VARNAMALA


Keki N. Daruwalla

 

 
BOMBAY PRAYERS

From the lapers, the acid scarred, the amputees
I turn my face. The road, I feel
should be stratified so that
I rub shoulders only with my kind.
The street is the smithy of the Lord!
The cry of the hungry
rings along its metal walls.

I caress the down on my abdomen-bulge
the way other people
caress other people's breasts.

I am the doctor who bangs his doors shut
on a queue of waiting patients.

My enemies I threaten with fire and thunder
But never openly, pocked face to pocked face
I dial their dreams late at night.

I like the dog-eyed, the dog-eared, the dog-tailed
My asperities I reserve for my near ones.

Not that I cannot see
the plaque emerging like a rock
from the skin of the low tide.
But then a metal lid
falls across the eyeball like a shutter
and hold out for the thirsty
the promise of the bottle.
Lord! Slowly, inexorably
I am adopting your vices.
 

MEHAR ALI, THE KEEPER OF THE DEAD

In the year of the fire-serpent,
the prophecy runs
lightning will chop the cummulus
into chunks of meat.
Red rain will fall
as the goddess descends,
her rain-red hair
streaming backwards in the wind,
to cart away the dead
in the folds of her mists.

It is a Tartar cemetery;
they had lost their way across the roof,
past serac country and the ice-falls,
till coming to this cluster of low cliffs
they flopped, savaged
upto their knees by frost.

Two of them survived and had
this catacomb hewn out of limestone cliff;
married Bhot women and begot children
who wilted — nine generations scorched
like dying melons on a withered vine.
And now with a face like a patch of fissured bark
and eyes: pools dulled with a film of moss,
Mehar Ali, the keeper of the dead,
remains the last of the living,
his days slowly embering into ash.

His speeches is a monotone that creaks on
like a cartwheel going over gravel.
'This is the catafalque where lies
Barqandaz, the wolf-slayer.
The two survivors lie here
and these their Tibetan wives.'
A match flares across the vault.
'This miniature on the wall,look at the
faces - each smaller than a match-head —
and the paint-effect, like
hairline-fractures on a cartilage.

It is deliberate, to show the action of frost
as it worked over their visages when they crossed the pass.
The faces were done in old paint which cracks;
the rest was done in vegetable dye.'

The Californian females ask:
'Wolf-slayer? Where did he slay the wolf?'
'Mr. Mehar Ali, do you trace
your lineage back to Jenghiz Khan?'
'Its amazing this Muslim cemetery
in a semi-lama country!
And this local prophecy, do you think
the goddess will ever come?'

There is no response
In the past year he is known
to have smiled only once
when he mistook a flowering shrub
for a child
and blessed it.

But when high winds moan, 
driving the rain into the catafalque,
and lightning rends the sky,
speech starts fermenting in his mouth
and bursts out
in bee-stung incoherence.
It is then that he communes with the dead,
they say, and his eyes
probe each wraith of mist
for the sky-woman,
her hair flaming red
as she alights upon the shroud-grey skin
that keeps him whole —
Mehar Ali, the keeper of the dead!
 
 
 

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