RageforLight

Refugee

2020-07-03T03:16:00.002-07:00

Paper and plastic strewn all over the rail tracks. A crumpled polythene bag curls over the rusty iron. There are power-lines overhead, taut and thin. Perhaps they are for the trains. Are the trains electric? There is a flood-light on the struts of electric wires. It is weak and characterless against the still-light evening sky.

By contrast the small fire in the middle of our huddled group is full of life. Flickering, dying, reviving. Quiet crackling. The light dances gently on Hasan’s thin polythene raincoat. He is is resting his head on his father’s knee. He is a sturdy, stocky, teenager. But the long walk and unrelenting cold has worn him out. He is curled up like a child. Dark hair and sharp nose. Eyes closed. The edge of the dirty make-shift tent half covers Hasan’s back. Fuad, Hasan’s father, keeps his palm protectively on Hasan’s temple. Immobile. But a caress, nonetheless. Fuad is bald, but his chin is covered in silver stubble.

I don’t know the two men next to Fuad. In their late twenties, or early thirties. The one nearest to Fuad has a sharp jaw, aquiline nose. The other has heavier features. He’d have looked almost menacing if he wasn’t clutching a worn, pink cotton hat. There is an empty can of sardines next to the fire. The aroma of its remnants wafts upwards, mingling with the smell of smoke, reminding us of our hunger. My stomach clenches. The plastic water bottle is now half empty.

Beyond us, the rest of our camp ranges haphazardly across the railway lines. Men standing in small groups. A young woman tracks the stumbling explorations of a toddler with tense eyes. Three older women sit side by side on a rail-track. Their scarves are a colourful contrast to the dreary beige of our surroundings. One of them has found an umbrella, and clutches it to ward off the light, miserable drizzle. By the side of a shallow wall near the station, the group of young boys are already asleep. I had watched them during our long dreary walk. Faiz, Amir, and… my mind goes blank. Who’s the third? Sayed? Yes, that’s right.. All three ranging between twelve and fourteen. Skinny, scruffy, with long limbs that did not seem to obey them as they walked, or sat. Nervous eyes.

But now in the fading light they are three bundles of cloth. Two huddled up in an almost infant-like pose. The third, probably the lanky Amir, stretched out like a long, weather-beaten bag. Its hard to tell one from the other, for their heads are covered by their make-shift blankets. I look closer. The “blankets” are layers of random bits of cloth. I haven’t talked to them, other than a brief word or two. They keep to themselves, and also avoid the older men. They pretend to be tough, sitting with with wide-spread legs near the cooking fire, shoulders as broad as possible, spitting onto the path with a confidence belied by their eyes… I remember watching Faiz when he thought he wasn’t being watched. Squatting like a little child, struggling to open the cover of a packet of food. Scrabbling, hesitant fingers. Boys who should still be with their mother. Or playing outside their houses.

Opposite them, across the tracks, another boy bathes using a small plastic bucket. He pours water into the bucket from a weather-beaten iron drum. He is surrounded by rubble, as if this station had been bombed in a war. Behind him is an ancient railway carriage, gone entirely to rust. I see more people arrive at the encampment. A middle-aged, serious faced man walks at the head of the group. On his shoulders is a small, sleepy looking girl. One of her eyes is obscured by a lock of hair. Behind him a woman walks in a white, blue and pink scarf. She is clutching the hand of a girl of perhaps seven or eight, in oversize pants and a sweater fit for someone twice her size.

The struts of the electric lines repeat one after the other into the distance. Likes the sketches my art teacher used to draw in school. To teach us about perspective, and how objects in the distance look smaller than those nearby. My body aches from the long walk. It is hard to keep my eyes open, but I don’t want to head to my torn polythene bedding. The sharp edges of the stony ground push through the thin fabric, keeps me awake. Even when my body becomes accustomed to the hard ground, my mind is like a machine. Running. Running. Like a film. Like it is also a carriage on a track. The past comes into view unstoppable. Full of colour and smell and it is so real I tense so hard I cannot breath. I try to breath-in my bedding for distraction. Dig the lengthening nail on my index finger deep into the skin of my palm.

Samantakuta

2019-02-07T01:16:00.000-08:00

The wind here is endless.

It whistles. Pokes its icy snout into my crevices.

Whispers past the iron railings stuck into my side. I shouldn’t care. But personally, I like the sun. It is my great misfortune to have spent my whole life (well, at least the past 12,000 years. Bit of a blur before that) on a cold and foggy mountain-top.

Below my bulbous, bushy, bulk the mountain falls away in a vertiginous swoop. After about a hundred meters straight down the hillside slopes outward into a gentler incline. A line of steps snakes down ridges like a long white jagged scar. Through thick green forest. Brightly dressed devotees like ants, swarming up wards. They start climbing in the middle of the night. So you hardly ever see the mountain without them. Overall, if you were a bird flying above me, being whipped about gusts, you’d see something like a giant god-sized mossy ant-hill.

I’d introduce myself.

But it’s complicated. I’m so many things.

And yet, mostly I’m not any of those things.

Not in the way people think, anyway.

You’d think I’d remember exactly when I attained boulder-hood, but one of the problems of being thousands years old is that you tend to forget things. You’d also think I have interesting thoughts, having seen so many monsoons pass me by. You’d be wrong. It turns out I don’t have any of those long thoughts people talk of. Just slow ones. About damp. Or noise.

Damn bells everywhere…

There is a shack about fifteen feet below me. That’s where the pilgrims stop to catch a breath, listen to the pounding of their hearts in their head. Order a cup of strong tea with lots of milk and sugar. The “walls” of the shack are polythene sheets, translucent in their thinness, whipping about in the pre-dawn wind. The corrugated roofing is weighed down by a few bags of rubble, and old, bent, iron piping.

There’s always a dog or two or seven in the tea shack. Pint-sized mongrel types of murky, distinctly diverse ancestry. Coats a dozen shades of dirty brown with hints of faded white. Curled up near the feet of a pilgrim. Ernest, foxy snouts. Absorbing the warmth of company through a furtive, snuffling, proximity. Inching closer if you move away. They don’t have names. Well, not human ones. Though one of the tea-shack boys calls the smallest one Citizen. A big name for such a small puppy.

The mongrels are the only animals that come here now. In the old days lone elephants would wonder up the mountain. Placing their tree-trunk legs slowly and carefully on the steep inclines. Grasp a bunch of leaves on a branch with the delicate, prehensile tip of a trunk. Haul it down. Unhurried. Until it rips off the tree. Curve the trunk mouth-wards. Chew, thoughtfully. Gravely. They haven’t been here for a hundred and fifty years. They were all shot when the coffee plantations were planted. Then the coffee died….

But I digress. What I mean to say, was…

I like the tea-shack. Practical.

Warm.

Not holy at all.

Which brings us to the crux. Or the nub. The essence.

The problem, as it were, is that I’m Holy.

Well, not exactly me, but the oversized, slightly cartoonish footprint on me. Its on my… well, you wouldn’t understand boulder anatomy, would you, so lets just say on me. You can hardly see it now. It’s covered by so much jeweled bric-a-brac & brass tat. But, as an Englishman (I remember him. He had a face like a morose Great Dane) wrote 200 years ago, “its resemblance to the impression of a human foot is very rude indeed. It is an oblong, five foot four inches long, and two feet seven inches wide in the widest part, which is over the toes”.

And also the mountain.

That’s Holy too.

And its all… how can I put it…

Different types of holy to different people. Sort of an all-purpose spiritual buffet.

People have been setting up myriad worshipful whatnots on the mountain and me for thousands of years. In recent times, I’ve been wearing a temple as shiny as it is tacky. Used to be wood, this tutelary top-hat. A few centuries years ago. With carvings. But now it’s all concrete & brass railings. Multi-coloured flappy flag bits. Makes my surface itch, all this kitsch. I guess it could be worse. It used to be silver umbrellas at one point in the 1600s.

