Anjum Hasan

I remember the urgent knocking of the

heart's small fist before a school elocution,

or running into a nun round a corner

and made idiot by that prim mouth,

those flawless skirts. There were

agonised deputations to the sitting room

at home, to ask some muddy-booted,

cigarette-smelling visitor about tea.



Shy.

That quivering emotion belonged perhaps

to quiet bedrooms on winter afternoons

in near-forgotten, hill-encircled towns

where children lisped tentative answers

to the questions of some serene matriarch,

and ate, anguished by undisguisable crunching,

the brittle butter biscuits from her tins.

That slow ordeal between the window's lace

and the fire burning in the grate

was the established manner of being young.



To be shy now is odd or impolite: no one

expects it. There's no longer the implication

of grace in being reserved. Yet doggedly

I remain the girl once bent over a shirt

on Sundays, ironing alone through afternoons

ill-defined by the monsoon's whimsical light.

It was only when coloured dream matched

the pressing to perfection of stiffened cuff

or pleated skirt, that I possessed all the clarity,

all the beauty in the world.
...

My heart beat fast or did not beat at all;
I could not say all that I thought and thought
till words deserted me. I loved too abstractly.
I dreaded how all there was to give was me—
...

All through the day it stays: the sadness of coming
into a wet city at dawn, not speaking, neither of us,
when one by one the neon lights wake us from a cramped,
dream-ravaged sleep, driving home in one long curving sweep
...

Late summer, and mornings have nothing to do with evenings,
evenings untouched by mornings. The ghee light pouring over
streets and terraces out of a bottomless sky, loving everything
all morning, taking nothing back, concentrating in the small
gold champak flowers that men greedily balance on branches for.
Late summer sounds - dogs and nadeswarams, the last rites
of weddings, bikes with almost disco thundering, crack-lunged
buyers of old paper, buckets filling anew, and the butter light
melting in its own heat against compound walls and parked cars:
the generous light in which butterflies turn the same colour as the champak
stars among the last clumps of jacaranda, and the cassia tree flowering and
flowering in wilting yellow like no one told it to stop. Slow drip
of late summer thoughts - forgiving one's faults, everything becoming
a plan to find a place where it's always this late summer merge
between drums and bees knocking hard against panes, the dish-washing
clamour, and the flickering voices inside that one sits trying, with both
hands, to keep alive, not realising that this is that place, this is that place,
and when one does it's too late because the palms striped with sky
are thrashing about with something that almost has a human name,
and then it rains and rains and rains.

Later the children come out and collect in corners like wet ants.
The air is crowded with their new-born questions -
Are you pushing me? Is that a snake?
...

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 the door and sleeps on a wooden
plank behind the counter that smells of cigarettes
and stale tea, till rain cools the streets. All the
farthest 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.
...

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.
...

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 it 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 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.
...

My heart beat fast or did not beat at all;

I could not say all that I thought and thought

till words deserted me. I loved too abstractly.

I dreaded how all there was to give was me—

like water, this biography. I unravelled far too easily

then fled to selfish deserts and slept on the hardest rocks.

I couldn't make what others made and broke and broke

and made, that sweet choreography. I went alone

and missed the world continually. I misread smiles;

I stuttered before open arms, but time passed too fast

for disappointment's imprint on the glass of memory.

I sought the future even when the blood swirled now,

I let the past decide too greedily. I kept searching out

the window, I tried to stay half hidden by the light.
...

Jag känner hur den kalla svetten under mina armar

försynt fuktar hennes blus - blyga, våta blommor

av min svett på hennes blus.



Jag bär hennes färger, törstblå och skogsgrön

och bränd orange, som om de tillhörde mig:

min mammas färger på min hud

i en dammig stad.



Jag går i hennes kläder

med ett skratt inombords, befriad

från bördan att vara det jag bär

för i min mammas kläder

är jag varken mig själv eller min mamma,



utan mer den där spinkiga

varelsen på sex år som trär

sin mammas guldringar på sina fingrar,

drar på sig en stor kofta som luktar solsken och mjölk,

och dåsig av kärlek leder sig själv genom rum

med fördragna gardiner mot det honungslena juniljuset.
...

All through the day it stays: the sadness of coming
into a wet city at dawn, not speaking, neither of us,
when one by one the neon lights wake us from a cramped,
dream-ravaged sleep, driving home in one long curving sweep
on traffic-less roads with their morning walkers and damp dogs;
still thinking of that other place worked on by the sun,
the casuarina trees and shouts of people on the beach, frayed and
muffled by the heaving of the sea. We climb wet stairs where
no one's been for days, thinking it ought to be the case that one
returns with screws, a piece of string, some word or turn
of phrase, something to fit somewhere, that click or slide or
resolution that has been wanting. Instead a winter monsoon
blurs the world; we wash our hair, shake out sand from folded clothes,
sleep for a while in the still early morning while vendors shout
the names of flowers, sleep so that our bones at least achieve that
calm alliance with our breathing and take us where we
want to go: a place like water when it lifts us in a magnet wave
to set us down again, and we're unencumbered, weightless, brave;
our questions turn to images of strangers waving across fields,
pointlessly, insistently, across fields, through falling rain.
...