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tr. from Kei Miller's 'Broken is the shape of everything'

Kei Miller

 

For someone who'll read this

500 years from now

How are you?
I am sure a lot has changed

between my time and yours,
but we're not very different,

you have only one thing on me -
hindsight.

I have all these questions for you:
Do cars fly now?

Is Mumbai still standing by the sea?
How do you folks manage without ozone?

Have the aliens come yet?
Who from my century is still remembered?

How long did India and Pakistan last?
When did Kashmir become free?

It must be surprising for you
looking at our time,

our things must seem so strange to you,
our wars so little,

our toilets for 'men' and 'women'
must make you laugh

our cutting down of trees
would be listed in your 'Early Causes'

our poetry in which the moon is still
a thing far away

must make you wonder, both for that moon
and for the poetry.

You must be baffled,
that we couldn't even imagine

the things you now take for granted.
But let that be,

would you do me a favour,
for 'old time's sake'?

Would you go to the Humayun's Tomb
in what used to be Delhi

and just as you're climbing the front staircase,
near the fourth rung, I have cut into

the stone wall to your left -
'Akhil loves Rohit'

Will you go and see it?
Just that, go see it.

When Farida Khanum

sings now,

she does not hide the age
in her voice,

instead
she wraps it in paisleys,
and for a moment
holds it in both of her hands,

before
she drowns it in our sky.

When she sings now,
she knows

that at the end of that note
when her voice breaks
like a wishbone,

he will stay.

Tonight

You're still glued to the bus-stop seat,
I pull you off it, "91 is here."

On Gray's Inn Road,
you again call the houses "so miniature,"
holding them between your finger and thumb.

On the double-decker,
you're still dozing off on the back seat,
asking me to wake you up when we get there.

As we get out, I'm still telling you to
"wrap yourself well, it's always colder
near the river."

As we walk below the Waterloo Bridge
and you turn to look at me, I am still
one-part longing, one-part fear,

wishing, tonight, that you were here.


(thanks to Daniel Titz and Dorian Lebh)

The first time has

never been easy for me,

the one in which lightness
is supposed to do the work -
I am only thinking

and there's no room for thinking
not in the walk,
not in the hands,
not on the bed, the first time,

I never had the ease
of talking, of letting talking,
of letting kiss, of letting a bed,
of letting it happen,
I never had the ease,

I will probably never have
the ease

and so these past years
I take care
and make myself unlovable,

'coz we never talked,
'coz I never talked,
an' then I just figured an' figured
an' we never talked,
and I never said, and you never talked,
an' I didn't ask, we didn't say, an' I figured
without you, I figured that I did not know,
and we never talked
then, or later,

and after that so much of me changed
so suddenly, I feared

being recognized.

And one day

"from beating,
my heart will stop,"

and no turn
will ever take me,

no iron will
melt into the streets

and the night
 - between Raspail
and Vaugirard -
will forsake me,

one day,
all memory will
be water

and long walks
would not do the trick,

need will no longer be
a shirt to wear at will,

and then, when I'll need-like-breathing,
no one will be on the fringes

folks will matter

even a passer-by will
inflict

little colours
washing up in the city,
little rivers sinking
into skin,

people, willing,
unwilling,

and I wouldn't know what to do

except to take to my heart
every thing they say,

one day.


(thanks to Jacques Dutronc)

It comes once in a lifetime,

it happens to us all - for me, 

the landlord's son is the one 

who did it, and in a minute he 

changed it all, yesterday I was 

'bhaiyya,' I am 'uncle' now, y'all.

In 1995

I was ten and you were
already battling the stars

of a virus, and in the middle
of grocery shopping,

and street pavements
bursting with lilacs,

you lived so close to
dying, that every morning,

when you woke up, it took
two seconds to ascertain, oneself,

and then, one's own.

With the worst behind you,
you said, how can people write

about letting go, as if
it was 'tragic' that they went,

as if their going could not have been averted,
as if, a scale had weighed in the sky,
 
but already you sounded unconvinced
of your own voice.
 
In that year,
I did not even know what sex is,
 
what veins are, except a book - my
father's - on the benefits of herbs, which,
 
on its last pages, talked of stuff
that nobody told me nothing about,
 
talked of erections, semen, power, & something
perverse about a horrifying illness, and how it takes
 
only the select.
 
You said, in those years
of holding that which you did not
 
know, "Reagan let us die,"
with a kind of resignation that
 
without forgiving, already wraps 'letting go'
in a hope, and slips it in the dimension of myth,
 
before sneaking it behind the books on your shelf.
 
Now when friends visit me, and stay for
a day or two, I thank my stars,
 
and when they leave the room, go to the loo,
or run for a morning appointment,
 
I think of you, making what you could,
of someone always going, of someone
 
gifting togetherness as if wrapped in
paisley, light like feathers, resting on the sill,
 
about to go which way I do not know.




(for Mark Doty)

I can't even remember what he looks like, he's now

a wink, a shrug,
a sound, a hug,
a waiting,

a look, a shirt,
a scent, a hurt
abating,

a kiss, a sneeze,
a bunch'of memories
still inundating

but now not a trace
of the eyes, the face
that
did
the
real
baiting.