Every few hundred years one king or chieftain or local Big Man loses and another wins and the flags and umbrellas and knickknacks on the mountaintop change. The ancient (well, middle-aged, I’d say) chronicles change tack promptly, like a clipper when the wind turns, say things about the old boss like "…. he adopted a false faith. He placed miscreant ascetics of false faith on the Sumanakuta to take for themselves all the profit accruing therefrom" etc. Then about the new boss “[h]e commanded the adherents of the false faith from now onwards not to do so, and charged the sons of the [insert new deity] to carry out in the right way the many sacrificial ceremonies which should be performed there”. Etc etc.

Hereabouts, the chronicles tend to agree with whoever is running the show at the moment.

Have done so for thousands of years.

Still do.

Shiva’s Peak.

Adams Peak.

Pico De Adam.

St. Thomas’s Peak,

Siri Pada, Ascent to heaven…

So many names for one mountain. There’s barely any deity around who doesn’t seem to have some sort of lien or right of way here. Some call my mountain…

(Yes yes I don’t own it but it as much mine as yours. More mine I think, if you consider who came here first. Technically I’m part of the mountain. Until I roll off, that is. Or am quarried to build condominiums.)

…any way, some call the mountain Saman Kande, the mountain of Saman. Who, you may ask, is Saman? Aha. Saman the deity of the wilderness. Saman the lord of the mountain fastness. You can find his statues in dewale shrines, where Hindu gods are worshiped, often inside a Buddhist temple. But some people think he was a local chieftain thousands of years ago. I remember his name on the lips of pilgrims for more than two millennia. He’s not alone, though. A thousand five hundred year ago, a Chinese monk wrote “when Buddha came to this country, wishing to transform the wicked nagas, by his supernatural power he planted one foot at the north of the royal city, and the other on the top of a mountain”. Yes. My mountain. Almost a thousand years later, an itinerant Moroccan explorer “My only desire in coming to this island was, to visit the blessed foot of our forefather Adam”. Apparently Adam stood on me on one foot for ages as an act of atonement. Though alternatively, it could’ve been for a lark. Or because he’d made some sort of bet. You can never tell.

A Venetian merchant who visited me on the advice of Kublai Khan wrote “they say that on this mountain is the sepulchre of Adam our first parent; at least that is what the Saracens say. But the Idolaters say that it is the sepulchre of SAGAMONI BORCAN, before whose time there were no idols. Five centuries ago a Chinese voyager claimed that the footprint on me was made by P’an-ku, the primordial man. A hundred years afterwards the Portuguese believed that it was that of St. Thomas or of an Ethiopian eunuch, the treasurer of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians. Two centuries ago: “In the middle of the mountain called Sivanolipatham, three rivers rise out of Sivan’s foot…”. Apparently Lord Shiva danced on me, and left his footprint.

My personal favorite is the version of Moses of Chorene, the Patriarch of Armenia. That the footprint was made by the devil. Ibidem Satanae lapsum narrant – Satan fell there. I don’t remember seeing him, though. Or is it her?

Anyway, you get the picture. The air here is thick with prayer. Layer upon layer of incense-smoke, wafting fragrance of warm oil, supplications, entreaties, curses, petitions to a dozen different omnipotent omniscient almighties. Like sediment packed densely over millennia. Packed so tight sometimes it feels hard to draw a breath. So thick it’s hard to see very clearly.

Speaking of which, it’s still too early for the mist to clear, this morning. Hints of sun on the horizon, though. Clouds gathering in the folds of the mountain. I can feel the weight of the pilgrims on me, their clothing wrapped around them. Shivering. Queuing to worship the foot, ring the bell. The quick-soft patter of mongrel-paws. Officious in a way that only small, owner-less dogs can be. The heft of a herd of tourists, weighed down by cameras, lenses, selfie-sticks, backpacks. The soles of their sports-shoes scuffing my skin.

Its not that I mind the company. People have climbed me for so long I cannot imagine life without them. Like earnest ants, trudging and winding up the slopes. Even before there were footpaths. Before there were steps. Before Alexander the great (actually a man of quite average height, if memory serves…) had chains set into the slopes. Travellers. Pilgrims. Poor people. Rich people. Thin people. Fat people (well, not many fat people, actually. Not in the old days, anyway. Quite steep, these slopes.). I just don’t understand the way they think. Many, full of faith in the giant footprint of their lord and god. Yet full of doubt about the beliefs of the idolaters. The infidels. The worshippers of the false gods. And the occasional apostate.

Who climbed the same steps.

Who made the same

obeisance before

the same cleft

in my side.

Odd, that.

A year of not writing

2016-12-26T06:00:00.002-08:00

Too much traffic on this road

Not enough time

and stillness

for words to grow

like fungi. Delicate-limbed

plants so thin they are

translucent

In Rioja in a walled town in a cellar I had some wine

that had complicated whorls

of musty-vegetal-sweetness

in its nose

because of tiny creatures

that lived on the skins

of its grapes, flown

in by fruit-flies to

grow in the ridged

nooks, crannies-

of aging barrel-

staves

Brettanomyces

Winemakers kill the little creatures

by bottling the wines after

sterile filtration

terrible phrase

like a Coetzee novel

Months of sanitized office walls

sterile and filtered, have left tall, white

canyons, an endless

canvas strait-jacket

in my head

Meandering camel-paths have become

asphalted-over

No weaving caravans

from Xi’an, where the king of Qin
had his terracotta golems,

through Kashgar and Samarkand
Mongol, Turkic and Persian

to Palmyrene
caravanserai, souqs
at Aleppo,

Constantinople...

No ships embark

from the Moluccan archipelago

or Jiaozhi, beyond
the Golden Chersonese
clinging tight

to the coasts of

Malabar and Coromandel
past the tip of Serendib

to the Aksum empire or

through the Bab-el-mandeb

up the Red Sea

Only jet-planes now

and straight

colourless contrails

in the sky

Ulysses

2015-06-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

I like white noise

the company

of strangers

Oddly freeing

Terra nullius tabula

rasa, no

stain

yet on the veiny map of roads

rivers thoughts

fights dis-

appearance

into the familiar

I can wait

let the words

wash

over me

music

Quayside

2013-09-15T03:17:00.000-07:00

The posts by the quayside are rusting. They used to, I think, be painted green. But now they are mostly rust coloured, with hints of its former greenness. On the flagstones are fragments of nut-shells, remnants of cigarettes, smalls oases of weed popping up in between the stones. The debris at the corner of the pier have become old friends that I greet everyday. An old tractor tire half out of the water. Rocks half covered in moss. Plastic bottle moving with the waves, battering rhythmically against the rocks.

Our boat is placed well away from the smelliness of the fishing boats, on the other side of the pier. We sit there in the evenings. With the gentle “gloop gloop…swoosh…gloop gloop…swoosh” of the water against the pier. The peaceful humming thrum of a boat a little ways away. I liked to look at the masts, ropes leading down to furled sails, half-visible, half-silhouetted against the evening sky. Soft light with only a hint of sun. It was one of the few times I could relax. Where I didn’t have to talk. Struggle to communicate.

The harbor water changed depending on the wind. Sometimes it was like polished old glass. Surface smooth with gentle dips and flaws. Sometimes it was skin with goosebumps. Sometimes a tablecloth where an errant dish had pushed up the surface in rolls. When the water fell against gently sloped concrete, instead of the “gloop” there’d be a sound almost like the crash of tiny breaker. A miniature “swoosh” and swirl of bubbles. Like the sound of a paddle slicing into water and pushing its way through.

I look, half-envious, at the people with boats of their own. Though boats scared me. They terrified me. The weight of responsibility of piloting them. Boats were also like people. They’ve histories like people. Personalities like people. They aged like people. Sometimes you think a boat is immobile, but if you watch long enough, they move. In a slow rhythm that doesn’t entirely match the movements of the boat next to it. I like objects that are like people.

