Indian Writing

From her poem “Another Paradise Lost: the Hindu Way”:

One sleepy summer afternoon, while helping
myself to a glass of chilled water, I saw a
snake lying curled under the fridge. It could
have been a very poisonous cobra. Very

quickly, I chose my mode of attack: Acid.
Staggering, I reached for the glass bottle
so that I could pour the yellow-green cheap
acid on its slimy body, burning it to death.

“Stop it”, the snake hissed in pure Tamil
connecting with me in the language of
my prayer and poetry. “I am an exile.”
And I configured mental images of political

refugees. It wriggled out and I saw that
it was balding, almost Rushdie-like, perhaps
with a death sentence too. Controversy was a
crowd pulling catch-phrase, to which I dutifully

succumbed. Acid bottle in hand, I heard the
snake preach to me about living in detachment.
“The perfection of life is when you do not
know the difference between yielding and

resisting.” The scrawny being writhed further
and told me of rebirth and reincarnation. Being
a writer I really wanted to take notes. Instead
I began arguing. “Shut up”, the snake said to me…

The whole thing here.

The bus conductor
Pushed me out
As I was leaning on a foot board
For support
In an open public bus
Going somewhere
In Mumbai city
In the early
Twenty first century
Thinking about
A Malayalam poem
In English.

I had written about Mamang Dai’s fiction here and here.

Here is a poem by Mamang, The Sorrow of Women, which I discovered in Muse India:

They are talking about hunger.
They are saying there is an unquenchable fire
burning in our hearts.
My love, what shall I do?
I am thinking how I may lose you
to war, and big issues
more important than me.

Life is so hard, like this,
Nobody knows why.
It is like fire.
It is like rainwater, sand, glass.
What shall I do, my love,
If my reflection disappears?

They are talking about a place
Where rice flows on the streets
About a place where there is gold
in the leaves of trees,
They are talking about displacement,
When the opium poppy was growing
dizzy in the sun
happy, in a state of believing –

And they are talking about escape,
about liberty, men and guns,
Ah! The urgency for survival.
But what will they do
Not knowing the sorrow of women.

(Second post in the Why Does This Irritate Me series)

Kerala.
Houseboat.
Smell of curry.
Bollywood.
The voice at the other end of the line:

- when your Internet connection went down. Or when you upgraded your system software and your PowerPoint files wouldn’t open. Or when your @*#%! PC wouldn’t talk to your &^%$*^@ printer.

First-ever love marriage in the family (the Western way).

Krishna wore black jeans and a football jersey, and he took a “snap” of me, as he called it, with the most tricked-out camera-phone I’d ever seen. His bride was a touch more traditional: She was dressed in a stunning salwar kameez, a pants-dress of blue silk, and walked three or four paces behind us, letting her husband do the talking. When I tried to bring her into the conversation, she flashed a shy smile and deferred to Krishna.

Next time I’m on the line with tech support, I’ll have a face to go with the voice — not specifically Krishna’s or Meenakshi’s, but someone just like them. And no matter how frazzled I am, no matter how badly I want to put my fist through the computer screen, I’ll be calm and polite.

I shouldn’t have had to travel halfway around the world to discover this, but that voice on the other end of the line belongs to a real person with a real life. In fact, he or she may even have just celebrated their family’s first-ever love marriage.