from Priscilla’s scrapbook
June 22, 1989
He gave me another poem today. “You know so little about me,” he said. “This is something about my high school years, in Calcutta, the building where my parents lived. It’s a bit all over the place, but then so was I at that time.”
Another self-conscious one-liner. The poem must mean a lot to him.
Minto Park, Calcutta, 1969–71
The road bends still in my outstretched mind
into the narrow lane bounded by grey battlements
looming castle-like above the ground,
disguising their true function
as “servants’ quarters,” to which
cooks and houseboys would retire
after the last drink was drunk, the last dish washed.
Behind the battlements stood my building — one of two, both grey
and stately — set on manicured asphalt,
with the luxury of a garden beneath, where frangipani and bougainvillea wafted scents into the air
like the shuttlecocks of the badminton players
next door, launched with the confidence that sent cricket balls
blazing from adolescent bats through the wire fence
into another exclusive address, the Bhowanipore Cemetery.
I would search for the balls there, amongst weed-littered graves,
stumbling across a crumbling tombstone to a little English boy
taken away by malaria, aged nine, a hundred years ago;
or hear the jackals cry at night, their howls a faint echo
of the processions down the road from the maidan,
spewing fear and political anger into the sultry air.
We kept them out, behind the fence, outside the battlements.
When power cuts came (“load-shedding” the favored euphemism)
to the rest of the smoke-numbed city, we basked in an
oasis of privilege, our electricity connected to the
Alipore Jail, the Shambhu Nath Pandit Hospital, the lunatic asylum,
all too dangerous to be plunged into darkness. Hope like a lamp
glimmered on our desks. Luck (and good connections)
lit our way into the future.
At the corner of D. L. Khan Road sat the Victoria Memorial,
her marble skirt billowing with complacent majesty,
as potbellied boxwallahs took their constitutionals
in her shade. Young wrestlers performed their morning asanas
on the lawns, their contortions a widow’s legacy. Traffic belched its way
across Lower Circular Road. The world muddled through.
In my building, the Asian Paints manager, cuckolded by his bachelor neighbor,
traveled often, leaving his gangling cricket-mad son to dream
of emigration to Australia. The bosomy nymphet four floors up
kissed me wetly on the lips one night, then took up with a boy
years older, a commerce student. They are now married.
Just above us was the executive who resembled a Bollywood star.
My mother’s friends swooned if they passed him near the lift.
High up, kind Mr. Luthra, white-haired and gentle, went higher still
one night, his last words to his wife “I don’t want to die.”
He always haunts the building in my mind, fighting to live.
Down the street, the muezzin wails, calling the Muslim faithful
to prayer. They must jostle past the bell-jingling Hindus
trotting to the Ganesh mandir in the middle of the street, their devotions
drowned out by the loudspeakers outside the domed gurudwara,
chanting verses from the Granth Sahib. My favorite Jesuit priest
cycles to jail, bringing succor to prisoners. The millionaire brewer’s son
drives by in his open Sunbeam, racing noisily past the complacent cow
grazing idly at the corner. Peace flaps in the wind like washing.
The world we lived in was two worlds,
and we spoke both its languages. In the night
we dreamt of school, and exams, and life,
while the day burned slowly like a basti brazier,
blackening the air we breathed. Naxalites drew proletarian blood
while refugees poured into our streets,
children of a Bangladesh waiting to be born.
In the distance, the politicians’ loudspeakers growled like tanks
rumbling across the border to craft another people’s destiny.
The sun seared away our patience.
Behind the battlements, we slept, and lived, and studied,
never quite finishing the last drink, nor emptying the last dish.
Poor cousins from the country stayed with us
till shorthand classes and my father’s friendships
won them jobs. We raised funds for Mother Teresa.
The future stretched before us like the sea.
At dawn the saffron spread across our fingers,
staining our hearts with light.
Lakshman to Priscilla
July 1, 1989
Isn’t it lovely here? I could sit with you and look across the river at the sky as the sun sets completely, feel the darkness settle on our shoulders like a cloak, and forget everything, especially the hatreds that are slowly being stoked in the town even as we speak. It almost moves me to prayer.
Why do I pray? And how? And to whom? So many questions! Well, I’m a Hindu — I was born one, and I’ve never been attracted to any other faith. I’ll tell you why in a minute. How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years. Sacred Sanskrit, a language alive only in heaven and kept from dying here on earth so that we can be understood when we address the gods. But I often supplement the mantras with incantations of my own in Tamil or English, asking for certain kinds of guidance or protection for myself or those I love. These days I mention you a lot in my prayers.
Yes, I pray to Hindu gods. It’s not that I believe that there is, somewhere in heaven, a god that looks like a Bombay calendar artists image of him. It’s simply that prayer is a way of acknowledging a divinity beyond human experience; and since no human has had direct sight of God, all visual representations of the divine are merely crutches, helping flawed and limited human beings to imagine the unimaginable. Why not a corpulent elephant-headed god with a broken tusk? Why is that image any less real or inspiring of devotion than a suffering man on a cross? So yes, I pray to Ganapathi, and to Vishnu and Shiva, and to my memory of a faded calendar portrait of Rama and Sita in my parents’ prayer room. These are just ways of imagining God, and I pray in order to touch those forces and sources of life that go beyond the human. Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.