A Gardia Costiera boat always moored near us. No. CP22022. F carefully avoided ever looking at it. Sometimes a boat from the Aeronautica Militaire would moor as well. Lord knows what they did in these quite waters. Sometimes one of the big ships would start up. Or a big ferry like the Paolo Veronese. Getting ready to load up its trucks and move on. And I would sit and listen to the deep deep base thrum of the engines. Almost waiting for a resonance within me. Like the thumping you feel inside when you’re in a club. There was a response…but more subtle than my response to a beat. It wasn’t a thumping in my chest. It was a heightening of the senses. As if something momentous was just about to happen. Military menace of machinery in the air.

The Veronese is beautiful. The clean lines of her hull only briefly marred by the gushing exit of water through small holes near the waterline. Llifeboats crafted in white and tan at the sides, and a smaller one at the rear. Two sleek funnels on the two sides. Two masts. Its rear doors into her hold like a giant maw with trucks lined-up waiting to drive in. Her engine is guttural. Steady. Unlike the rise in frequency of the sound of an approaching car, or the receding drone of one going away along the quay. Or the nervous zip and clatter of motor bikes.

Flight

2012-08-09T09:38:00.000-07:00

Years ago my mother wrote short stories about mice
who lived in the store room in Hatton.
It was magical yet familiar,
a dream set in all the intricate details,
smells and feel of home.
I was in the stories, and Appa and Ammi, Akki,
Saras akka, my cousin Shehan
and Subramaniam aatha the cook.
When I read them now the memories flood
back like a warm, inchoate blanket,
a winter duvet where the years
have gnawed little rips
and the occasional tear.
Sometimes I wonder
whether those days
were ever real.
Whether the vague terrors of childhood
have been smoothed over
with the velvet dust of years.
I try to grasp again the feel
of cat’s whiskers on the back of my hand,
the smell of morning in Hatton,
as if nothing in the landscape had ever been touched.
Complex multi-layered bouquet
of crushed guava leaf,
thrill of chlorophyll like perfume...
as a kid, I remember smelling
it for minutes while in a tree.
Smoky crackle of twigs in the fireplace.
Uneven squeak of floorboards.
Scarred cane wood settees in the sitting room,
furniture we’ve had from before the riots of ‘83
smooth curves jarred by occasional old wounds
exposing the innards of ivory-yellow wood.
Books on Marx and Engels and Mao,
next to a row of frayed Reader’s Digests,
some from the 70s.
I remember finding a biography of Neruda,
didn’t even know who he was
but was fascinated by the word sketches
of his conquests of un-named women
in harvest fields.
Smiling, subservient faces of estate workers
with whom I couldn’t speak, my Tamil too halting.
Even back then I knew vaguely of their grotesque poverty,
having to drink tea from a hollowed out half coconut
gristle still spiky on the outer shell,
breakfast a morsel of unleavened roti bread,
livened only by a bite of nai miris.
Shallow walls of the tortoise enclosure,
residents trundling
in a constrained oval
jaws chewing in slow motion.
They laid an egg once, but nothing came of it.
Sterile white oval,
small work of flawed magic.
Five years later,
In Rajagiriyra we lived upstairs
above the Bandaranaike’s.
I used to slide down
the banisters of those stairs
for hours.
Dreaming up a dozen lives that I
thought I led.
Always been like that. Always will be.
Living in my head.
Living in worlds
I made for myself.
Ten years later, after we moved to Wattala
at lunch I used to read books, TV
blaring in the background
and appa and ammi nearby,
The smell of sambol, mallung salad, fried eggplant...
would drift in the air, mingle with
updates from Saras akka about food prices,
our driver Appuhamy’s lectures on politics,
dog grunts and the smoothness of cats
lurking hopefully on chairs, waiting
for a piece of fish-bone with watchful eyes.
Now, in my own apartment in Clingendael
(watched by a fat Dutch pigeon
on the balcony rail)
I read my mother’s poems.
She has that knack of catching colours
A painter’s eye.
Clear window that cuts through
mundane daily updates, stilted
language of emails.
I wish talking to family was always like this
Clarity and warmth in colour.
I remember as a child,
when left alone
I used to feel their absence
like I had been moved away from a hearth
like someone had tamped down the central heating.
Now, I’ve been away for so long
I have forgotten how
proximity floods the mind
with the fullness of warm silences.
A few days after I got married,
Krystyna and I had a chat.
She said when I arrived at the poruwa
surrounded by family, with my parents,
I had looked strong.
Different from how I usually look.
The memory of it tightens my throat,
made me wonder whether being atomized
had robbed me.
Whether flight from the cocoon
had made me a man but killed the boy
carved sharp lines
but emptied my veins
of some essence I can’t define.
Singha Road to San Francisco,
my family is an uneven web
splayed across the world.
They are like friends I made in early childhood,
chosen by proximity, not personality or chemistry.
But like childhood friends they have seen me
when I was a seed.
Before I put out leaf and grew tall
and bent and green and twisted.
Knew me when my bones
weren’t hardened ,
when I was knobbly kneed.
They fit me like we’ve
spent time together
in a womb
or a sardine can.
They are not my size and shape
but the concave in my body fits the convex in theirs.
The kinks in my limbs and the pointed ends of my mind
fit into familiar groves in theirs.
After some years, and a few thousand miles,
the groves and kinks have become unfamiliar
silted over by change and age
and exposure to different
kinds of sunlight
and wind.
Email and voices on a telephone, record
only imperfectly
this inching apart
like the blue-grey tint on a Hiace van's rear window
making the landscape on the other side
seem obscure, unreal.
Once you meet in a year or
two, the differences
in face and skin and timbre
of voice
and mind
are as disorienting
as walking out of a dark cinema into daylight
or a shift in the tarmac beneath your feet
That’s it I think. The ground
beneath your feet.
When I see appa and ammi
somewhere other than in Wattala
they seem strangely out of place
like people shipped in by time machine.
One a Peter Pan in a world that doesn’t understand
the need for fantasy or crocodiles with clocks in their stomachs,
or the joy of crunching lettuce.
One a silent weight
of cigarette smoke and man-smell
blunt, true, scarred and brittle as old iron,
quiet as an empty room with someone
in a chair in the shadows.
While getting a haircut
I searched in the mirror
for appa's and ammi's features.
The giant forehead perhaps.
Maybe the beginnings of my father’s nose
Akki has a big forehead too,
although hers is round
and mine is oddly oblong.
Laabi writes of a nomad
who confuses one city with another,
one continent with another
gets tangled in tongues,
of pounding on the bars of separation...
No wonder emails don’t feel real.
They’re like a yoghurt cup on a string,
taken with you through
the wardrobe
in those Narnia books.
I wonder whether writing down
these thoughts will change things,
like breaking an ants nest to see within
or capturing an insect
to stick it on a cork screen.
But I don’t care.
I have no other way of holding on to those days
memories that wrinkle and deform
like fresh basil leaves overnight.
Intangible as evening light
beginning to fade
on a dirt road.

Ride

2012-06-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

The Dala Dala crests a bump
swings in to pick us up.
Conductor hanging out the window.
Sliding door, bodies bulging
out of the broad opening
in the van’s flank.
Inside, a pool of faces, school uniforms
I search for space.
Next to the seats there are
smaller seats, that flip open,
and then there’s always the ledge
over the engine
where latecomers perch.
The conductor, thin youth,
bangs on the roof,
engine growls

Pavement begins

to go past...

Inside the Dala,
a young girl clutches her books, I
can’t help reading. Neat
numbered flow
of paragraphs, lines
A baby in a tiny hoodie
in her mother’s arms.
Tiny face
like a miniature
a painting an eggshell
drawn with the tip
of a thin brush.
Features so delicate
it’s almost as if my gaze
might bruise her skin

On the radio, someone

is singing about Arusha. Slow,

heavy bass beat. Hypnotic...

