South of Sangoli Rayanna Circle and a mile or so to the east of the Central Bus Stand, a dried-up moat, overgrown with weeds, stretches along a heavily trafficked road. 

        On the moat’s far side, a stone wall, maybe fifteen feet high. Beyond the wall, a 12th century fort with giant doors from which protrude large iron spikes meant to kill or maim attackers. A watchtower now inhabited by birds but once occupied by sentries gazes out upon the changed world that it still dominates. 

        Inside the fort’s doors, two niches are built into the stone passageway. In one is a Ganpati statue, Lord of Luck, the mouse’s giant sidekick, master of learning how the flower blooms and the corpse rots, child of Siva and Parvati. Housed in the other niche is Durga, goddess who protects the gods, the primordial darkness in the shape of a woman, killer of afflictions, butcheress of the buffalo demon. At the passageway’s end stands another set of imposing doors, making the fort almost immune to attack. 

        A road winds into the fort compound. A dirt path veers off it to the right. Follow the path and you find a Jain temple. Close by, a locked dancing hall. 

        Outside the fort, the sprawl of a slum. Tent-like structures made of cast-away materials found in junk piles line the road. Lorries transporting irrigation pipes or bricks for construction sites roar by, whipping up dust clouds as drivers stare straight ahead, hurtling toward Hubli. Along the sun-beaten roadside stone cutters chisel pestles and grinding stones. Mallets bang chisels, rock chips fly. 

        A child with his cock almost dragging on the ground walks bowlegged toward a miracle only he can see.

the sound of light lying on
the eucalyptus branch, although
there is no “lying”

and no
branch either. Only light
piled on light, the raga

of their mute fusions, of
the goat walking uphill
while the wind blows down.

-- in the quiet of a breezeless night
a single
eucalyptus. The factory owner’s

mind, emptied now of what happened
near the Isar River one snowy day
in Munich long ago. All this balanced within

the moment when Kunda lifts her paintbrush
from the canvas, wondering what
comes next. Also, of course,

there’s you, no blanket,
naked in bed. The moon
shines through the window as I write.

She tells stories, one about a god
with an elephant’s head, another about drought,
how it looked through a dead cow’s eyes,
its carcass rotting near a dry streambed,
buzzards ripping pieces of intestine
like stringy innuendoes from its belly.
When she’s done, she sends the child, Holika,
to the vendor on Hindalga Rd., who, like a philosopher
incapable of picturing the unreal,
sends back paan leaf and betel nut for us to eat.
Outside, in the adjacent hut’s doorway,
an ex-foundry worker shaves strips
from a bamboo pole with a knife.
The baby is nice, crawling across my lap,
a scavenger dog in search of a milk dish.
Once, while returning from her husband’s birth village,
they passed through Londa on the bus:
wild boars prowled the jungle underbrush,
birds screeched overhead,
the lime tree’s perfection was too perilous to look at.
Months pass.
In order to untangle what’s tangled,
Holika dances, simplicity itself, in the dust.
On the hut’s other side, her mother,
crouched by an emaciated rooster,
shields the sun from her eyes with a hand
as she studies how the dead land, stretching
in brutal light
beyond the imagination’s ability to grasp it,
is invincible.
Her power of focus, which long ago
broke her heart, keeps her alive.

Rising

             from bazaar dust
                                              the white dog, indistinguishable
from

          the light,

                           is itself
the light

                strolling forth
                                         on paws with
a scavenger’s

                         foul grandeur,
                                                  the heat foaming
from its

              mouth, flies

                                  buzzing near
its anus
              as sweating machinists
                                                       on strike march by
with red flags, then

                                 a boy standing next to

                                                                       a flower seller throws
a stone at the dog who

                                        darts into

                                                         an alley where
the man who weaves

                                     baskets

                                                    looks at

what he weaves:

                             snaked

                                           bamboo trips, an intertwining

like time, the problematical’s

                                                  fundamental

                                                                        simplicity (the ease
with which

                   the absent evolves

                                                    into visible)

How can
she do it, she’s
so small? Like
a stem pulled down
by a black chili, Nilima seems
tugged groundward by too much
raven hair hanging
heavily to her waist as she stands
in the cave’s mouth, spreading
with delicate fingers
the lips of a man’s neck wound
in a daylight almost too bright
to allow survival, but it does, even letting
Nilima retain her balance no matter
how often, saying
she’s so small, I refuse to see
the scene’s intrinsic stability: the poise
of those in her keep
and the rifle always within her reach.

At noon in the heat
in the stony field
the body’s a deepsea diver,
saddled with heavy equipment, walking
slowly on the ocean floor.

