CONTENTS
Spilled from the Salt Rack Beasts Wilder
Omens of M Fishing for God
* Dollies
*
Fishing with Khusbhu Glass Teapot
Waiting Village Sayapatri Garlands
*
Red Moon Through Clouds kumari stripped Pink Peacock * Flood Canoe Circus Bugs *
White is for Widows Humans in Disguise Great Shout of Sky
Birds and Prey Politicians and Gods
*
Khusbhu’s Horses Sunshine Stag
Harvest During the Blockade Duped by the Gods
The Fall of Taleju *
Untouchable No Mangoes
Drawn with a Burnt-Out Match Blessing Dust
*
Stone and Clay Crows Butterfly Dowry
cobwebbing *
Spilled from the Salt Rack
Chili Powder – generous, blood for a stranger, the colour of lipstick Khusbhu wears uncarefully, not pressing her lips first to each other
and then to a tissue, but a thick swipe for reddening cheeks and collars, for open-mouth laughing
Himalayan Salt – faces pressed together at a cliff-edge, more pink and alive than cymose shoots in the shade of blossom trees, more pink and alive
than Khusbhu’s treasured childhood corn snake, sun-fearing with sky-coloured eyes
Mix Masala – Khusbhu misread the word chaat as chatur and bought what she imagined was a peppered bird that tucks into a hole in the Himalayan salt cliffs, so high that voices thin and choke to a whisper and the air is all imaginings and silence
Cumin – all noise like chili powder, scattered mouths and eyes, Khusbhu plays with a balding street dog on the market junction or far on a hillside,
the quarrel of her capable voice could feed a hungry pack, life clings to the flesh of men and birds
Cardamom – Khusbhu cries loudly from the kitchen, thin shell and epidermis, too much for the small space like a bird panicked in a low-ceilinged room,
darting at walls, the fire close to dying, the un-cracked pods like squeezed-shut eyes embarrassed by all this noise
Black Pepper – the trace of it like the kiss of the moon on the daytime sky, printed lipstick pressed to a tissue, the abyss of the early morning too thin
and mountain-high to colour cheeks and collars,
Beasts Wilder
In 2016, the Nepalese Government knocked down the sign by a river in Saptari District, changing its name from the Tharu word ‘Gaihri’ (Deep) to replace it with the name ‘Gahidi’. Tharu villagers quickly knocked down the new sign and put their old sign back up.
How could you slip a new history across the water on the back of the name so close to the word for horse? Such an ill-bred history. An all blubber and no muscle horse. Ears flat back horse. Like winter to touch horse.
Horse that clicks the dull machines of its eyes, which are in the front of its head.
The angled bowl of its chest tips over as it balks along the riverbank.
A horse, spilling its pigeon-heart.
Crossing the river, its dish hooves would churn under its weight. It is swept along.
Of all the names – the most un-beautiful horse. It would turn to look at the broken mechanics of its body and think –
How did it get like this, these rusty pistons, this empty birdcage? Bred by cowards. Teetering stones for shoulders.
The body: a wet, clenched fist.
Much too tight. A horse that’s all scarred knuckle, bone fractured like a map of the river. The white rings of its eyes would pool like milk.
Teeth show pathetically. Nostrils balloon.
A horse, grunting now, muzzle sinking below the water’s surface. A horse no match for the people who named the river
Omens of M
The head is a cocked fist, a rosebud. The blade swipes it away
don’t wash your face at night, you’ll marry an old man
Blood drips like a metronome. I flick the head a safe distance
chew and spit a dry chrysalis to stop the pain
and there are eyes in the back of its head, like M
fish in your dreams will bring you gold
The underbelly is orange, so pretty I hardly want to skin it
don’t sweep the house after sunset
It squirms once more; a whip-stroke in the sand
don’t enter the kitchen while bleeding, you’ll rot the food
Poison from the wet stem of its throat smells like a delicacy–
don’t borrow salt, a salt debt is bad luck
I could feel guilty. While M struggles to find purpose
a crow calling on your roof invites new guests
crouched in the doorway for warmth without smoke
whistling at night invites the devil
there seems so much of it in a dead cobra
a dog howling on your doorstep invites death
posing in the clay and the dust, waiting to rebel
are you listening to me, chori?
waiting to prove the purpose of its life
don’t bring snakeskin into the house, however pretty the underbelly
Fishing for God
You clear yourself with the river
and tell me you hear Indra echo like a poem in the sky, but there is uncertainty today.
The river quivers between night and day under the tin-foil sky. I untangle my Tharu helka, and pass you mahseer
one-by-one. With your knife you undo them gut to tail, pull their singing flesh, but they are little more than squall and sky.
There is nothing to them, you say,
the way women complain about their daughters. Each catch spills its own pain like a story.
The wind is brittle and there is dryness in the cut-throat sky. I am learning the colour of hunger:
scales that worry our wet skin and nacreous fish-eyes that root themselves in the sockets of the shore, sulking at the dwindling sky. My spare hand locks your hair behind your sun-warmed ears. I’ve seen you count the broken mosaic of the stratosphere, net the stars as easily as mahseer and drink sky from your sky-filled bucket, but God’s absence is tightening around you like a harness.
You’re held back like a monsoon,
your heart two netted butterflies the colour of sky, one beats, flaying itself with the fear
that it has forgotten how to fly,
the other folds up and sleeps against the weave, breathes the sky.
tharu corn husk dolly
I.
The Tharu corn husk dolly’s face is a wrinkled straw mask with yarn crosses for eyes and no particular mouth. Her arms are held away from her sides so she can be propped against a pillow or tied to a pillar, and her waist is thick; good for child-bearing. Her back is slightly curled over with toil and her corn-head bulges, enough room for folksong and malady cures. There is a noose of grass tight around her throat to keep her grass hair tidy, and another around her ankles to hold her legs together. It is how she was made. Her straw dress is long and modest so that unless you cared to look, you might not tell what held her together.Nobody brings them inside during bad weather. Their hands are the first to tear. They flutter in storms; the wind shakes them and turns their skirts the way children turn in sleep as they endure their dreams. How well we admire their short existences.
II.
There were dollies we made on messy, bored Sundays with rain angry at the windows; where we smudged Daily Mail ink with glue sticks and scissored at pages until we had a chain of paper girls joined at the hands and feet — caught in the ritual of a party game. We dotted on eyes with permanent markers, inked in the black O of each mouth. Experimented with how small we could make the waists before they tore in half. We strung them across windows where they stuck to the condensation and curled over and over until their faces touched their knees, exposing the skeletons of last week’s headlines. It was the pose of weak women, hugging their knees to save themselves; girls with pricked fingers and grazed knees, swooning at the sight of their own blood.
Fishing with Khusbhu
We stood waist-deep on the bend in the river
with our skirts resting like lilies, freshwater mahseer pitted against the current, easy to scoop out with a tapi
where they would ripple like the hands of ballerinas. I learnt to twist the edge of my net and snap it tight so the fish were flung high into the air.
Shuffling in the water and squinting at the sky like a cricket fielder with my bucket outstretched, I would catch one, and it would explode in the bucket and spray blood over my face, while the rest would fall back to the water, the twists of their silver bellies
pirouetting against the young night sky.
Khusbhu, though, liked to pick hers out of the net
the way she plucked roadside geraniums out of thorn clumps, and lay them in the bucket
where she could pick at the shiniest scales
and inspect the heaving black spots of their mouths.
Khusbhu, you have to kill them, I’d say, blood beading on my face.
Her silver-speckled hands closed around the bucket as if it were a cloudy womb full of ruptured injuries that she knew intimately.
Her fish suffered perfectly –