Warm,
vegetal smell of corn on the cob
drifting from the pot
of a woman squatting low in a corner.
by the side of a pewter pot,
black, on a clay cooker, flickering
licks of flame
and her chicken-wire grill
on which she watchfully turns
the half-cooked maize
once in a while.
Grey ash,
hidden gleam
of burning coal.
She is having dinner,
two banana’s
cooked in a stew.

“Sawa Sawa”

A boy on a motor-bike weaves
to avoid us, accelerates
into a dusty halo of tawny light
framed by the headlights
of oncoming traffic
like a caricature
in black ink.

The words

make me think

of a hammock’s

pendulum-

swing

A girl in her teens
has curled up on a chair,
just inside the verandah
of a small house.
She is texting.
Children pour out of Kijenge church
bounding about
with pent-up energy
like baby goats
or Dik Dik

Smooth voice

unseen mouth sculpting,

shaping syllables...

Bottles of beer
on the tables of a roadside bar
men sitting on plastic chairs
dusk softening
their outlines.
Past a cobbler’s bench, (three planks
arranged in a triangle,
surrounded by slippers
of colours.) and a sugar
cane cart, with small rustling
see-through bags of chopped
sugar-cane hanging
from its corners.

...of Swahili like whorls of clay on

a potters wheel,

ductile, clipped...

A heavy bodied old woman
climbs slowly off
with her wares in a big plastic bag
She rests a moment on the roadside,
to catch her breath.

...and round at the same time

speeding up into rap, staccato...

The conductor’s (fake?) leather jacket
is loose on his thin shoulders
coming apart at the seams
under his left arm. I
wonder how much he takes home
when he and the driver split
the crumpled 500 tsh notes and worn
coins, after paying the boss.
He tells me
he went to school near Njiro
where I live.
Failed out two years ago.
He is shy about his broken English

...then slowing to a lilt.

Hip-sway. Pouring

oil.

A gaggle of girls run across the Kijenge bridge
to dodge traffic. Bags heaving,socks flashing.
Past the bridge,
A pane of glass leans against a wall.
Colours gleam incoherent.

The speakers have seen better days,

they vibrate, I

keep wanting to move

to the beat

tap my foot on the engine casing.

The voice fades, leaving

thumping bass

and I think of Ebenezer…

(at the orphanage that I visit
sometimes on Saturdays, there
is a kid called Anderson
he likes to sing a song
called Ebenezer,
shouting out the chorus.
When we sang, it was the first time
I saw him grin)

I hum the tune

My conductor friend,
mostly silent
“ssss”es through his teeth
to bait more prey
there is good hunting today, people
standing, ambling near a shoal of picki picki bikes
beached by the side of the road.
He tempts a young girl
With the promise of a seat

We pick up speed,

bumps come thick and rapid.

Sudden yaw, engine

roars up an embankment

bumpy with balding, rocky outcrops.

A woman sweeps the road
with a brush broom (twigs
emerging wild
and uneven),
in a billowing
shroud of dust
as cars roar by
How unlike
the robot
that they plug-in
to clean the pool
at the Impala Hotel
where dust is not even a memory
and traffic a comforting rumble
beyond the palms.

...and then we bank, rickety

getaway plane,

down a dip

back onto to flatness

of asphalt

The mud has spread
on the uneven metal floor,
in glistening patterns.
A hole in the door exposes
its metallic innards.
The door-handle is a stub, a
digit from a long dead
rusting, metal creature.

Music is pounding

from a tiny shack

with CDs on its walls

A girl leans in past the counter to browse
tall, graceful body. A
sewing machine surges, slows
to speed of a women’s
pedals. She guides
the dipping needle
along a patch of fabric.

We accelerate

past Kijenge

Outside,
a child pauses,
hops over a puddle

Swing away

tramp steamer, rusty

steering hard a-port

in a choppy,

rising swell

of dust and rut...

Four toddlers in a row, past my window,
little brown peas in a pod
Hair so short they’re
almost bald
eyes shiny,
luminous with curiosity.
Next to them, their mother is tall and still
Silent sentinel.
For a moment I am envious
(always a stranger
in a strange land
spirit tugged from Clingendael
to Colombo, Sydney to San Francisco…)
of their warm, intangible
cocoon.

...overtaking a line of traffic,

bounding over potholes

like a galloping beast of burden.

Smoke plumes flare
from the exhaust of the Dala Dala ahead
into a grey flower
that disperses.
At Mister Button
a young boy sits behind his sewing machine,
reading the paper
with his fellow tailors.
Smooth-faced
beautiful woman
selling peanuts. A child tugs
at her dress, tiny baggy pants
mottled with dirt.

We pull-up

near the clock-tower roundabout

The Swahili hesitates on my tongue
But I say shuka hapa

Step out
into the fading light.

Love Song for Hemingway's Town

2012-04-02T10:04:00.029-07:00

Thinning

fronds of canal-

side trees

like uneven

strands of white hair

on an old woman’s head.

Tendrils

like veins in leaves

tiny blood vessels

spreading away from trees

bared by winter

Fatness of pigeons, fullness

of Ugg boots.

Texture of tree bark

posters fading on garbage cans

misshapen saddle-bags on the backs of bikes,

asymmetrical.

Icy puddles on the road, treacherous,

as sudden as XTC or a

blow to the head

dips and valleys

unusual surface of Clingendael roads, like

the hide of some giant leviathan

on whose back I ride.

Cycling through Clingendael

reminds me of Lindsey Stirling videos,

There is one of her playing violin

and dancing at some sort of dumpsite

or an abandoned building at the foot of some hills.

The buildings are derelict

Grafitti in big blue spiky letters, leaves and vines

mixture of the delicate

and rough, of smooth and grit…

I’ve always liked opposites and contrasts,

Juxtapositions

and their in-betweens

rasp and quaver

in a crows croak

cobalt blue of street signs, straight and true but

rounded at the edges

Loud arguments of water birds

A trunk so covered in light green moss

that it looks like it spent all eternity on its side.

Rank vegetal decomposition

in the back of a dumptruck.

Bike leaning on a lamp-post, an

Albert Heijn bag as a seat cover.

Old dirty canvas draped

over rusting corrugated metal fencing.

A duck cuts diagonally across canal scum

like a windscreen wiper.

I pass a swan’s nest (and then

the “verboden voor honden” signs

begin to make sense)

They’re both there. One on the nest,

one nearby, shifting muddy leaves

with its large beak.

Two crows peck

near the sleeping swan. Its neck

thick as a rope

used to tie ships to a quay. Sinuous

as a mating snake.

There’s been a bicycle parked, locked, by a tree in the woods

I wonder who it belongs to,

Whether it belongs to anyone at all,

Pale light on water, like beaten metal

Water-side reeds, dead leaves gone wheat-beige

There is a gentle, fragile magic to these woody lanes

That you only notice when your mind is quiet

Brick roads and gentle arched bridges

Spreading out in a lazy patchwork,

Know only to water birds

and dogs,

a pulse of life so slow

you won’t hear it

unless you wait for it or

of there is static on the line.

The web of tree shadows

is sometimes the only reminder

of the pale

imperceptible light

of early spring.

Sharp spikes and small curved windows

of clock towers,

marred sometimes by the ugly squatness

of new buildings (themselves softened

by the presence of toddlers

on supermarket trolleys being wheeled to cars)

(and by the curves of brick side-walks

made gentle, deformed,

by weather and age

and by the irregularities in the cement paving on bike paths)

all in a rhythm so imperceptible

that you must slow down

breath slow

to feel.

Sometimes I wish I had a broader lens

So I could take in more of this tapestry

of embroidered light

that glides by.

Fly into nooks that dip

between hillocks and crannies in canopies

like a video camera strapped to a toy plane.

Capture liquid notes of bird sound,

note by note,

in intricate, exquisite detail like

etchings in jewellery or the folds of a robe in an old painting.

