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EXCERPTS

MEENA ALEXANDER : To Li Ch'ing-chao 22

1. Into her eyes wild geese are vanishing. I rub the glass I stare at this northern snow

I read the poems of Li Ch'ing-chao she lived seven centuries ago.

KAMALA DAS : Nani 42

Nani the pregnant maid hanged herself In the privy one day. For three long hours Until the police came, she was hanging there, A clumsy puppet, and when the wind blew Turning her gently on the rope, it seemed To us who were children then, that Nani Was doing, to delight us, a comic Dance... The shrubs grew fast. Before the summer's end The yellowflowers had hugged the deorway And the walls. The privy, so abandoned, Became an altar then, a sunny shrine For a goddess who was dead. Another Year or two, and I asked my grandmother One day, don't ~u remember Nani, the dark Plump one who bathed me near the well? Grandmother Shifted the reading glasses on her nose And stared at me. Nani, she asked, who is she? With that question ended Nani. Each truth Ends thus with a query. It is this designed Deafness that turns mortality into Immortality, the definite into The soft indefinite.

GAURI DESHPANDE : The Female of the Species 55

Sometimes you want to talk about love and despair and the ungratefulness of children. A man is no use whatever then. You want then your mother or sister or the girl you were with whom you went through school. and your first love, and her first child - a girl - and your second. You sit with them and talk. She sews and you sit and sip and speak of the rate of rice and the price of tea and the scarcity of cheese. You know both that you've spoken of love and despair and ungrateful children.

Nine Poems on Arrival: Adil Jussawalla : 79

Spiders infest the sky. They are palms, you say, hung in a web of light.

Gingerly, thinking of concealed springs and traps, I step off the plane, expect take-off on landing.

Garlands beheading the body and everyone dressed in white. Who are we ghosts of?

You. You. You. Shaking hands. And you.

Cold hands. Cold feet. I thought the sun would be lower here to wash my neck in.

Contact. We talk a language of beads along well-established wires. The beads slide, they open, they devour each other.

Some were important. Is that one, as deep and dead as the horizon?

Upset like water I dive for my favourite tree which is no longer there though they've let its roots remain.

Dry clods of earth tighten their tiny faces in an effort to cry. Back where I was born, I may yet observe my own birth.

Indian Women: Shiv K Kumar : 108

In this triple-baked continent women don't etch angry eyebrows on mud walls. Patiently they sit like empty pitchers on the mouth of the village well pleating hope in each braid of their mississippi-long hair looking deep into the water's mirror for the moisture in their eyes. With zodiac doodlings on the sands they guard their tattooed thighs Waiting for their men's return till even the shadows roll up their contours and are gone beyond the hills.

Calcutta if you must exile me: Pritish Nandy 133

[This is clearly based on the Bengali poem "Jadi nirbAsan dao" by Sunil Gangopadhyay, maybe it is a bit free with the lines, but at least it should have been acknowledged!! It is excellent on its own in English, but this mysterious absence of an acknowledgment steals a lot of its thunder. ]

Calcutta if you must exile me wound my lips before I go

only words remain and the gentle touch of your finger on my lips Calcutta burn my eyes before I go into the night

the headless corpse in a Dhakuria bylane the battered youth his brains blown out and the silent vigil that takes you to Pataldanga Lane where they will gun you down without vengeance or hate

Calcutta if you must exile me burn my eyes before I go

they will pull you down from the Ochterlony monument and torture each broken rib beneath your upthrust breasts they will tear the anguish from your sullen eyes and thrust the bayonet between your thighs

Calcutta they will tear you apart Jarasandha-like they will tie your hands on either side and hang you from a wordless cross and when your silence protests they will execute all the words that you met and synchronised Calcutta they will burn you at the stake

Calcutta flex the vengeance in your thighs and burn silently in the despair of flesh if you feel like suicide take a rickshaw to Sonagachhi and share the sullen pride in the eyes of women who have wilfully died

wait for me outside the Ujjala theatre and I will bring you the blood of that armless leper who went mad before hunger and death met in his wounds

I will show you the fatigue of that woman who died near Chitpur out of sheer boredom and the cages of Burrabazar where passion hides in the wrinkles of virgins who have aged waiting for a sexless war that never came only obscene lust remains in their eyes after time has wintered their exacting thighs and I will show you the hawker who died with Calcutta in his eyes Calcutta if you must exile me destroy my sanity before I go

Kamati woman : Saleem Peeradina : 149

Against a motley framework you
Emerge bearing stone, return
Measure again your infintely slow distance
To the rise.

