Hasan, Anjum;
Street on the hill
Sahitya Akademi, 2006/2008, 64 pages
ISBN 8126017937, 9788126017935
topics: | poetry | india | english | dup
anjum hasan (b. 1972), invents a new idiom for indian poetry in english;
unruffled exterior, carrying convoluted gestures that shift abruptly and
jump across the landscapes of urban, small-town existence.
reading hasan is like turning the tube on a kaleidoscope, one image shifts
rapidly into another... for instance, in in my mother's sari, she is
walking in her mother's blouse, with her blue and orange sari - there's a
bit of tension in the air; "damp flowers of sweat" showing on the blouse -
but still she manages to laugh inside, "cheating" people in her mother's
colours, shifting registers rapidly as she moves from one jagged-sharp
image onto another:
girls lovely and empty with want
who I destroy with my Look of Elsewhere.
It's so easy to break girls, spoil their carefully planned
afternoons, their elaborate ploys to sweeten the air,
tantalise. Their eyes are bright with their love
for themselves, while I walk on the street
in my mother's clothes, laughing inside...
links: http://www.bokinorr.nu/komma/PDFer/05-03.pdf
translations into hindi by teji grover at pratilipi
==Contents
1. June Night in a Middle-class Home 3 2. Dark Room 5 3. Time of My Childhood 6 4. Mister Language 7 5. Coming of Age in a Convent School 8 6. Learnt 10 7. Neighbourhood 12 8. In my Mother's Clothes 13
1. My Folks 17 2. England 18 3. Shy 20 4. Ordinary Days 22 5. To the Chinese Restaurant 23 6. November Haiku 25 7. Boats 26 8. Families 27
1. The Pregnant Woman 31 2. Afternoon in the Beauty Parlour 33 3. Small Town 35 4. Hills 37 5. March 39 6. Song of the Fruit 40 7. Mawlai 41
1. Home? 45 2. Where I Now Live 46 3. Kitchen 47 4. Rain 49 5. Gluttony : Now and Then 51 6. Holiday 52 7. Rishikesh 54
1. Beach Town : Off Season 57 2. A Place Like Water 59 3. Pop Song 60 4. Food of Love 61 5. Jealousy Park 62 6. Yellow Curtains 64
On the narrow steps leading to our gate, the pakoriwallah from Bihar is often found kissing an anonymous woman at night. Amazing act. My parents switch off the sitting-room lights whenever this happens. The car beams show them up – one unbroken secret silhouette. The steps invite other actions. The local fakir some- times lies there, coloured like a ditch, and passers-by might climb to have a better look at the orange trees. But this is different. The soft-spoken pakoriwallah smelling of his pakoris, his half hour island of defiant passion on the steps of somebody's house, while around him everyday: the brash freeloaders, the kick in the groin, the familiar words of abuse spoken in an unfamiliar language.