A swan cuts the set-gel surface

of the Haagse-bosjes pond

like a knife-tip through the pimpled skin of sago pudding,

it docks by the pond-side, white, minature

carnival float.

Trees flowering

in powdery bursts of white and pink,

Shock of yellow leaf.

I wish I could set this scenery to music,

it would be such a potpourri, a tapestry of sound

so detailed, so rich, so sensory I overload

with the grass and the ducks and the trees and the benches and the mailman in a red

jacket, and cars parked in a line I wonder

what sound would represent the car

quick smooth vowel notes like

sea-turtle eggs being laid

slippery globular slide and plop

as they pass

cyclists could be a sibilant whizz

like the sonar signature of a small

metallic creature

in the sea.

Feathers would be barely audible

and a nesting swan

would be a long, low, wind-tone.

latent menace, tenderness.

Rapid murmur of smooth grass passing

flowerbeds tinkling like a field of tiny wind-chimes

weeds anarchic, bushy broken sine-curves

parked scooters, swift, small whooshes of air-stream.

Lithe women in jeans, slow

rhythmic swaying beats

on broad-hipped low-

voiced drums.

Pockmarked paving, sunken gratings, tiny

puffs and coughs.

Lorries and trucks, trundling elephant-sounds

Trees, rustling so complex

you couldn’t write them down.

Intersections like a herd of wildebeest

crossing a river in high season,

brakes likes squeals

of calves,

and beasts caught

in the jaws of crocs.

This morning,

passing a church disgorging

its faithful, I saw an old lady

She was holding a sprig of some leaves,

spare, like pine.

Legs that no longer taper, stockings

weaving, staggering walk,

Like Maggie Thatcher

in The Iron Lady

talking to herself,

to the dead in her head

grip on the moving mosaic of

time and place,

loosening.

Watching her made me want, desperately

to peg everything

onto paper

While my mind

still has a gecko-foot-

-grasp

On the canvas of the past.

Roti and other memories

2012-02-16T09:59:00.023-08:00

Tea was made hot and sweet, back at home, a strong, almost cloying concoction that I can rarely replicate over here. We had some coffee plants at the bottom-end of the L-shaped garden. They would be plucked sometimes, seeds extricated and dried, occasionally the drying beans would show signs of mould or fall afoul of a passing spray of cat piss. The beans that survived would be ground. Made into, grainy, earthy, cups of coffee. Nowhere as smooth as instant coffee. But I miss it now. In a way that I will never miss Nescafe, or my caffe latté, latte macchiato, espresso macchiato, ristretto etc today.

Amina Saïd in her poetry

talks about weaving a carpet of memory

My carpet is patchy, fraying at the edges…

Thosai, eaten hot off the pan. Appa used to eat thosai on the little pantry table, next to the kitchen, and not in the dining room, so that he could get them hot and eat them before the cooled. He used to get annoyed when they lost warmth. Saras akka was an expert with the thosai ladle. First she would take a ladle-full, from the thosai mixture. Pour it in a broadening spiral on the hot iron surface, then smoothen it in another spiral. She would make two varieties. Cooked on a flat black slab of iron. One was a sedate, soft, pancake-like creature. The second was a glistening piece of magic, slathered with a coat of oil and cooked to a crisp so that the bits crackled in your mouth as you chewed. Sometimes she used to cook them with ghee, and those days were heaven.

I could write poems, books, about ghee. It adds flavour to anything, subtle, aromatic. As if someone melted butter, mixed it with some magic herb. They call it unrefined butter. Perhaps that is what adds the flavour, the impurities, the bits and bobs of unknowns. (like what I imagine the flavour of kassippu liquor to be, brewed in the jungle, derived from whatever falls into the barrel). Or maybe that's not what unrefined means. Anyway, sometimes, on special occasions, you get the hint of ghee in fried rice, lubricating the slide of grain against grain… shiny on thosai…perfuming the decadent softness of Bombay sweets…

Roti. We often used to eat roti. Thin, unleavened bread. A hard pancake of cooked dough. When the roti is hot, scrape a bit of butter on, it begins to melt. Twisting-off pieces, sopping up hodi (gravy) on one’s plate. Maybe scooping up some dhal, add a smidgeon Katta Sambol for spice. In my head I can smell wafts of molten butter, mixed with the coconut in the dough, rising up, mixing with the thick, wholesome, milk-gentle fragrance of dhal… The thought of dhal reminds me of Cadju curry. Piles of cashew plucked, separated from the fleshy fruit, dried and cleaned, cooked in coconut milk until their raw crunch softened into a milky chalk-soft creamy texture. They’d be cooked with peas that would bob about amongst the cadju and rupture in a juicy burst upon biting, or disintegrate. Sweeter, more vegetal than the cadju.

…and Poll (coconut) sambol. First you use a coconut scraper, (there’s a place called Odiris that makes them), to scrape a decent pile of coconut, holding the half-coconut steady while you turn the handle of the scraper, round and round. Then you mix in chili, lime, and umbalakada - maldive fish – and mix it about, adding in a pile of chopped onion. Its all mixed up until it is a small mound, fluffy, in a bowl. When eaten with bread, or perhaps even roast paan (small, lightly roasted loaves) and spicy fish hodi, with the onion crunching it is indescribable. The savoury-ness of the dried fish adding depth to the chili. and the lime a slash of tartness, mixing in with the other flavours. The bread giving body and chewy-ness, the hodi an infusion of spicy liquid. Smooth, savory heat. (One of the joys of traveling in Sri Lanka is eating in dodgy places, or semi-dodgy places. Once on a long drive back from Yala, Nimalan, Anojan, S and I stopped at a “hotel”, half constructed, ordered food. I remember having the most amazing sambol. Fluffy, infused or rubbed with just enough chili, finely chopped onion, occasional, unexpected pleasure of Umbalakada.) I could eat it for hours.

The Sinhalese name for eggplant is batu - but there are several other batus. Thalana batu, an almost-bitter vegetable the size of a billiard ball, but oval. There is a smaller batu, called thibbtatu. Tiny, as small as a blueberry, tough and green and it grows in a little bush. I think we had one in Wattala. When cooked the right way, with the little berries split open, (perhaps they open during cooking) there is a salty, savoury weight of flavour, as if it were meat or fish. Another delicacy were the meaty chunks of madu-maalu, flat-fish. Eat, bites cleaving, viscous glide of each morsel, cartilage crunched effortlessly. Saras akka used to make Iddli, in her iddli pan, like short, thick flying saucers, small doughy clouds that would disintegrate as you swirled them in Sambhar (spicy vegetable gravy.) (I used love the way they served sambhar in grungy, dirty Saiver shops – ladling it out of stainless steel buckets).

In Hatton town they used to sell Umbalakada wadai. Small fried dough-cakes with a chunk of umbalakada on top. I walked into Uncle Sivalingam’s house one day, eating one. He said I was like my father, who would eat food sold anywhere on the street. I remember feeling vaguely proud, of being thought of as classless. And maybe more importantly, of being like my father.

Loft

2012-02-14T09:28:00.072-08:00

At the very apex of Wattala House, accessed through a small spiral, iron staircase, is a small room with many windows. When we were desigining Wattala house together, we had meant it to be a loft room where you could close the rest of the world away with a trap door, and survey the land around the house. It looks interesting as you approach the house. Creates a long, narrow swathe of white wall from roof to ground, smudged now here and there with the green of mould. Long windows, all round. Art-deco minaret. An atheist’s steeple. Silent pulpit where sermons can waft into the head.

Like many a random childhood dream, it didn't exactly work out. The electrician didn't put in a connection for a fan (I remember him now, large and rotund, unruly hair and hirsute body like a somewhat gormless bear). I never did use it to hang out. Maybe it was too small a room to do anything with. Now it is the Colombo version of Hatton's Lata Pata (junk) room full of odds and ends and bits of things that don't fit anywhere else Disassembled pieces of double beds. Now that I think of it, they're the skeleton's of trees like bits of people, that survive over millenia. Bones. If I was there now, would the air smell different up there, if one stayed long enough? Would birds come in and nest in the lattice-work above the windows if I didn’t make too much noise?