Women and men unload buckets
full of rocks onto the backs of trucks.
All day the drivers travel from here to Indal,
the aluminum plant, then back again, repeatedly.
650 tons of bauxite needed
to make one ton of metal.

The digging never stops, which is
the only way
to write. Moving slowly
while the lungs cry out for air, one takes
a single step at a time
in a light that burns but doesn’t shine.

Red dust from the west road
where they mine for bauxite
drifts everywhere, blowing
through the window screen and powdering
the spaces
in between these words.

        This morning, woke up with a headache from too much beer last night. As I looked groggily around the disheveled room, raindrops tapped the roof. A cow or bullock wandered somewhere nearby in the village: I heard its collar-bell tinkling. The sound seemed amplified inside my hurting head. 

        As we got ready to go into town in the early afternoon, I told Suman to wait a minute while I rolled up my khaki pants to mid-calf, thinking I could prevent the cuffs from dragging through mud, but once outside my precautions proved meaningless in the downpour. As we trudged toward the bus stand, Suman's sandaled feet wetly slapped the soaked ground. Rivulets ran everywhere while cow dung and mud dissolved into each other and skinny children jumped around spastically in puddles. The rain’s sound possessed the beautiful steadiness of the ongoingness of all things. 

        The bus was jammed and steamy, all the seats filled. In the midst of jostling passengers, Suman and I stood crunched together in the aisle. As the bus bumped along, I held onto a pole. Scrawny peasants in mud-splattered clothes held baskets filled with vegetables and fruits. A mingling of smells -- mustiness and sweat, coriander and mango. Through the windows: rain swept through trees and over fields while drenched villagers walked under useless umbrellas. Seated near me, an old lady with only a few teeth and a tiny nose offered me her seat. "Nucco," I smiled but she was insistent, stood up, gestured at her seat. Once again I said no but other people joined the debate, telling me it would be rude of me to refuse the woman's offer. “We must be showing the foreigner respect,” a leather-faced red-turbaned peasant lectured. I gave in. The old lady inched to the side so I could slip by her and sit down. Suman laughed. The woman’s forearm was covered with a tattooed design: dots, stars, some decorative lines. She was small, not more than five feet tall. After I sat down, she ogled me with beady eyes, apparently interested in determining whether or not I was comfortable. Eventually she looked away. 

        The bus rattled along. Fifteen minutes later we arrived in the city’s Bhogarwes section. Suman and I got off. The rain still fell heavily. We traipsed down the rickshaw-crowded street, then along a path lined with dripping bushes and thick-trunked trees. 

        I pulled my hat down tightly on my skull so it wouldn't blow off. 

        Suman said, “There’s nothing like these rains, nothing.” 

        “I know,” I replied.

1
Gray and wet, a perfect
saturation of the senses.
Like misty rain, the mind’s fingers
travel over tiny bean shoots in the garden.


2
Prakash, the ham radio operator,
hunches mutely before his equipment
knowing that tomorrow or the day after
his wife will give birth.

Like millennia of pressure turning dirt into sedimentary rock,
the last gray daylight crushes down
on the world, forcing what’s formless
into minutes more detailed
than gnarled banyan trunks.

Slippery stones. White bullocks drag
carts through the rain.


3
An empty room: dirt floor; sandalwood incense.
Someone enters;
someone else follows.

Voices near cobwebs in which
tiny beautiful insects are trapped.

Complicated machinery is discussed. And rivers
swollen with rain.


4
The senses: rice shoots, tendrils
coming into being
out of sodden earth.

-- The smell, feel, sound, sight, taste
of rain.

The old couch with blue cushions
sags like a mind so fatigued
it can barely distinguish thought from sensation.

Through the window:
red gulmohar flowers in muddy water;
a boy wears a torn grainsack poncho-like.

Muslim music, ghazals,
on the cassette player.
At a teak table: tea; voices.

The girl home from school
ignores her mathematics,
eats fat dark berries.

Someone’s hands sink
into a dog’s wet fur.

On hands and knees on a balcony, a woman
looks for something in the rain.
Below on the street, I trudge by, jeans mud-splattered, torn
rainhat leaking like a birdhouse with a faulty roof.
The rain’s wildness: a voice
deeper than the language humans use.
Peasants, smelling of cows and mangos, exit
from a movie theater, then sprint
this way and that in the storm, which washes
vegetable baskets and eyelids
with gray excitement.
“Look,” a sopping daughter tells her father, pointing
at rainwater flooding from a gully
and tearing petals
from a bougainvillea branch on the ground.
Behind me in the rain, a woman crawls
on her knees across a balcony.
Who she is eludes me, although I sense
the soaked wonder of her search for something
small and precious and difficult to find.

