Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

HOMRAJ ACHARYA

HOMRAJ ACHARYA Homraj Acharya grew up in southern Nepal. A graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder and American University, his publications in Nepali include a novel, Nirdosh Kaidi (Bhimshira, 1995), two collections of poetry, Jeevit Kankal (Unnayan, 1999) and Alubarima Deuta (Kalchahra, 2003), and one translation, The Principal’s Secret (Ratan Puslak Bandar, 1997). His writing in English has been published in Salt Hill, Wind, the Kathmandu Post, Strategic Confusion, and Walkabout. He is now a public policy analyst in Washington, D.C., working on education issues, and an activist for democracy and social justice. He founded the grassroots nonprofit Books in Every Home. I am a rural Nepali and an urban Washingtonian, with a buffaloriding past and a Metro-riding present. The Silk-Cotton Tree These are the monsters, as wide and difficult and towering as the universe. Listen. It’s different from yours, of course. It’s a city, cut and crossed by the cracks of bark, and beetles live on these thoroughfares with red wings, the color of fecundity and anger. In their sweet shops the bees are armed, and the vultures on top of it all coating the leaves with a brown waste that looks precisely like ice cream. Everyone is hungry. You never know what your neighbors will do. It’s a watchtower for thieves. You climb on it to look for jackals who might covet your goats, to hunt for tigers, foxes, pretty girls 176 on the riverbank where if you’re quick you can steal their clothes as they bathe like the god Krishna as a naughty boy. Those religious stories can give you good ideas. It’s a cup of milk. You feed its flowers to your water buffalo, and also the saplings. It’s a bed. There are pods to be cracked, and within them whorls of fluff to stuff into mattresses and pillows, the carrier of the life of the tree, the cotton seeds, in each pod there are hundreds, tasting like sunflower seeds. It’s said that a pillow made of silk cotton will talk to you at night. It’s a party, candle wax hanging from its leaves. You can slice up the abandoned hives and melt them on the fire into brown holiday candles. It’s the fire itself. The heart is made into matchsticks, the limbs thrown into the hearth to heat the milk, to heat the stolen honey, to heat the bee larvae that taste like eggs. It’s a red-light zone. High up the vultures copulate with screams of excitement. On the fat triangles where branches meet boys play music, dreaming of legends. Below in the underbrush a girl and boy come together like a flute with the lips of Krishna. HOMRAJ ACHARYA 177 It’s a billboard for names and dates, Red Cunt, Rattling Balls, Fuck Fuck Fucking Bhim Fucked Draupadi. Each tree has a name. The Pillar. The Umbrella. Goblin, Snaky, Holey, Crooked One, Father Burial. The roots are so big they must have spirits, they must be a palace for the naga snakes. Where the trunk meets the ground there is a hollow sprinkled with holy water, marigolds, bel leaves. A goat is sacrificed, one of the goats the tigers didn’t get or the goddess Durga at the time of brown holiday candles. Leaves are mixed with cowdung to fertilize the fields, and there is rice. It’s a shrine, it’s rain, it’s a new year. The Kerosene Stove The kerosene stove has no home. Monday by the water bucket, Tuesday by the leg of the bed, sometimes greeted by the hand, sometimes by the foot, its face kissing the burnt bottoms of skillets, aluminum saucepans, kettles, pressure cookers. It is really unfortunate. It had bad karma to be married to this house. It was a dowry, now it nestles by rice sacks in the corner, or underneath the bed that squeaks like the mice in the ceiling so that neighbors know the whole world about you, but hey, who cares what they think? The rice sack is hungry, its belly empty. 178 HOMRAJ ACHARYA Potatoes complain, tomatoes moan, there are the usual cracks from the bitter gourds. A black and white TV flickers in the evening. The Nepalese delegation to the United Nations voted its approval of the American proposal. The Crown Prince has felicitated the soccer team...