house help, part one

basanti was the magical one, the dreamer with the slow smile, her hair wispy and unkempt, skin mottled with unfinished thoughts. she was beautiful as she floated through our rooms. we shared our dreams every morning, as i sipped my green tea and she chopped and diced for our breakfast. mine was a recurring one of being chased by wild animals, meticulous panthers and rhesus monkeys that would appear and chomp my arm off after a short chase. hers were also recurring, alwayz about struggling to fly, as she ran away, from animals and from  her mother, who chased her with a stick. when her mother came to visit from the village she was tiny, no bigger than her 3 year old grandaugher, and i couldn't imagine how she'd infected her daughter with a life long fear. 

but silky was different, much more pragmatic, poring over the hieroglyphics in the kannada newspaper that came specially for her. another rape! she'd say with almost gleeful horror, he gagged her with an iron rod, broke into the house, you can't trust any one these days. I'd shake my head, tut-tut, and so the gossamer mornings were quickly burnt away into the banal horror of everyday life.

what does it mean to let someone into your house, to live your life just one degree removed from their skin? her hands chop dice cook wash everything that goes into your mouth. her fingers massage your head and back, fill rubber bottles with hot water in the winter and crush ice into glasses of iced tea in the summer, smooth over the creases in your bed every mornings, scrub your clothes, wring out even your inner clothes, your bras and underwear on days you're particularly lazy, hopefully your mother doesn't know. she hangs your bags, fold your clothes, pins your sari, give you sartorial advice on your new clothes, this is too wrinkled, that color is nice. pushes you to attend social obligations you don't intend to fulfill, but its her wedding how can you not go? 

But today there is a crisis to be solved. we need to talk, she says. she looks determined and troubled. i ask her to come into my fathers room, this house is all windows and no doors, voices travel through it like the gust of wind from the gigantic cooler in the summer. maybe this is why things just go missing, because the borders between being and non-being are just too porous.

her eyes quickly well up and her voice rises, shrill. i come here to work, she says, there are both of us, and yet i hear things, i heard from the garden bhabhi asking about that girls clothes, but i don't wash them downstairs, i finish the work here, and then i was upstairs today and everyone knows my name has been mixed in the mud and my son, i can't lift my head with what he did i know what you all say about me and i ignore it but it can't go on like this i can't live like this. i cant live like this. i move uncomfortably towards her, pat her shoulder and quickly take my hand away, unsure about how to comfort someone when you're the source of her misery. she's miserable, but there's something unsettling. even marriages break up, I tell myself, mothers and daughters vow to never talk to one another. but something here isn't right. I mumble about trust and the lack thereof, the funny thing is how often this word is thrown around in my life. speak the truth baby, says ma, and this dicta is my heavy albatross.i drank with a friend later that night, and he laughed at me, what is this christian attitude towards the truth! do what you have to and deal with it later. but, and this is the power of imagery, ever since I couched this feeling in colerige's calamitous metaphor i feel the physical weight of every untruth and half truth.

what is it about little lies that is scarier than big ones? i can't tell, can't tell if she's a hounded animal, back to the wall, snapping at every movement towards her in the only way she knows, that acid sharp smile and crisp denial, banking on the dreaminess our heads are wrapped in - or if this is calculated, and we're too busy to notice strings emerging around us, tightening to draw us in. like a bond movie! don't be idiotic. but the signs are there, i saw her fight once, like a panther at her door, sinewy and snarling.

I don't know why you're waiting, says achiles, waiting for a real calamity to jolt you.  

do these things happen? the world is a strange place, I can't forget how boring and brutal it can be. we  lie and cheat, steal and hack through relationships and lives for opal rings and for our muscles to contract in orgasms.

hello, this is a tabli

you show off, trying to turn me inwards
but see
the game changed suddenly
you looked at the music, all of it, filling my room
forcing your way inside my head.

here's teen taal, think of one beat today, the next tomorrow, the infinite moments in between
each beat, flat, and yet

dha - dhadakkadhin
dha dhin dhina dha

you say it's poetry, my fingers can't move this way, my bones don't keep time
this is alien to my flesh and yet I feel
we're all parts
perhaps bits of a longer day

locking horns

And we fight and we end, like always,
With indigestion, mine
And sleep, yours.

You insist, I rage
Grind teeth choke back salt
Feeling through our thoughts and wants
like blind rats in the rain, confused
moving towards a dull longing to be warm and dry

knowing all the while to become so
is to be so alone

battling with your knives turned in

1. truth-telling:
I am battling with Ma’s moral compass, hung like an albatross around my neck. It's like she gave me a shot of veritaserum instead of breastmilk. She told me speak the truth, baby
and you have nothing to fear. But the truth is a sharp knife, and if you run with it you will cut through your skin and slash through the jungles, decapitating people you know and love. If you can't see the cars you have no business driving.

