich and free enough from the political to be able to luxuriate in the political,

which is to say, nevertheless, of ambiguous and shifting class background not unlike forgive me not unlike Kannagi, not quite royalty, not quite poverty, without much to complain about but without the lack of rumination to not complain about it, which is to say without pretending to reign, either with pen or with intergalactic ballistic missile, which is to say the sweet mango fruit of SMS sex metre but without once the banishment of longing, which is to say how exactly does an ancient text register in the soggy wafer of a brain scrambled by all registers, O but it does, it does,

without being apolitical but nevertheless sweet as a mango, or indeed angry, indiscriminately angry as any roadside Kannagi, ready to end the reign contra the truth of love, say Oh this is where you were going all along, says Mr. Subramaniam to his racing pen, oh penmani, register for me at least that link to what was perpetually being lost even then in that dreamtime to our still troubled times, rein in the true political, bring out weak and spineless testicularly encumbered man your true Kannagi, your inner kanmani, your truest courage, your missing breasts, step by step, minute by minute, stand, turn back, look, look hard and devour, my dear sir, the sweet mango fruit of that vision.

NO MORE INDIAN WOMEN

“There are no more Indian women,”
mourned big-eyed Bal Thackeray
gazing down at his cute

little white rubber pumps.
Truth is, there never were.
A hundred years earlier, for instance,

my grandfather clipped his toenails and
while his supposedly incompetent
assistant tried to tot up the grain

bought or sold, he yelled, “Work
harder, you lazy kamnati!” ie., you
lazy widow. But the assistant

was no widow at all, and the real widows
were all dead. Not on the pyre, you understand,
but in the dimmed light of private rooms.


Sections from STATE BANKS OF INDIA (1)

Jaise hi noor-e-chashm ne BA kiya idhar
Business ka maal usko samajhne lage pidar
Rishta talaash karne lage high rank ka
ladke ko cheque samajh liya State Bank ka...

The moment the beloved son finished his bachelor’s,
The proud father began to treat him as the stuff of business:
He began to seek matrimonial alliances of high rank,
Thinking, my son is a cheque from the State Bank.(2)

*

A blue building, the paint nearly fresh.
Respect of the town; anchor of its main drag.
The cross-hatched metal curtain has been pulled
most of the way, leaving a narrow space for
one man to pass through. Nearby, in a tea stall,
the employees are singing.

*

One in a row of only 3 shops,
on the edge of a paddy field.
On one side, a provisions store;
on another, an STD booth;
and in the middle,
the State Bank of India
where only full pants
and collared shirts
are worn, with a pen
in each neat front pocket.

*

Udaipur, circa 1973. A man has just left
the manager’s office with a big fat cash loan
in his hands. Outside, he picks up his shoes
which he has taken off—
because the State Bank is sacred—
unaware that a pune, acting on orders,
has secretly filled those shoes with pebbles.

The man calmly shakes out the shoes,
puts them on. The manager and his cronies
are hiding behind a curtain, watching.
“Aha!” the manager says,
“There goes a reliable debtor.” (3)

*

Near Luz corner, a shiny, fancy-looking ATM
reflects the passing traffic. Wow, he says
to himself, even the State Bank of India seems
impressive—in these times.

[1] Ongoing “collective poem”, inviting contributions from readers describing one or more branches of the State Bank of India and related nationalised banks. Readers are requested to kindly send in their own anecdotes, stories and descriptions, in prose or in verse, to naravive [at-sign] gmail [dot ] com .

[2] Translation by Danish Husain; original Urdu verse by Danish’s father, Syed Wasiul Hasan.

[3] From prose by Taha Mehmood; anecdote from Faraaz Mehmood.