I feel the cool sweat from under my arms soak her blouse timidly - shy, damp flowers of my sweat on her blouse. I wear her thirst blue and forest green [sic] and burnt orange as if they belonged to me: my mother's colours on my skin in a dusty city. I walk in her clothes laughing inside, relieved of the burden of being what one wears since in my mother's clothes I am neither myself nor my mother, but more like that spindly creature of six who slips onto her fingers her mother's gold rings, pulls on an old cardigan that smells of sunlight and milk, and conducts herself, drowsy with love, through rooms with their curtains drawn against the honeyed light of June. this is a radically re-worked and tightened version from an earlier text that appeared in chandrabhAgA magazine, and was online at varnamala and is available at several web sites: I walk in my mother's clothes on the street, feel the cool sweat under my arms soak her blouse timidly: shy, damp flowers of my sweat on her blouse. I let the white dust with its years of spit and sweet wrapper, its agonising lifelessness, pass over me in my mother's clothes, her rust and bright blue and burnt orange, my mother's colours on my skin in the dust, as if they belonged to me. I cheat people: men, girls in high heels who pretend not to look and fidget and sulk, girls lovely and empty with want who I destroy with my Look of Elsewhere. It's so easy to break girls, spoil their carefully planned afternoons, their elaborate ploys to sweeten the air, tantalise. Their eyes are bright with their love for themselves, while I walk on the street in my mother's clothes, laughing inside, relieved of the burden of being what one wears, since in my mother's clothes, laughing inside, relieved of the burden of being what one wears, since in my mother's clothes I am neither myself nor my mother. In her inky silks, her cool green gardens of chiffon that once filled me with thirst, I dream of elusiveness (which is actually the dream of all girls in high heels on the street, who I scorn!) Is it only one woman we all want to be? The woman opens her eyes and looks at the mirror into the eyes of a child. The child who drifts like a shadow through long summer afternoons when everyone sleeps, the spindly creature of six who slips onto her fingers her mother's gold rings, pulls on an old cardigan that smells of sunlight and milk, and conducts herself, drowsy with love, through rooms with their curtains drawn against the honeyed light of June. Does she always begin like this - seeking love by trying to become the person whose love she seeks? Rolling up the sleeves of her mother's cardigan and sitting with legs dangling from a high chair, her frail little shoulders stiff with pride, her sisters jealous. Her mother slowly waking to the calm evening light, laughing at the serious girl-clown who is opening her eyes to look at the mirror into the eyes of a woman, when all that there is of that unfathomable grace she has taken with her, and you are suddenly cold in her cardigan.
We have hills in our blood but end up smelling fat cars on city streets and garbage strewn under rain. We speak in stories: raconteurs, mimics, chroniclers all, with vast memories and no name-plates. We shall never lose our shyness or build houses unselfconsciously or live outside books. We keep adding to our repertoire of cryptic family jokes. We look through an open window and like the predictable movies, the leaves and sky melt and signal that we’re making the blurry journey to another place and time. [online at: http://www.bokinorr.nu/komma/PDFer/05-03.pdf]
This town is darkened by the hours of those who return home after silent days spent in the library to Van Morrison held in by clear windows in rooms made invisible by habit, to afternoons that hasten into night and are wiped out by forests of rain, to dripping taps and fridge food and yesterday’s paper beyond which pear trees wait for their white flowers. We are the sum of our ordinary days, we feel boredom like rage but without rage’s bright burning pleasure, we look out at the patch of lawn, the empty clothesline, we know books are like maps that show you but don’t take you there, we know drink and fortitude and other people like us who feel they are growing through the roof of this town. [online at: http://www.bokinorr.nu/komma/PDFer/05-03.pdf]
for Daisy We come in here from the long afternoon stretched over the town’s sloping roofs, its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours, its melancholic second-hand bookshops with their many missing pages. Life’s not moving. We sit at a red table, among the dragons, near the curtained-off street-facing windows with their months’ old orangeade. Out in the streets there are schoolboys with their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers. We eat more than we need to. We eat so that our boredom’s no longer dangerous, so that from the comfort of soup, with the minor pleasures of chopsuey, we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited, unknown and unknowable affairs, people with never-fading lipstick and confident gestures who we will never be. One day soon we’ll be running, our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus, and we won’t read each other’s letters thrice. But right there we’re young, we count our money carefully, we laugh so hard and drop our forks. We are plucked from sadness there in that little plastic place with the lights turned low, the waiters stoned from doing nothing, the smells of ketchup and eternally frying onions. [online at: http://www.bokinorr.nu/komma/PDFer/05-03.pdf]
Families like ours from the plains who think ‘plains’ is a naked howling word, a treeless stony word. We could get killed – casually – and all our reading (fat books, fragile wisdom squeezed from intersections of English and feeling, encounters on the page that shaped, quickened, instigated) would come to nothing. We could get hurt and it just wouldn’t be meaningful – our suffering – no blow equal to a sentence of history but just someone taking graffiti literally, someone who thinks of giving and receiving pain in ways far too primal for literature’s kind of cunning. So families like ours steeped in recollection and private wit, in shopping bags, records, curtains, letters, our things – in lieu of, to fill in, give weight to. And then the thingless families who nevertheless move solid through the suburban air: the straw-haired children who build their make-belief home in a disused jeep trailer, the bare-footed woman who pulls clothes from the line and goes inside quickly when the clouds come down. Maybe at night the woman’s mouth softens when she sees the children asleep, their dusty legs entangled with each other’s on the narrow bed. Maybe she just sits like that for a long time in the one-bed empty house, not thinking of much though the frogs start up a harsh croaking from the ditches, and drunkards pass by in pairs, explaining things to each other on the wet road.
