Four Poems: Rehearsal for Departure, Reading a Script at Ziarat Dastgir Sahibun, Authorized Version and The Masonary of Detail

ABOUT THE POEMS Ranjit Hoskote is one of contemporary Indian poetry’s most distinctive voices: a writer who brings a fine awareness of verse technique, and tradition, to a wholly original view of the world as it is pieced together and broken down by the perceiving self. These new poems, written at the beginning of his third decade in Indian poetry, show him to be still at the top of his game. Hoskote’s themes are the true consolations and false certitudes of religious belief, running inseparably into one another as fat runs into muscle, and the fragility of human hopes and the luminosity of human dreams even inside history’s darkest spaces: colonialism, repression, violence.

The lines here hum with haunting and beautiful images: the mercurial quartermaster with his red-stained fingers and (later) aviator sunglasses, feeding the gulls; the colours of thought and prayer; the silence that drips from trees; the poisoned beehive of words; the puppet demon “who carries his world/ wherever he goes, dancing foot stumped/on a palace”. The lightness of that dancing foot and the catamaran floating “on the agate water” is in these poems held in tension with the searing light and senseless sound packed away in “steel pomegranates” and duffel bags: we see how beautiful our world is, and what we have to lose in remaking it too strongly in our own image.

Rehearsal for Departure

The quartermaster sits at his dusty table,

his singing breath anchored by ledgers.

He doles out the week’s wages, fingers stained red.

It’s ink, just ink, he reminds himself.

In his dreams, this outpost becomes a tropical island:

a tricolour sags at half-mast among the palms,

a nurse is sobbing, a surgeon has moulded

the death mask of a poisoned emperor.

A guard spits in the sand,

brushes a fleck of ash off the harbour’s cannon,

picks up his clove-scented eyeglass

to scan the sea for signs of invasion.

The quartermaster has the situation under control.

He has ordered the stagehands to lift

the catamaran from the sandbank

and float it on the agate water.

His porter has been waiting with a torn umbrella

that a lady bound for England dropped in haste

as she boarded the last ship out, when the Empire fell.

The quartermaster strides out on the deck

but keeps in the shadow of a tower crane

as he throws away the last of his ledgers,

feeds the gulls from a tray of crumbs

and clips on a pair of aviator glasses.

The docks go grey, the customs house goes black

but the ocean is a range of violets and greens.

He will adjust that as he goes, he tells himself,

flexing his fingers, still stiff from the desk.

A pilot is calling the time, the samurai wind

is shouting orders. The catamaran

has flung out wings. He salutes the flag

and switches on the ignition.

The joystick works like a song.

He hums as he takes off over the harbour,

leaving a thoughtful farewell wake

of bombs along the patchwork sea.

Reading a Script

at Ziarat Dastgir Sahibun

Srinagar, 2005

Proverbs fall from the saint’s upturned bowl.

Beneath the cypress, work is a steel-grey word,

thought is plum and prayer a mournful green.

A cube with three lacquered walls and a broken face

holds them together.

The almond merchant shuffles past the lake

without humming. The singer hides his voice

under a scarf. The guide won’t admit to his compass.

They’re actors in a long-running movie about comets,

in which a pair of hands wash themselves at a fountain

over and over, the sound track worn out, silence dripping

from the stripped chinar and the charred roof

to the headstones buried in snow.

Authorised Version

The true believer has lost his touch.

His world is an album with its pages torn out.

His past is a field of marble testaments.

There is ash at the roots of his stormy hair

and salt in his blood.

Who taught him

to hide in crowds,

to plant steel pomegranates

in children’s eyes

and drip poison

on the beehive of words?

The Masonry of Detail

It drives dead slow, the mind that’s going nowhere.

It fixes on a ragged turquoise kite

that a boy’s lost to a banyan,

a kite that clutches at life as an Andhra puppet might:

leather shaved close to translucence and shaped

into a demon who carries his world

wherever he goes, dancing foot stumped

on a palace, sun pinned to his crown and a creeper

breaking from his right shoulder.

It draws a line, the mind that’s going nowhere,

to join all the blues that stream around it:

a man’s shirt, caught in passing; the stripe painted

along an express train; a sari border

ripping under the toes of a woman

stumbling at the foot of the stairs;

and a duffel bag left on the platform,

cradling a bomb.