Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

VIVEK JAIN

VIVEK JAIN Vivek Jain was born in Bhopal, India, in 1980 and spent his boyhood in Appalachia. He earned an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Virginia. Currently, Jain is a resident physician with interests in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and public health. He also enjoys the reimagined poetry of translation. Jain lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his younger brother, Anand, and their mother. I find labels—whether imposed by an external world of which I have limited knowledge or adopted by an emerging sense of self— problematic. After all, isn’t the project of self-knowledge a lifelong endeavor? Poem for a Would-be Revolutionary, My Father My father’s beard winters. His sister intimates how, years ago, Indira’s men first sought him in the night, how prison submerged his life. Five times, papa, they came for you. How their negotiations with wrist-thick bamboo sounded like deference or a beaten pariah. You descended each time, your protests preceded by conviction. 96 Anand’s Story god didn’t make me— At dusk, I escaped from the foundry of India. Atop the pyre, I seized the urgent smoke roots of the dark banyan cloud over Bhopal. From the altitude of god I fell, depositing, and pocked the sphere below. From there, I wandered to play in the laps of hills. You, who have forgotten how these eyes were once backlit with death, know this: god didn’t make me, I wasn’t his to make. December, 1984 The reports drift in. Conjured from among twenty thousand who swilled VIVEK JAIN 97 mouthfuls, lungfuls, vaporous biting dreams that came foraging mistaking it for the night dhool is my brother, pushing through growing mounds of hardening limbs as woodpiles’ flames confuse brown skin for bark. He is displaced on the flocculent ashes of twenty-thousand sleepers broadening in the sky, an estuary. This December night sews lights on shores where others join stacks of blazes, like wicks upon wicks, in the city, Bhopal. 98 VIVEK JAIN ...