SMALL WANTS
Nothing happens now, except when
I begi to think of the times
when they used to happen.
When I looked forward to the four-anna
coin
that my mother gave me every day
and asked me to preserve it for future
use.
New clothes were bought for all three
of us
three times a year
to make us presentable before
friends, relations and sympathetic neighbours.
On Sundays and other public holidays
our maternal uncle took us
to the rich Naya Sarak Market
in his black Morris Minor.
We ate crisp and hot vadas
at Madhu Sahu's ramshackle restaurant
on the Pilgrim Road (now lost
and perhaps forgotten by everyone
except by the three of us).
Small wants, but they used to matter.
Today, even as the early sun
filters into my room through
the delicate, handwoven Sambalpuri curtains,
I think of them-
old wants that seem to bother no one any
longer.
Relaxing on the reed mat spread on our
sprawling verandah on the second floor,
I ask my good wife to bring tea,
watch our old milkman's son bring
my son's milk for the day,
listen to the tireless doorbell ring
for no reason at all.
The familiar postman delivers parcels
from the British Council Library
and the American Studies Research Center,
lengthy letters from my two brothers
and even their loyal wives.
Laxmi, our maidservant, arrives
with her smiling eight-year-old daughter
tugging at ther borrowed saree.
I keep myself busy through the day
drinking "matchless Darjeeling tea",
chewing tobacco, listening to words
that lost their edge years ago when
I first began writing the language without
a flaw.
I still hunt the places where
hot and crisp vadas are believed to be
served,
but accompanied now by my wife
and my rather reluctant four-year-old
son.
I still write letters, although
each letter gets shorter
than the one written before.
And, as the long Indian day comes to its
end,
my son, his lisping voice
sounding curious and far like the rustle
of leaves
through the midnight air,
asks me questions that I cannot answer.
PICTURES OF THE BODY
1
There're those frank, unadorned pictures
that skip and dance to quicken
what sleeps through my bland wakefulness—
the wish to carry on the body's need
to interact with the unreached secrets
that wait to be broken upon, enjoyed
by blunt, repeated reminders of where
bodies discover themselves most faithfully,
keep on spilling over into each other
without shame or insult, caring for nothing,
looking for nothing beyond now, submitting
to the glued touch, the wish to be rebon.
I'm quite there, where this body might
find itself once again through a never-ending
rite of arousal and compensation.
The pictures dance to a blind rhythm that
is
all their own, while I look on, my flesh
pounding hard over its naive inconclusions.
2
I look away from each one of them from
time
to time, expecting nothing beyond their
skin,
their wish to be noticed, flawless nudity.
I think I'm learning how they couldn't
be
what they are not for me already, how
they
belong to a dream that I'd disown.
But I don't know how I sink into this
sleep in the middle of a wholehearted
prayer
to be happy with the picture that is me.
They emerge, without much fuss, from under
the low bed, from under the shadow
of intimacy, find me too dumb
and slow to give them what I know
I have, but somehow can't give—
a name for each body, its bunch of toes,
its own breasts and lips. I can't, while
they
gather around me in circles, their seductive
translucence
playing above a mass of incapacity and
sleep.
3
In the first light, just before
the night's departure, the pictures merge
into a shining brown body that
learns over my sleep and waits for
a word of approval that wouldn't be heard
beyond its lone ear, would indeed be
the beginning of a long story.
I imagine the place where I had met
that face, fail. It looks familiar.
Nimble fingers quietly polish my skin
to their desired shine, shape my flesh
into exact measurements of their need.
It seems I had been touched by them in
yet another sleep, variously, felt them
deep
under my skin, where an immovable desire
is.
The face draws closer, lips greet lips,
shaking
two willing bodies, teeth biting every
wronged need.
Light is on the windows. My warm fingers
feel
the hard lumps on my lips. And there is
that
numb weight of a body that knew only too
well
what it wanted from me. This sweat. This
heat.