I wonder what I could do with the place. Fit in a table and a bean bag? Watch the back yard, watch who walks up and down Singha road. Watch uncle Bandula get drunk and start shouting at people on the road or at imaginary enemies. Run my hands over the smooth ridges of the closed trapdoor, enjoy being away from the world, like when I’m wearing earphones.

Perhaps someday far off a child of mine

will explore, in the loft room, now that I am too old

too set in the matrix of adulthood

for play

Back from Home

2012-01-31T10:00:00.000-08:00

The air and the cold is unfamiliar

upon my return.

The sameness of the houses

and the dull colours

remind me of my first trip to England.

The bike takes turns slowly and awkwardly

in my hands.

For a brief moment I wonder what side
I should ride on.

My face hurts with the cold,

All is dark and sharp and angular.

There has been no gradual fade from warm to cold,

from soft, muggy air to harsh and clear.

Only a jarring change.

(I prefer in-betweens, and slow fades

like how Christian Spain fades into

what used to be Muslim Spain and then to

Morocco, across the sea)

I try to remember Colombo,

the stickiness of sweat

- between my fingers - in
a film across my face. Rain -
thunderous,
soporific thrum,
rustling impacts on wet,
glistening leaves,
saturated earth...
The trip home (home?)

feels like a blur of memories

even when I was there I

had trouble grasping onto things

events happening so fast, so chaotic, so

without control

that I couldn't get a grip,

couldn't take a photograph
in my mind, put
things into any logical order or

into neat boxes
of wrong and right.
Ammi and Appa are to the right of me, to

the left of me, below me and above
me, I try now to remember
moments of communication,
common ground.

The conversations we had, the three of us
sitting in a solemn circle on the balcony,
(Appa tells me to be careful when I enter
because the parrots are feeding)
in the growing dark,
me slapping away mosquitoes, real and
imagined with one of appa's handkerchiefs
that I took off a rack

Appa tells me

how he had been brought down to Ragama

as a child

How his family came from Malaysia

the travels of his grand uncle

[censored]

ammi talks of how she and appa met, how her parents reacted, at first,
how they ended up in the same office,
just out of law college,

[censored]

Ammi is so apprehensive

about my impending

departure

About me being a ghost

That there is almost nothing that I can say

to help

Only inanities

Often I feel as if I have nothing to share
or maybe no time to share

no space for it in my head or theirs

The Colombo lifestyle beckons seductively,

colours to see,

smells

to smell, not like

this icy

city

(although, this early winter morning

in the Hague as I head to work, steam

or smoke

rises slowly

from a building,

and the light is soft

there is a spare, gentle beauty

in the skeletons of trees

and the delicate sun.

Smell of manure slowly makes its way

through the cold, still air)

Insidious?

so many people, so poor, so
at beck and call, doormen who open doors, people to

pack one's grocery bags, push one's elevator buttons

drivers to drive....

(I remember looking at the way I was dressed, and looking at the way A was dressed,
how new my clothes were, how tattered his clothes were)

....cooks to cook.

The nostaligia and

displacement

(or at least the burning

edge of it)

will last only a few days

After which I will

re-submerge

into routine

back to the quotidian

out of the flow

of the jar and judder and sideways leap of

creative life

No warp no woof no deviation

No colour no spark that does not fade

over the day

the teeth in the wind will drive away
all memory

of heat and dust
and moisture

know

that some of this is man-

-made handmade by me the hand

maid of my own

dark mate)
Its funny how I am two different men

in Colombo and The Hague

Back home my brain

is a storm

of multi-coloured sand

in my mouth and in the trees

the road and

in the sound of bees

here it is

is a merry-go-round

faded grey

Is neither me?

Perhaps one place

throws into sharp relief the other.

Makes the cold keener on this side, thickens
the smoke and dust

on the other.

Trundling routine vs chaos. Deafening silence vs cacophony.
Middle-class

mundane-
ity vs grotesque
disparity...

Perhaps
I’m just painting

two straw men

Perhaps being a stranger

in both places make me blind

to the gentle, pleasing

in-betweens

(and oh the sky is beautiful

It reminds of those fleeting

moments at the edge of consciousness

drunk with music, alcohol, or emotion)

Perhaps instead of a dirge I need a love song

(I started reading Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return

to the Native Land and

was taken aback by his bitterness

did not feel like reading on)

Maybe be
like Frank McCourt who

could laugh

about his Limerick childhood

where his baby brother had to drink, instead of milk,

for lack of money, sugar water

given by a friendly barman.

Dip beneath the veil, feel

the face of everyday

Enough Gemini.

Time to return,

Sagittarius.

Time to feel

the roundness of cobblestones.
(A man in front whistles while

dragging a bag through sleet)

Through the hoof

on every cleat.

Road

2012-01-05T21:02:00.000-08:00

An old woman

with unruly graying hair cradles

a bundle of wood,
long and twisted.

Telephone poles lie abandoned,
covered in weeds.

Boy swinginging a stick, a

worn towel wrapped
around his thin shoulders

like a shawl. A

little girl with a flowered skirt

pauses as she heads into a temple,

gazes at our bus.

Roof-tiles
in the old-fashioned

arched style,
troughs and peaks of

asymmetrical
aging curves.

The roads begin to wind
as we climb. Steep
side lanes
cut into the hillside and
disappear
into the trees.

Old man in white,
jowls bunched under moustache.

Half-made earthen steps
weave along the road

stony, wild.

Two dogs wrestle in the grass.

Roadside stalls
on the kadugannawa climb
have dangling
harsh bright
florescent lights.

The hillside falls away
below
The bus ahead is crowded,
passengers struggling for
space and grip, I
feel uncomfortable, watching them
from our comfy seats.

Curtains are neatly tied
in the window
of a wooden shack.

Old poster fading on a tree trunk,

bright signs

stuck in paddy fields.

A tree like a crouching witch

with branches
like gnarled hands.

Bundles of rope
trussed neatly
in a row in a shop verandah.

Squad of orderly milk cans

in the back of a truck.
Black dog

resting his snout on cement floor.

In the back of a lorry, a

boy sits
on crates of empties,

hands clasping the necks

of two bottles

Unhusked corn in piles.

A Jackfruit tree emerges

from the thatched roof

of a small hut

(glimpse of trunk
within).

Someone has used sticks and branches

to weigh down the tagaram roof

of a stall.

Jackfruit split

with ripeness, or a heavy fall,

innards barely visible.

Old fertilizer bags lie abandoned.

Men sitting on tree trunks
on the back of a
truck, one young

and talkative, another

old with white hair.

A child peeks

over the seat of a motorbike.

Vehicle graveyard,
out front a trailer lies tractor-
less, filled
with rusted junk.

Round scar
of a fallen limb on the bole of a tree

We eat at a place called Saruketha (fertile
paddy field)

I like the name,
although the devilled
cuttlefish is bland,

“mee kiri kamu!” (lets eat
buffalo curd!) on a sign

“Bulath vitak!” (betel leaf
bunches!)
on another.

Schoolgirls in pigtails.
Graying hair of a
man on a bicycle.

A bed on the verandah of a

wattle and daub house

has a red sheet.

Fragments of a poster on a tree.

A tuk tuk driver leans back, foot near handle,

texting on his mobile.

White chest hair on a middle aged man,
his sarong tied high
on his belly.

Breadfruit leaves
turn yellow
on the ground.

House near the rail-tracks, walls
discolored
by time and dirt.

A bamboo grove,
young leaves spiky
and wild.

Old leaves
gather in clumps
on corrugated roofs.

Fuselage of an old van

near a garage. An

old woman

re-ties her waist-cloth.

watching the road.