The man who runs the sports goods store that also sells old unopened books and board games in faded boxes, sits with his tattooed arms folded in the sun. He drinks a lot of beer and doesn’t ask stupid questions. His friends loiter around small music shops all morning, in slippers, with their shirt-tails out. The distant air lights up the furrowed edges of the hills. Sometimes he wants to describe the smell of brown oaks ageing in the sun and bakeries where boys in dirty aprons lit their ovens in the early summer morning. But the tattooed man dozes on when his friends talk and the sun whitens the spines of pale detective novels and books full of blond-bodied girls and cross-stitch designs. When a man is killed in the afternoon, knifed and left to die with his face down in a drain, the tattooed fellow has an opinion. But he shuts his door and sleeps on a wooden plank behind the counter that smells of cigarettes and stale tea, till rain cools the streets. All the furthest sounds of the city wake him up slowly, till he hears the rain on his own window and thinks of the dirty water running below the dead man’s face. In the evening when the rain lets up for a bit his friends might return and joke about it. He switches on the lights at five. People drift in with damp trouser-cuffs and notice the Chinese dragons on his arms. They talk and again the cool air outlines each noisy car and softened tree. It’s Saturday. He rests his elbows on the cracked glass counter and watches a girl across the street scrubbing a couple of neat stone steps till they gleam in the clear blue evening.
Between the gravestones going with flowers, newspapers, minutes in its teeth the March wind suddenly returns and then starts off again, with some other fragment of life present to its thin chest. Its mad rhythms confuse the trees. This wind is the language of indecision that winter speaks when it opens its slow mouth to let April in. Dark vacancies of forest fire, shifting planes of pollen: cold fills one window, a sort of spring the other.
For seventeen years we passed through Mawlai in a bus – saw waxy red flowers in the pomegranate trees and a man pegging brilliant white napkins on a clothesline against the wind. We didn’t live there and those who lived there didn’t care about the buses passing through at all times of the day, right up against the mauve beef hanging in its pockets of fat, and the shops with shiny strips of tobacco showing through shadows, and the new houses and the old houses where the same sort of people lived, or at least that’s how we felt, passing through in buses for seventeen years. But we won’t be doing it anymore – looking out of a window at a patch of maize in its copper earth, eggs in a wire basket, hand-painted signs near open doorways that remind us of sunlit drawings in children’s books about places that grow sad in their unreality with every passing year, simple signs in white paint – hangne ngi die tiar, hangne ngi suh jainsem. We’ll forget what they looked like, the rough golden clapboard shops with their unwrapped cakes of soap, the windows in houses no bigger than a man’s handkerchief, and it will be difficult to remember where each of the cherry trees stood because they flowered so briefly before lapsing back into their dark green anonymity. The graveyard on a gentle slope, the fence weighed down with roses! We’ll want to urgently tell someone, if we ever happen to return, that we knew this place, passed through in a bus for seventeen years, but having said that we won’t know what else to say about Mawlai because we never really got off there or bought things from its shops or stepped into someone’s boiled-vegetables-smelling house to watch the street through the netted curtains. We’ll keep quiet then and try to ignore that sense which is not pain but has pain’s cloudiness and its regret and its way of going and returning.