2. trust-trees:
Shadowy metaphysical nightmares, because you can burn them and slash them and cut them in a million ways, and all this with your eyes closed and ears blocked, with the barest wriggle of epiglottis. But they grow slow, and have shallow roots.

3. tortured troubled trite
my yoga teacher, in his quavering voice tells me close your eyes and relaaaax observe the changes going through your body. know you can control your body, and your mind. I twitch, resisting the inward gaze. I feel like faulty apparatus, lazy and stupid, insincere undignified and trite

you can know people when you know their worst nightmares: on a moonlit night I tried walking across the sky, but not with you watching

an enthusiastic

insistence on self contained happiness sets you on edge

easy slow

burning out slowly like camphor fuming and then erupting into sudden flames without body that die out before they begin taking with them light leaving behind a slight acrid smell
oh and talk the same talk and smell the same smells

panta rhei?

I see a streak of colour, a boy in a red sweater runs across the fields that stretch along the curve of the river. They are vast gashes of green and yellow, sloping towards the river that eats into their existence, cutting away at the cliff they stand on. A stray eagle bobs on the air, now coming straight at me, now just a straight line as it dips and soars far above the horizon. I want it to be intoxicated, consumed with the thrill of being alive, momentarily forgetting to look for the dark things that scurry underfoot.

My grandfather’s ashes were released into this river. Set loose from the confines of skin and clothes and wood smoke and metal, as only primal elements can be. Feet sinking into the sand we stood at the river, around the only one able to lead us through our grief, the local madman. His low constant chant our numbness: isko doodh mein dhoh, apna is patte se katori banao, aata ko iskme dalo. Behind us a swollen cow lay on its side. हम मोक्ष दिलवाने आये थे, कोई बिन पूछे पा लेते है. Ma broke away from the group, unwillingly boycotting a ceremony she came uninvited to. She teetered on a rock, unable to look at the river carrying away her father.

Bua had stood knee deep in this water, flicking his fishing road towards the millions of fish rushing along in the water. I stood at a safe distance behind him, away to the side ever fearful of the prospect of my nose being ripped off my face by the adamantine hook, wondering how anything had the wits to grasp greedily at an inviting sparkles as it struggled along the whoosh of the water. The irony of a life of struggle ending on the end of a nylon string. But Bua always released the fish he caught, after it was carefully weighed and photographed. The futile endeavor of a lifetime, to know, name and own the contents of the river.

We came visiting my grandparents’ orchard atop the river in the hot summer months. The trees bent towards us laden with leechis and mangoes and fruit flies flew morbidly into our eyes. We were told the river was dry: it still looked menacing to me, glinting invitingly in the sunlight.

The murky, placid waters of the Ganga at Varanasi are a constant reminder of death, like a picture postcard. Bobbing atop a placid boat you release little bits of fire onto her. The fiercer Yamuna, fiery in its youth beckons to you, reeling you in with a magnetic urge that makes your bones hurt. You fight, but scores of people can’t and don’t. Senses perhaps blunted by alcohol, they slacken their grasp on this world, and the world slackens its grasp on them. They leap into it in a rush of adrenaline to fight the only fight they ever want to lose, finally giving in a wave of panic and relief. But we know nothing of this struggle, just reel in their grotesquely swollen bodies.

The stories ringing in our ears we climb over the string that demarcates the end of the village meant to keep out bad spirits, and roll down the path, pulled towards the water. We try to follow the source of the river and scramble over rocks and crisscross the stream that runs into the main tributary. We exultantly strip down to our underwear, spread our limbs out in the water. Squinting at the sky, with the sun warming our shoulders we bask in our youth. Growing up with a larger than life sister means you rarely have to raise your voice -- the river today is my vocal sibling. The rocks I balance on slip from under me, tumbling towards the bottom, far away to the sea.

Ever changing, never the same, and yet more real than we as humans will ever be. The river unnerves us. Scurrying in our cities we drug her to forget this, clogging her with rank sewage and black murky waste. Building walls to contain her, and she retaliates in kind, flooding our cities with our own waste. And yet we worship her, calling her mother, beseech her for support as we give unto her our dead and our grief. But it flows on, defying even our anthropomorphism. Heraclitus knew what we can not accept: the river, like everything, changes constantly, impervious to our stepping in. Not once, not twice, nor ever.