Idle whip of a cow’s tail.
A thatched roof on stilts protects
an orderly pile of bricks,
there must be a kiln nearby. A
stray dog watches
the buses go by,
Drying clothes weigh a line into an awkward curve
Houses painted a fading lime green
and dusty pink.

A man sits by a pile of unhusked corn, his

blackened pot
ready for customers.

Another pot,
covered.

smoke rising.

AH

2011-12-02T07:42:00.001-08:00

His lanky gauntness is omnipresent. Careworn grey trousers hanging loosely off his thin legs. So tall and so spare he could have been made out of wood. Hooked Roman nose and missing teeth. An emperor who grew up stuck inside the chicken coop of the mind. He works with the energy of a demon (climbing, chopping, fixing, digging...) and the precision of a machine, one of those people for whom every knife-stroke, every step lands perfectly. He has a cognitive sharpness that almost cuts, deployed often to track which cars and buses and vans he overtook. Daily he launches foul-mouthed illogical rants about politics, politicians, war and the cost of living.

When I was a kid, before “tuition class” or stuck in traffic along the grimy length of the airport road he used to tell me things...

Like when in his village, there had been a dead body. Decomposed. He had helped carry the cadaver, the skin coming off in his hands. Had taken a small piece of bone, given it to a drunken man at a tavern and told him it was dried fish. Told him to eat it.

About a soldier who had been assigned to use heavy machinery in a field, a motor hoe or something. How he had been using it illegally in another place to make some money, and how the heavy claw of the machine had fallen back on him. Crushing him. AH and other soldiers had taken him to hospital. His head on AH's lap. Before he died he told AH that he was sad about his family, that he was thinking of his family.

And about his days driving a toddy lorry. I pictured one of the lumbering, ancient, rumbling, panting wooden-backed monsters that ply the roads from the coast to the hills up and down. When they went to pick up the toddy one day, he drank so much he couldn’t reverse the lorry out of its parking spot. Showed me with his hands him repeatedly trying to put the lorry in gear. I pictured one of those tall gear shafts like the ones you see in TATA buses

He used to offer me plantains and mangoes and jackfruit. The mangoes would occasionally still bear the black debris from the cut of a sooty knife. Proffer them with an aggression and insistence that bordered on harassment, that may have been amusing, interesting in an old woman but almost a physical affront coming from a man. Words used like loose bullets uncontrolled. Occasionally taunting. Waiting for you to rise to the bait.

Back when he lived in Dummalasuriya we went down to AH’s house. Bathed in the river. AH in makeshift swimming trunks fashioned out of a knotted banyan-vest. Drank toddy out of a large one-and-a-half litre plastic coke bottle, till we were laughing uncontrollably. While my father lay content in an armchair on the verandah. His wife made curried squid, tiny, digit-sized morsels speared with iratu (the stalks of coconut leaves) and a pollos (young jackfruit) curry, so thick with coconut milk that the chunks disintegrated in my mouth like blocks of savoury cream.

Some years later, when she got aches and pains in her knees, AH used to complain that when they were getting married, nobody told him. That she’d get aches and pains in her knees.

Long Days

2011-11-04T00:21:00.000-07:00

Back then
behind the bedrooms,
in the house-sized cut in the hill
that rose up to where the plant nursery was
there was a bed of strawberries
not the giants you get in the West
but small ones, wild and imperfect.
At dinner I used to like to crack open chicken bones
or chew the soft drum-stick ends and suck out
the thick savoury marrow.
Sometimes we used to get fresh cow’s milk
from the Cow Baas down the hill
It tasted so different from the powdered version,
especially if you let it cool,
and the filmy skin grew thick and tangible
on the surface.
Underneath its wooden floors
Hatton bungalow is criss-crossed by a series of deep drains
As a small child I’ve gotten into them and thought
maybe I could creep through.
Mysterious pipes from the bungalow,
emerge in the guava grove
heading down towards the lake
Tall sepia walls, whose corners disappear into darkness,
floor cold to the touch of slipper-less feet.
Musty smell of store-rooms.
Warped wood in the pantry floor.
From the children’s bedroom
there is also access through a missing ceiling board
into an attic-like space .
My mother used to write stories
about a pack of mice who used to live in the Lata Pata (junk) room
behind the cook’s bedroom
The Lata Pata room was always a place of mystery
full of random things
We used to spread talcum powder
on the floor of the lobby
until our feet slid and we would “skate”.
We never did manage to furnish Hatton house
they way it once must have been
but the sitting room was warm and
the shelves full of books
One day my parents
called-in a priest to look at the house
he followed the swinging of a cross
on a string
and dug up a small silver foot
washed it in a basin
within it my family says
were the ashes of human remains
it was a “Hooniyama”
Something placed there to ensure no person who set eyes on that bungalow
would get to purchase it
my mother says they bought the house without visiting it
and maybe that's why they got to buy it.
(Hatton was the reason we could not flee when the riots happened
all my parents savings were tied up in it)
I often wondered about this incident
How much of it is true
I remember vaguely
the image of the priest in his white smock
and the washing of the little metal foot
in a basin of water.
I used to walk down the stone steps in front,
next to the gnarled cypress tree
to the half moon shaped lawn
unruly grass
little anthills popping up everywhere on the periphery
stand at the edge and gaze over the greenness of the lake.
When tea is planted in estates
hills have furrows cut into them
burrowing all the way to the bottom
down which water can escape
slicing through ring-shaped ditches circling the hills
When I was a boy playing cops and robbers,
we used to scrabble through the twigs
until we found something vaguely pistol-shaped.
hide in the ditches, slide down the furrows.
I discovered
that the way to not get caught, shot
is not to move at all
to lie quietly in a ditch
and look at the sky
through the leaves
of tea bushes.
At night, after a day of playing
we used to bathe in hot water
triggering the wrath of a hundred maana-
grass scratches
combat-injuries sustained
during hours playing
on the hillsides
In the smooth tea bushes that look like curly hair from far away
The rasping serrated leaves
of maana bushes
on unplanted hills.
The slopes ranging down
from Hatton bungalow
to the lake
to the right of the crescent-shaped lawn
had guava trees terrace after terrace.
We used to spend hours on those trees
our bare soles
rubbing shiny spots of familiarity on the knobbly tree trunks
choosing just the right guava fruit
not too soggy after rain (they taste watery then)
not too soft and ripe
because they might have gone bad.
Occasionally we’d build a tree house
planks slotted into clefts in the larger guava trees
I used to be fascinated by the idea
of building something autonomous, that you could live in
somewhere to eat, safe from the rain
it felt like an earthy, tactile magic
And bonfires. We had bonfires
We used to thrust knobbly potatoes into the embers
and the ash covered wood
sometimes wrapped in foil, sometimes not
they would come out burned, blackened,
mostly inedible

There is a picture of me and Shehan on holiday in Hatton
we are chewing on sausages
stuck on sticks

It reminds me of those long days
full of play

Explico Algunas Cosas

2009-11-07T23:41:00.000-08:00

I like having books in random places. In the bathroom, there’s a picture book by Leunig, a big matt-khaki book on Arabic literature, my lonely planet guide to Africa and pieces by a few African women writing in French:

Marie Claire Dati, in Jubilation, writing about women who are like fruit, Femme mandarine, femme jus de fruit, a savannah, a spring, bamboo, colours… and in Je Déchire – I tear out - she tears out the pages of Africa with rainbow eggs that have angel flesh, an ongle de genie – fingernail of a genie, where her grandma was born on septic banana leaves, where her grandma, squatting, dropped the larme rouge de la fécondité – red tear of fecundity.

Tanella Boni writes of 'Bidonvilles' - shanty towns, where 'liberte' enchainee' to the marrow, with a banana tree that dreams, 'sous-hommes' - sub-humans, who shove and struggle to live. In Grains de Sable - grains of sand, images swim, women living, like dolls or toys, birth to death, 'sur l'estomac d'un nom d'homme' - on the stomach of the name of a man (father, husband). Like a flea. In 'Il n'ya b pas de parole heureuse' - there are no happy words, god created her woman's skin as un instrument de musique, unedited. In Gorée, ile baobab, she writes of slave ports, of stone walls that still remember cries and prayers. The 'porte du continent', memories of barbarity across the 'peau de mer' - the skin of the sea.