        You walked toward me into the sunlight through the factory’s barnlike doors. 
        Lathe grease on your hands, the hem of your faded blue sari faintly scraping the dust, you stared straight past me at 

        -- I didn’t know what. 

        It didn’t matter. 
        Piled with parts to be machined, a lorry rumbled through the gate

        like the end of an old beginning.
        In the house adjacent to the factory, someone yelled

        while outside mali climbed down the cassia tree
        as a dog with a dead chicken in its mouth wandered into a neighbor’s yard. 

        It was late morning by then but in the house Anand was still upset about the woman in white dress in his dream the night before.

        Even though he’d tried to pull free of her because her dress was splattered with blood, she wouldn’t let go of his hand and laughed at him when he pleaded to be released. 
        But now 

        -- you weren’t staring past me anymore but instead talked with the lorry driver who smoked a beedie while sweat dripped like boiling raindrops from his cheeks and forehead into the dust. 

        And then there were, later that day and the day after too, the stories. 
        “I was the youngest . . .” 
        “The region was known for groundnuts. I loved the taste of the boiled ones when my uncle . . .” 

        Because your mother died when you were born, 
        your baba daily lugged you through the village 
        in search of any breast that had sufficient milk for you to gulp. 
        Further north that same year, Annie Besant, a relocated white woman, tried to become 
        what you already were, an Indian, as she trudged 
        along goat- and pig-crowded paths near burning funeral pyres 
        in Benaras by the river 
        while vultures tore strips of flesh 
        from minds deluded into thinking they knew what knowing was. 
        You grew up assuming 
        that around every corner 
        a new mother waited, breasts leaking milk that formed puddles 
        just for you on all of Jamkhendi’s roads 
        which crisscrossed here and there and led 
        regardless of where they seemed to go 
        back to the beginning: 
       

        cities rioting 
        the bulbul singing in the tree 
        cries for freedom 
        slobber dripping from the bull’s wondrous mouth 
        a way of seeing that
                                            (beyond even politics) 
        sought a triumph over the morose

Not one
left standing, nor

buried, either -- all along
the road

to Bagalkot. Some lie
dismembered, limbs

piled up in stacks
like factory castings or firewood. Others

are cut in two, the upper torso
sprawled in dust, the lower

stuck into the ground, a faceless
sentry guarding

nothing. Three
old people, two women and

a man, steer
a plow blade as a bullock

walks ahead of them and white
cranes parade

behind, eating worms. The shade trees
in this place where we

stop for a minute: an
illusion. The real

is the rest of this
boulevard of butchery, so much

life sawed through
just above the ground, felled

trees mile after mile, a new
cleanliness where once

many
banyans grew and

the clutter, like all
messiness, had to be removed.

1
In the evening doorway, the bindi boils, red
as a misplaced menstrual drop, on
the young girl’s forehead
while, through the village, the bullock pulls a cart loaded
with a cargo not everyone can name.


2
At the distant forum, who says what and why
neither baffles nor is clear
to the close sea, nor to Ramesh, the cab driver
with a Buddhist prayer book on
the dashboard, who steers through crowds too alive
to be confined to what
we see of them.


3
Another afternoon. As always, the sea at Juhu smells the opposite
of flowers.

As evening comes, the vendor drags
his bhel puri cart onto the beach.
People walk up and down, studying
marks left in the sand by the ebbing tide. The boy
leading the monkey on a leash doesn’t startle away
the human feces’ stink.
“Mumbai Choli,” a sign says, mouths watering
as far as the eye can see.


4
Far off in Belgaum, where neither of us is now,
Godkari, with a bird tattooed at each eye’s
outer edge, slices open
a stolen jackfruit, seeking
truth’s taste.

The blade she uses is just rusted enough
to cut to the chase.

Although she doesn’t know you, she’ll give you a piece.
She always shares what she takes.

At night, from emptiness's
encyclopedias under
the gray-white midal flower,
the bellybutton’s history

emerges. I study
the a.m. dark, hoping there’s something
to glean. Soon
the mind’s totems condense into frost
on everything that grows. At dawn

with a useless laptop in my sack, I listen
to silence’s vigilance, how it crouches
focused
in trenches and behind trees. A little

further north, day’s
first rifle fire. Later, a bomb explodes. Here

a canteen’s cool water, dirt
under fingernails, morning’s call to prayer, after which

-- and then it’s night,
the wolf moon howls in the mountain forest.

“In the valley made by her thighs,
a woman bled and fish evolved
in the pond of it,”
Sundera once told Suman.

In the morning, I piss on a cliff that overlooks boulders
between which another path winds upwards.
No exotic sacrifices occur up there.
Only thin air, hard breathing and stone
tell us what comes next.

Later, higher.
Snow. White sky. Ice.

And then
as always
the descent.