Beneath the mounting rise, sometimes,
Though you are simply a figure bending
Over rubble, the full brown
Movement of your body's taut mystery alone
Gives stone meaning.

From wall's meaning
To your own in the shifting shade where
Squatting, you house
A body close, your breast
Fills his need.  Your smile lighting

Shadows in the sub-regions of your eye disturbs
My poem.  Somehow, the long sadness
You've always held there is stronger
Than stone borned at the centre
Of this boom.

At the concrete center of a city, your turning
Face's lone procession rests
Again on the small length of movement
In the shade.  In the given shade
He kicks the dust, fingers
Stone, never knowing which way you go
Or where you come from.

R. Parthasarathy : Exile 137

1

As a man approaches thirty he may
take stock of himself.
Not that anything important happens. 3

At thirty the mud will have settled:
you see yourself in a mirror.
Perhaps, refuse the image as yours. 6

Makes no difference, unless
You overtake yourself. Pause for breath.
Time gave you distance: you see little else, 9

You stir, and the mirror dissolves.
Experience doesn't always make for knowledge:
you make the same mistakes. 12

Do the same things over again.
The woman you may have loved
you never married. These many years 15

you warmed yourself at her hands.
The luminous pebbles of her body
stayed your feet, else you had overflowed 18

the banks, never reached shore.
The sides of the river swell
with the least pressure of her toes. 21

All night your hand has rested
on her left breast.
In the morning when she is gone 24

you will be alone like the stone benches
in the park, and would have forgotten
her whispers in the noises of the city. 27

R. Parthasarathy : Trial 140

Over the family album, the other night,
I shared your childhood:
the unruly hair silenced by bobpins

and ribbons, eyes half-shut
before the fierce glass,
a ripple of arms round SuneetTs neck,

and in the distance, squatting
on fabulous haunches,
of all things, the Taj.

School was a pretty kettle of fish:
the spoonfuls of English
brew never quite slaked your thirst

Hand on chin, you grew up,
all agog, on the cook's succulent
folklore. You rolled yourself

into a ball the afternoon Father died,
till time unfurled you
like a peal of bells. How your face

bronzed, as flesh and bone struck
a touchwood day. Purged,
you turned the coiner in a child's steps.

Contents

Meena Alexander :
	Sidi Syed's architecture 20
	To Li Ch'ing-chao 22
	Hotel Alexandria 25
Keki N. Daruwalla :
	The night of the jackals 27
	On the contrariness of dreams
	Gulzaman's Son
	Haranag 39
Kamala Das :
	Nani 42
	Requiem for a son 43
	Evening at the Old Nalapat House 45
	Of Calcutta
	The Stone Age
	The transit at Chiangi [Changi] 51
	The wold bougainvilea 53
Gauri Deshpande :
	The Female of the Species 55
	Laying of ghosts 56
	It comes slow 57
Nissim Ezekiel :
	Hymns in darkness 58
	Ganga 66
	Guru
	Very-Indian Poem in Indian English 68
	Night of the scorpion 70
K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar:
	Traveller's visa 72
	Surrender and Grace
	Poetry pedlar 77
Adil Jussawalla :
	Nine poems on arrival 79
	The exile's story 80
	The waiters 82
	To the Tune of a swing in the Municipal Park 83
K.D. Katrak:
	Locals 84
	Ancestors 86
	Poet 88
Arun Kolatkar
	The Bus 89
	Ajamil and the tigers
	Yeshwant Rao
	Crabs 95
Shiv K. Kumar
	Broken columns 98
	Indian Women 108
P. Lal
	The old man 109
	The murderer
	The poet 111
Jayanta Mahapatra
	Hunger 112
	Dawn at Puri
	A rain of rites
	The lost children of America
	Grandfather
	The voice 122
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
	The sale 123
	Genealogy 126
Dom Moraes
	Letter to my mother 128
	Gardener
	Bells for William Wordsworth
Pritish Nandy
	Calcutta if you must exile me 133
	Lonesong street 135
	Now that we have come back to our broken homes 136
R. Parthasarathy
	Exile (1,2) 137
	Trial 140
	Home Coming] 141
Gieve Patel
	How do you withstand, body 144
	On killing a tree (another page)
	Naryal purnima 146
Saleem Peeradina
	Kamati woman 149
	Transition 150
A.K. Ramanujan :
	Epitaph on a Street Dog 152
	Snakes 153
	Still another view of grace 155
	Death and the good citizen 156
	A minor sacrifice 158
	At forty 164
Vikram Seth
	From Golden Gate 167
	1:1,4,5,18,19,20,21
	13:50,51,52
Biographical Notes 172