ABECEDARIAN FOR MY FATHER’S CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

‘The world is gone, I have to carry you.’

—Paul Celan, transl. by Pierre Jorris

ashes of paperflowers unfurling on the mud flecked floor is a reminder.

brother’s circled photograph of him pressing a Chinese gun to his scrawny

chest & a beedi between his red-ecru lips is glued to a bamboo panel in the

dining shed. in the sole memory I have of him, he is kicking a green

elephant-apple mother grabbed from a talukdar’s yard for the kuchia

fish curry we demanded his eyes jujube-red like a setting sun of fagun

graceless, a wild horse that summer we saw an endless pit of rotting

human bodies in the school patio soggy fingers ringed by worms, brains

inching towards ashy gumminess, tongues serving silence, also history—

jeeps & bleeding rills are all we sketched as kids at midnight, from the stout

Krishnasuras we planted, we saw teachers & fathers hang like bats, heard

lamentations of Deudinis ricochet till the land was glossed with tar left

mothers as old as our burning wait for sovereignty to run into rivers regretted

naming tribal lovers after sunbirds whose bodies came home dressed in flies &

old mats. but, nobody no longer wants to remember it as it was: fields burning in

puerile blood, roots with cracked spines clutching memories, machetes stirring

quickly through embers of soiled girls in grey lipstick, fusty tresses of Bhogdoi—

right about dawn, we often heard meaty footsteps on the sward, saw figures

swaying to cries of silty egrets like weirs in monsoon, groping gracefully

through lavender-hued blinds of June showers— they begged me to

undo their braids and knife them, they spoke of Jonkie-Panei before I killed them,

veiling his throbbing boil of grief spoke my brother. and soon, he was gone.

winter’s mauve hours loosened its paling & he followed the rare cries of a baak.

xorais were offered for his return, so were rice beer & fresh pigs to unseen men

years later, nothing came but a photograph and a fisherman gesturing he is fine.

Ziro is where they last saw him, they say he pens a lot of sunbird songs to Dalimi.

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Beedi: local cigarettes; Fagun: a month in the Hindu calendar; Krishnasura: Royal Poinciana; Deudini: a performer who worships gods through her dances in Bodo religious festivals; Bhogdoi: a tributary of the Brahmaputra in India; Jonkie-Panei: (Mishing folklore) two lovers who were killed by an angry mob for eloping against Panei’s father’s wishes; Baak: (Assamese folklore) a grotesque creature that inhabits ponds and rivers. After killing its prey, a Baak often takes the corpse’s appearance; Xorai: Bell-metal tray; Dalimi: close friend of Panei in the aforementioned folktale of Jonkie-Panei

NEVER HEARD BACK

‘Why do I turn my head so piously to the sky?’

—Wendy Xu

Tomorrow they won’t know an emptying body from a ceremonial sunset and we, who are

left, on crinoline Sunday mornings will write down recipes from our mother’s oil-marked

magazines for luncheons our lovers never show up for, will enjoy the greasy taste of a city

left to oneiric requiems, will count icepacks left on the bed in the dark. Some afternoons, I

count shadows of tiny birds on my father’s knees and on others, I count people in the

supermarket just to remind myself the world is a lot lonelier now but not just to me. No

one buys cheap stoneware dishes for their old mothers, they stand quietly at the counter

and intone spindly summer thoughts for their kids. And the kids, othered from the loss,

groove to the mock static of indifference. The supermarket is always loud but not sad

enough to drown the convolutions of our loneliness so we hold on to our stories till our

grief crests and tides like morning sunlight on river walks. Is it enough to say we can no

longer look into each other’s eyes without crying, without believing we are buffeting apart

the graced hearts of our enemies? How will one explain this nightmare to their lover for

comfort? Perhaps every percussive song ladling out of this ungodly ossuary clamps an

answer. Truth: the maps of absence are full of wilting shadows and the hearts nailed with

human guilt. Now we can see why our mothers prayed but didn’t have the courage to love.

The world always finds its ways to pencil despair over our flesh. I am not even

exaggerating when I say in this empty house I can hear you whine about grapefruit stains

on your winter coat. For you, I sing the same songs and read the same obit. The backdoor

opens to a Klein blue evening but please don’t leave.

APOLOGIES TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN DETENTION CENTRES IN ASSAM

After June Jordon and Ford Madox Ford

I.

Morning broadcasts chinwag about your deaths every day

yet we choose to admire tiny wren-babblers in stuffy cityscapes

& hum Baul songs with lonely men over cups of ground chicory.

[This is how a man barely survives: reads the news, eats his food

& complains about lushness of azaleas, purple topography of paranoia.]

II.

In pulsating winter nights,

angry flocks choke & leech countless brown-necked children

& say it’s okay for you pillaged our pregnant lands, it’s okay

for you didn’t leave when we asked you to, it’s okay for you

will kill us if we don’t murder you & feast on your stiffs

fence-hoppers, termites, Geda, Miyahs, Bangladeshis

that’s what you are, they say— what?

They want to barrel & scull you across the penumbra of our land,

bury the ghosts of your people in our prairies so, it’s absolutely okay

to fire blanks, bulldoze your shacks, sleeping children, weak old men

& plume the slaughterers of your father on national television.

[This is how a man barely survives: reads the news, eats his food

& ponders the parameters of nausea, the plurality of his being.]

III.

In sweaty July afternoons under the malachite green of Sissoo trees

we husk jackfruits & wonder how in dictionaries we grew up

we do not have words for

the dressed smell of burning bodies, hungry screams welded

to hyacinth palms, dark rotting skins under the consumed sun

or the receding shoreline of splitting memories—

we are blinded by television & tethered by lies, our thoughts a yellowing batch

of worn wood, cattails in their autumn. Please know that we are sorry. We really are.

BECAUSE SHE REMEMBERS THANGJAM MANORAMA*

at some point the scuttling conversation twigs out promptly

to vanda-stamped leas to knitted hornbills to I want you

to never leave I am so lonely I can almost sense the veins of Iril.

you understand Meitei but not the broad strokes of desolation

so while her cardinal fingers wither into your stubble-slit thighs

you baste Nilofars on sarongs for each spring you won’t be there

to serenade with a Theile to unsnarl your shadows to make love

till the floorboard moistens with arsenic questions and solitudes—

there is a sickle in the dining room sink and you stroke its cold hilt

for courage, wonder how Manorama’s brother lives his guilt:

he muffles his screams between peals of bombardments or knives

his pain till the tub is a pool of tonguing cinders and cairn flowers?

on the way out, there is always a throng of reeds burning itself to

a ruddy liquid dawn, so, you squall back before time and take turns

at language at mouthing desperation for forgiveness at cleaning

fallen remiges while listening to AIR Imphal— “another woman died

in firing” the newsreader’s voice is a quiet lake as he reads his wife’s name.

your lover’s clit is a bullet and you can’t stop seaming her rutted feathers.

(for mothers of Manipur)

*Thangjam Manorama was a 32-year-old Manipuri woman who was killed by 17th Assam Rifles in 2004; Meitei: lingua franca of the state of Manipur, India; Sarong: traditional attire of Manipuri people; Theile: flute made of dry bamboo pipe