Indian Writing

I forget what I was looking for when I came across this lovely poem by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out in the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

At the MAMI festival, last weekend, we saw the following films, some for the first time, some for the most amazing repeat viewing:

- Isaki Lacuesta’s Legend of Time, which is a quintessentially festival film…

- Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (Jai Dharmendra, as Utpal Dutt says at the end; and the film is the nicest tribute to Hindi movies, but why did the Bhabhi disappear into the kitchen and never return from there?)

- Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, which is a nice film adaptation of Alice Munro’s story The Bear Came Over the Mountain

- Kieslowski’s Decalogue, Five and Six.

- half of an Italian film with lots of killing, hugging and screaming (we walked in late because we were coming from the IMAX to Fun Republic - what an optimistic name - and decided to have lunch at Little Italy, where we lingered over the great food. We had only been planning to reach in time for the Almodovar, but the Italian film did seem very entertaining, and we were sorry to have missed the first half)

- and Volver!!

Luffed it.

*****

Off to Fort Kochi tomorrow. Puttu-kadala, Chinese fishing nets, backwater cruise, here we come.