Hyderabad Notebook

I

I used to sit in the New Mysore Café, at a cracked marble table topA cup of foaming coffee in front of me,

Notebook open to catch a fruit fly on a smear of honey.The café is gone, in its place is a Reebok store, also a shop selling                                                                       Airtel SIM cards,

Cell phones in colors of the rainbow,Ray Ban dark glasses and knock-off Coach and Prada.

In a high room across the road, above carts with chaat and spiced tea,Someone sitting in a chair feels he is slowly going blind.

Over and over he runs his fingers over a pageSpelling out the names of God

In exquisite script read right to left and back againAs befits divinity.

He edges to the window, trying to peerAt the gates of the Golden Threshold.

The Nightingale of India grown heavy in her years, lived there.The place became a hospital, then a university

Stacked with students in stained jeans and kurtas,A man who sold beedis jostling in pale pink packets,

Another who boiled tea in a tin canWith increments of sugar—

The bitterness of black leaves a mess of tanninPredicting nothing.

II

Once loitering, notebook in hand,I saw a girl with a gash on her wrist, skirt wrapped tight about her.

She was kneeling at the gates.Using a twig she drew in the dirt

What seemed to be a round rock with a cleft in it—Etching it deep, deeper, till the stick snapped.

Using the broken bit she made a tree,Or was it a railway track, a spitting fire, a fountain.

Where she knelt, crushed stonesEndure planetary forms

The Milky Way flattened out, Pluto in darkness.Fragments of time clung together

The privilege of self-consciousness thrust aside,Letting us glimpse a natural language

Syntax of flesh and stone and rootAnchoring us to ordinary earth.

III

On Nampally Road where the booksellers used to beI stand in the rush of traffic

By ox carts crammed with sugarcane, trucks twanging horns,Ambassadors, Mercedes Benzes, Marutis.

I see tiny boys on bicyclesMilk cans hanging from their handle bars.

Tyres scuff the asphalt, cut free and leap,Come to rest in jagged loops of motion by ledges of marble

Cut from the bowels of courtly housesDrumbeats of amber in a fruit fly's eye.

From fitful calendarsPages marked in red ink drop into luminous air

Together with the wings of flying things so quick to die.Epiclesis—the breaking of bread

And the gathering-in again:The loneliness of paving stones

Returning us to a dream of loveAnd what we did not know we were.