On reading Jerry Pinto's translation of Sachin Kundalkar

No
I don't
have you

but sometimes
I have the exact descriptions
of how I feel without you
and that ought to count
for something.

No reading or writing is
no where close to love
but it breaks breath
just the same,
and some lines
are just as hard,
some, as light,

and yes
the guy that I write about
is not much like
you, when you were here,
or how you must be now,
but
that's
not
because
I am some doe-eyed-mush-monster,
making you sound better
than you were, but because
memory's a crafty-ass thing,
filigreeing the past, some bits
refuse to go, some turn into a blur,
and as it is - I'm not lying -
you were damn sweet, when you were.

Such a pity, the years,

such a pity, the silences,
the explosions on the sun, 
the dust of all the memories, 
such a pity this our being past
forgiving, these shores, such a
pity, this keeping on without you,
years away outnumbering the
years on the run, such a pity, 
all the fun, and that my hands
were small like Mercury and
that you were always the sun.

Don't go today, don't say you will

tr. from Fayyaz Hashmi's 'Aaj jaane ki zidd na karo'

Don't go today, don't say you will,
just sit here by me, or I will
die - I'll shiver and sigh,
if you say such things still -
don't go today, don't say you will.

Why won't I stop you, don't you know
I burn to ash when you start to go,
swear on your life that today
you'll let me have my way - won't you,
still? - don't go today, don't say you will.

All our lives are hostage to time,
except for this moment or two,
would you lose them, then
forever think but regret still -
don't go today, don't say you will.

Here the world's innocent, all colour,
and love and beauty reach the skies,
who knows what tomorrow will bring,
so will you cling to this night, and keep
it still - don't go today, don't say you will.

Fayyaz Hashmi

 

Some you will love,

some will love you,
& thank your stars if
this were to happen
together, if it won't,
don't mind, somehow
with time you'll find
(though it'll never be
fair) a heart to bear.

In the 1.4 MB floppy disk

I used to gift you two or three photographs,
(.jpeg's were smaller than .bmp's),
of us standing on the Gomti embankment,
or of you at the Chota Imambara
next to the portrait of the fat Asaf-ud-Daula,
or of our school Principal (after doing
vulgar things to him on MS Paint).

Then, along with those,
I gave you songs - one .mp3
(could be Bombay, 'Humma Humma'
or Dil To Pagal Hai, 'Chak Dhoom Dhoom'
or that 'Dance of Envy' where Shiamak Davar
was thinking what-was-he-thinking, and
Karishma Kapoor was dancing wtf-is-that-dance.)

Then, to fit them in, I gave you two more songs
but these were .rm, not even half an MB,
where even Lata didi sounded real,
like someone's grazed her throat
with sandpaper and
fed her pickles
for a month.

Then, after these (because
1.4 MB never felt small, then, stowing
all I wanted to give) I added three .ttf's,
font files, as special gifts, one of which even
had a middle-finger-symbol, which you then used
in almost every subject-line that year
1999.

Maruti Swift

It takes a 1248cc diesel engine,
4 cylinders,
16 valves,
a max. torque of 190 newton meters 
@ 2000 revolutions every fuckin' minute,

it takes rack & pinion steering
& drum brakes & disc brakes
& steel tyres,

it takes one thousand five hundred kilos of metal
moving, always moving 
in 48 second loops on the assembly-line,

painted & cut & bolted & fed
by workers.

It
takes
workers

on 9 hour shifts,
one 30min lunch break,
and two 7 minute tea-cum-toilet breaks
(those two-seconds-late-&-pay-cut-breaks)

it takes "if my leg itched, I do not even
have time to scratch it,"

it takes waiting
for one's own fingers
 
it takes white-hot "discipline" cut by teeth,
welded by metal to townships
with smoke-grey evenings

it takes 13 days of occupation,
months of sit-ins, lock-outs, it takes 147 workers
arrested on manufactured evidence,

to make one of these.



(thanks to Anumeha Yadav, Satish Dalal and Imaan Khan)

Now people see me as grown-up;

at university, they ask me questions and
put me into �committees�, my land-lady
asks me to give tuitions to her sons, and
now, when I see those kids, I think of them
as �kids�. Now people see me as grown-up
and they steal half my sky; when they talk,
they have that suspicion or matter-of-factness
reserved for adults, and it eats into me that
I still think of people my own age as always
somehow older. Even my anger is now so
grown-up, it's edge does not wash away
easily as it used to, and regret vinegars
many evenings. But all this is so odd, it is
so insane, �coz in my head I am still 19,
flying for the first time & fumbling with my
seat-belt on the plane, and, in my head, I
still don't know love & there�re yellow stripes
on my sweater, and I don�t know any better.

That moment when

the evening had not yet gone,
the sky was still not scarlet, the
sun was still to go beneath, the
edges of the Hampstead Heath.

My hands were still in my pockets,
you were still a little far; the heath
then stretched like golden farms,
and you were not yet in my arms.
 

J.N.U., then and now

That midnight kiss
that moonlit walk,
that memory slowly subsiding.

This 10*10 room
and twenty boys,
the moon goes into hiding.

That night of years before
& this night of swimming stars,
It's difficult, deciding.