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Soul - searching poems

Remembrance

Indian High Commissioner Nirupama Menon Rao's soul - searching poems in her first volume of poetry rain rising have been neatly slotted into three sections: Remembrance, Reflection and Exploration. Today we bring you her poems found in the first section.

tharawad*

Where I came from
this dark room where
grandmother waited
for the deliveries of her myriad
daughters
is swept clean now
and
yields little
by way of memories.
"Why", you ask,
"this search for being
in a shaded house where
the green slime
reaches out of unused wells.?"

At the bottom of the hill
there is an older house.
The laterite
pitted, the cobwebs mushy
against my nose and ears.
Where this distant aunt
sits sharing my name.
we have the same eyes,
rather brown,
reflecting each other,
but marked
as strangers in this sorority.
We haven't much
to say to each other actually,
but the meeting
unclenches my soul.

III

This matrilineage
slowly dissipates
outside the four walls
where grandmother
soothed her aches
with readings from
the Ramayana,
her literacy functional
and her common sense
abounding.
My aunts
tell fascinating tales
of survival
the marauders at their doors
clawing with long knives.
Vague memories of
that spoilage
of hate and passion
which scars
the teak on their doors.

I begin here. But,
this radius of a few miles
allows my escape.
I have rested my head but
find that place taken.
You
have been away
too long, they say.
It is willed that I
should not claim
this matrilineage.
But retain this
odd resonance I must,
of memory blips bouncing back
as the line
straightens out again.
Silenced
by a clamour of voices and,
a tongue
that has spoken differently.
* Nair matrilineal family or Kerala.

Madhavi amma's photograph

Grandmother sits rather formally
dark hair, center parted,
age thirty eight
in this photograph of a dark room
the white of her clothes
indenting the shadows.
The gramophone
with its gaping horn,
plays tenor tones
and
outside the photograph
the children of her forefathers:
have come in their boats
and wait in the backwater.
In the still night,
I can hear their whispered voices,
as they possess her.
This photograph
is of one who is missed
and whose voice still chides
my children
as their feet pound
above her dark room.

forgotten birthdays

I do not know
my parents' birth dates.
A chorus of voices
chips in
streaming audio
gripping
the bars of grand trunk trains
Zoom
to the verdure of soft
Keralan evenings...
Our birthdays,
birth hours,
birth seconds
offspring transferred
from your bodies
are all
within your high resolution recall.
But memory blurs black patches
over your nativities
layered over
by those colonel bogey ants
that somehow
creep out of the
Smell of rain rising...
Birth dates are plotted
extrapolated
with only reference to
astrological calculus
I've never understood
my friend
who deals with interplanetary
influences
and tells me
my ruling house is Jupiter
and
I do not know my parents' birth dates.
Left suspended in unknowing
I wait my turn to be listed
date of birth
place of birth
father's/husband's name
black India ink bursting
on absorbent paper with black
holes for my
parents' birth dates.
For now,
there is this clerk,
whose eyes talk inside the faded rims of
ageing pupils
who nods knowingly
may be understanding
why birthdays are forgotten.

To be continued

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