The Digant Poem
BY KUNJANA PARASHAR
After Ruth Awad’s ‘The Sarah Poems’
We give each other seven months
to find reasons to not die
but it’s not even day one
and I have a few: this morning
I read the Swedes once confused
the sound of herring farts for
enemy Russian submarines. They even
sent helicopters and boats to find
the enemies. You would have grinned
listening to this. If we’re gone,
who will bear witness to such stories?
Or how about this: each time I turn
the Laughing Buddha statue from
its original place in the east of our home,
my parents fight. Strange, isn’t it?
What about all the long dreams
of bears and knowing all the names
of the parts of a plant: cladode,
leaf, stem? Think of the frogs
that are going unnoticed in the ghats.
Think of one of the lone baby bustards
born in Rajasthan. Who will love them
like you will? And you haven’t even
seen the blind dog Leah’s dance, how
she muscles her snout and croons up
her ears, how she tears at the bed of shiuli
in the grass. Like today how the fence
got unlocked and Leah took off
like the wind. There’s nothing
like a dog running wild
in an autumnal chill, tail
like the flag of a country, newly freed.
One day I’m sure I’ll find her gone,
like that day when she ran through
the tunnel and into the street, and
I ran after her, scared of the honking
buses and the screaking gulls, me
versus the dog who can’t be reasoned with:
But the highway is close, Leah! What if
you get run over? You can’t even see!
Digant, maybe we should be like the dog
who thought we were just playing fetch,
whose feet were light as a spider’s nest, and
when I brought her back, whose largesse
of heart kept thudding against mine,
lush with beats, all cells begging
me to please listen to this music. Please
listen to me, I don’t want to live
in a world without you.
The Lezim Dancer
BY KUNJANA PARASHAR
My didi had forbidden it but
I practiced the lezim all night.
I was just a girl then,
my hair still matted like Shiva’s.
The living room was dark and
the water pipes gushed with air.
My arm movements were meek,
my breath quiet as the lisp of bats.
I knew nothing except
the stubbornness of dancing feet
and the shining of bells
that shone right through me.
I swung the lezim loose,
the silver disc like a starry galaxy in my palms,
all night up my thigh then chest, all night
my hands going chhanchhan as if
a thousand cowbells dangling low in a field,
all night my body rung
like the tines of a fork.
And then out of the soles of boots,
out of the tongues of frogs,
the morning came,
and inside me was the quietness
a bear possesses
just after her mouth has tasted mahua,
before her body begins to hunger again
for a clutch of wild flowers.
And when light came over the living room
I saw my hands were full
of bells and bright stars.
Marrying the Horseheaded Man
BY KUNJANA PARASHAR
I saw him first at the crossing of four roads
in the green of signal-light. He looked mean
and impressive and different. Next, he was
by my neighbour’s window
eating the heads of china roses like large worms—
all brown coat, clopfeet, heroic mane.
Like a cygnet following a swan, hiding
in the folds of her mother’s wings, he followed
me home in the dark and started to smell my sunsilk hair,
rife with this creaturely desire to know, to
taste and to touch the jiggle of my human flesh.
I felt them stir, after so long, all my equine longings.
So I let him stay, my half-knight, half-man.
We started to sleep together like wives, no,
like friends. I came to love
his particular whiff & he came
to love my uneven nails. We grew old this way,
two peas in a pod, two jackals in a cave.
Until we reached The Deep Rock
of Nothing, The Silent Pool of Whales
where together we gave up our forms
to become one with the wind, sans hoof or bone.
Only air in our shampooed manes.
