ON DISPOSSESSION OF CASTE
The eyes of the bear, hidden in the exodus of its thousand black pelages, sedated – red from how they exhume those it looks at – turning into glances of I look at you & it’s all you become are stoppages at a stealth pace of noon into this personal narration of the looking: A door: Single shuttered, blackwood with sharp-edged, fiery-red flowerpetals carvings – the bear is a setting of slow withdrawal in its coming, its coming like an idea of a room floating somewhere outside this one, shifting the essence of all objects to their shadows falling past the children plucking in the track of its mane (to test its sainthood) (as its keeper, a boy, its caretaker/tamer, drags it by its chains, calling out to collect alms) now beating – how many? how many? how many? chafed by the pecking & cawing, disjunct from where it looks at them – Standing in the threshold, rising on its hind to show itself, reminding itself of their toothlessness. The direction they elope to away from this corner the boy fastens its chain in, off-centred, crusting on the lip of a drum left to fill itself in rain – dehiscent & nameless – starting a fold to warm its end, fraying, all brown shot in dark algae green, uncoiling in slow cursives downwards, peeling by its corrective leaks in the path of its retrace – echoing in its decomposition, the last sigh of a swell stripping to worsted pleatings, deducted to a blade of scrap. Rust is our redemption. As in: we have touched, we are forsaken; chawl daughters married off afar don’t even return for their brother’s funeral – & to what is called fate is only napes, seldom skies & on the either side the long, two-point ladder of the look: Star Depot Soap, Gulshan Diaries, Desire Leather Boutique, Al-Rehmaniya Repair, Ravina over her phone pressed hot around them, & then another kothi in the adjacent light, & another. Arriving in white flocks. Curses, slights like cheap marigold blossoms torn apart. Now gilded embroidery –
WHITE CROWS
We could tell you only by your summer call, late June, white ants having eaten the words on notes are instances of leaping in Utopia, that released in your departure, we have caught it in net like Black Pomfret, lavender, husk, synthetic – making days anew, these random sequencing of adjoints, sinewy & tucked: each row of swathe, blurring lines within lines is an assemblage of dispossession, dissolving tenses, hymnal through the golden pane of 181 bus a regular from Kalina to Pila Bungla – the mechanism of black wires winding in a slow, black heat thickening depth at its iris & from where I squat, this loam before it’s even thought of is dispersed, yielding, misaligned from what resides in the midst of layers clasped into folds; backtracking to confront the thing at the interstice that stands for outcaste is constituted in this handicraft of amounting; fats, cement slabs, leftovers, silage, dreadlocks, the run-down assortments & other sorts of drawing in to keep unmutilated the volume of your plumage. It takes rain finally to precipitate the bulwark. Melting. This waiting, the chorus of us, stretched & prolonged, look, hours pressed into another day, the dark-bluish kohl of sky to loosen the bind.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.