You will hear it waking to the roar of a ceiling fan in the rustling of dry palm leaves, in pebbles pouring from a lorry onto the dusty street. the lips of the warm wind, trapped between scaffolding and terrace, will whisper soundless words of memory through the window’s grating. you will hear it in the last aeroplane of the night (whose sound you will mistake for thunder), in the alphabets of the birds, in indignant pressure cookers. your thirst will be vast as the sky. you will look for it in the evening, searching for one cloud among tremendous shadows, and at night when it might come from a great distance and touch the city with a new light. You won’t find it in the few grey leaves of march or behind the thin red crescent burning itself out on a fevered patch of sky. your hair will grow electric with the dry heat of the day, your dreams shot with the silver lightening of monsoon nights, the blue green violet nights celebrated by crickets, the mountain nights where fate is linked to umbrellas, and feeling to the violent hours that clatter on those heights. But venus’ eye is clear here. you will look for it in refrigerators at night, slice water-melons with its taste on your tongue - unfeeling, red-hearted fruit - and buy cucumbers in despair. you will almost forget the sadness of mist, but remember how quickly mirrors darkened and streets turned grim, and wait for the same blanket to be fastened over the sky and change the quality of this harsh, unvarying light. Always the 'where' of where you are is a place in the head, established through skin, and you recognise the address not in numbers or names but through familiar patterns of bird-song, traffic, shadows, lanes. And when you go away only envelopes bear the name of that tiny dot of geographical space where everyone knows you now stay. for the memory of each of the body’s ancient senses remains the same, for years remains the same: bewildered by dry winds in april, aching for rain.
My friends from the vast city drive to a dirty town at the base of a hill on a weekend at the fag end of summer. Good, says everyone. Excellent. They take their luggage up to their rooms, wash the grit from their hair, humming. The town is as old as a stony hill and large as one decrepit neighbourhood. Night fills it like a slow water thick with crude secrets. My friends never have to choose between logic and excitement. They plan the hours, then walk in the morning to where fifteen empty buses sing love songs while their pilots sleep among the vacant seats, forever condemned to dream of flight. Precise late morning shadows mingle beneath the feet of small town tourists: shirtless men holding baby boys, families the size of wedding parties, married girls so blank-eyed they might have left themselves in that other hot and ochre town where they were born. My friends slowly turn brown or browner, full of a careful happiness among waterfalls and sensuous boatmen who wander, oar in hand, half in dream and half in hunger. Good, says everyone. Excellent. The night smells of fish and old granite cooling. Of pineapple, garbage and rivers. My friends drink in their hotel room at night and they presume to touch the heart of things. Places they see yield their light, their memory, for what would these still green trees be if they were not trees for them? And that is the holiday at the base of a hill in the town with the white-haired waterfalls. The city is untidy, complex, full of lies and defeat. My friends will disappear into it, their car joining twenty others at a murderous red light. We have seen them for this short while only because the town was tacky and little, and they were in their brightest summer clothes.
The deep hills where sunlight moves and dark flies everywhere – in the restaurant overlooking the green river and ghat where sadhus darn their clothes or sleep; religion is touched with the mud of poetry: the fresh pink lipstick on the mouth of the Japanese tourist eating in the restaurant with flies everywhere and striped Coca Cola garden umbrellas, shit on the cobbled beaches and sunlight moving on the water and the hills. Every belief is tentative as long as we eat of this world, the day changes to a forest-green night, the river reflects light, a sadhu from Calcutta in an orange raincoat asks, ‘Do you speak English?’ and then sings a quavering hymn about God coming home in the evening. And traffic is the only heartbeat – the insistent flow of people across bridges, conversations gliding in the dark, the merry-go-round of shops. A sign on a tree says, ‘Instant Enlightenment Cosy Corner’ but all I hear are the multi-coloured noises of an uninterruptible world.