There's a woman whose name I love, she's called Werewere Liking, she wrote Est-ce bete! - isn't this silly! - sketching her body, 'contours et ligns elastiques' and curves, hollows, 'comme un jeu de songo' - like a songo game board - warmth, dampness, Une bouche qui remue - a mouth that moves, stiff fingers 'comme des mille-pattes sous le petrole', millipedes in kerosene.

Sans papiers (Dominique Aguessy), about immigrants drowned, perhaps on their way to the promised land. Ombres confisquées – confiscated shadows, au rhythm de traverses – in the rhythm of the crossings. Born of a nightmare told by a smuggler. All the drowned look the same, she says. Sans visage, sans nom, sans mémoire.

I flip the pages… ecstasy of a woman in orgasm. Petit mort. Beads around her waist. Poems by women who could not be traced after they wrote. A voice like a single string guitar.... Women for sale in the 'Marchand de femmes (Aminata Athie), where a woman is a heater, air conditioner, seed, talisman, jewel, body, cowry. Objet de premiere nécessité.

In 'Burkina Blues' Angele Bassole-Ouedraogo, sings of street children sleeping in makeshift beds, all over the Ouagadougou market, who quémander leur quotidien - beg for their daily meal, on the highways of Abidjan…but people want her to write that tout est beau...

La souffrance des enfants de la rue she will paint, she rages, on the walls of their chateaux. Pour into their luxury gardens, La misére de méres - the misery of mothers. Reminds me of ol Pablo in Explico Algunas Cosas: people ask why doesn’t he write lilacs and leaves and dreams and volcanoes?

Venid a ver la sangre por las calles! He howls. Come and see the blood on the streets!

venid a ver
la sangre por las calles

Syngué Sabour, Beijing Coma

2009-09-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

Near Pathe cinema, on a side street going into Chinatown, there's a place called Eazie. Inside the walls are pictures of a city with Chinese signs. You get to chose 5 types of vegetable. I chose two types of mushrooms, onion, sprouts and tofu. Stir-fried in Thai sauce and poured onto fried rice. There’re chairs on the sidewalk, so I sit outside. I always start with chopsticks, lose patience halfway through and switch to the plastic fork.

I’m reading a book called Syngué Sabour. About an Afghan fighter (Taleban?) who's paralyzed (comatose? Never very clear on this, his eyes are open but you never know whether he sees anything) after getting shot and is taken care of by his wife. It’s mostly his wife talking to him, telling him stories, in a small rectangular room with curtains with pictures of migratory birds. The book is full of rhythm, like a poem, and time is measured by the breaths he takes.

I read Syngué Sabour in the tram and the train. I read it most times that I get the chance, except in the bathroom, where I have “the beats: from Kerouac to Kesey, an Illustrated Journey through the Beat Generation”. (with pictures).

The odd thing is that recently, I also read Beijing Coma, about a Tiananmen Square protest organizer who’s in a coma after being shot in the head. His thoughts, his memories, detailed descriptions of what’s happening to his body. His mother. The bird that visits his room.

Both about people who are paralyzed, and peoples who are paralyzed.

Café Surfing

2009-08-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

I like sitting in cafés. I know the menu of the bookstore café by heart, especially the unusual bits. There’s NO STRESS! (orange juice, carrot, ginger and a shot of royal jelly) and Energy (fruit juice, organic yoghurt, lecithin and bran). (wtf is lecithin?). There’s also the cinnamon-and-raisin-bagel-with-walnut-and-honey-cream-cheese.

But today, I haven’t made it to the bookstore yet. I’m at Dendy, near the square where they have the Sunday antique market under the trees. On the pavement outside, watching people go by. Bright summer clothes. A man in faded check pants with his two daughters. The older one holds a flower. Mischievous half-smile on the slightly chubby younger one. She runs her hand along the silver backs of the chairs, one after the other. Almost does the same to my shoe, which sticks out at chair height, but catches herself and staggers-off happily.

A craggy-faced man sits next to me, sipping no-nonsense plain coffee from a medium size cup. I picture him thinking dour thoughts, like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, mocking my café latte. Craggy face turns out to be not alone. His visitor is a woman in crutches. Her clothes are expensive but too young & shiny for her. Not the woman I pictured for craggy face. They leave.

There’s a shop across the street, Blooming Art. I wonder whether it’s a shop for paintings about flowers. Lot of flowers, only one painting, so I’m probably wrong. Above, on the second floor, there are plumes behind the window. Greeny yellow and faded orange. They look like the feathers that burlesque dancers wear, or the wavy things you see on coral reefs.

Odd noise, like a horse wearing metal coco-nut shells for shoes… a bride and groom come around the corner on a silver and white Vespa, tin-cans tied to the back. She’s wearing the lacy head-dress thing that brides wear. I’m worried for a moment, because she’s brown-skinned. I’m always nervous when brown people do something weird, hoping that people won’t laugh at them and so at me. Ever the brown sahib. Two middle-aged women (they took craggy-face’s chair) laugh, but it’s not a condescending laugh. I relax. Flip open my trusty lappy. With the scratched copper cover and the thumb marks on the screen...

Helping IDPs - Ongoing Projects

2009-06-09T00:43:00.000-07:00

http://rebuildlanka.wordpress.com/projects/

Anthem

2009-06-06T01:59:00.000-07:00

The war is over

Blogs, newspapers, my
Gmail inbox
alive with

Bravado

Only patriots and traitors
now.

Ripe
jackfruit juice, sound of tabla music smell
feel of milk rice wattalappan
after breaking
fast, sound
of Tamil guttural
to my ears but full
of memories
my fathers friends
of trips
in the rickety old van
with the loose seat through
tea estates. Big
chariots wheeled deities in a
Kovil with the hundred (thousand?) steps in
Hatton town. I was
in a Sinhala version of Macbeth
once I liked the way my worlds mixed
came together in an island the bard had never
heard of...
Like the wooden
stage of the Lionel Wendt
the soil in Madinnagoda
is full of the past. Warm
between my toes
Through my fingers. Young priest
in the Wattala temple
didn’t shave too often chewed
betel his sermons
in our living room…
In college my team-mate prayed
prostrate Mecca-wards 3
times a day, memories
of my father struggling
to explain children’s stories
in Sinhalese,
my mother
treating an injured
man on Hatton estate
Dettol, gauze &
broken Tamil

I’m angry

Trying
to hold on
to dreams of rainbow
nation (s?) fusion, compli-
-cation, inter-
racial
marriages… hybrid
island
at a cross-roads, time
to forge, (iron's-
hot), grab this
chance for a melting pot, enough
monoliths, scarred lathe!
enough tin-pot-
monarchy-math,
time to play
with our United-Colours-of-Benetton-
clay, mix-match-
make hay
before the sun fades
to a mono-chrome mono-
tone 'with-us-
or-against-
us'

There's
no disloyalty
in refracting light,
no necessary
treachery
in devolving might,
no need wipeout-(by-
white-van) lives
because they turned-on
a flashlight on
the maggots in the machinery
of state

Seamus Heaney wrote a poem
once, about a Republic of
Conscience, whitens
my knuckles
yearning for a
benign Babel, a
home an anthem public
offices of many
tongues
Songs…

See

I'm listening
to Outlandish
they
sing Hip-hop,
from Morocco-Paki-
stan-Hondu-
ras-Den-
mark
they
are Muslim-Catho-
lic. The lyrics
wash over me.
RacismpovertyH-
IV, a
hint-of-a-
-possibility
raises Goosebumps. I
wonder

what if

A Tamil
and a Sinhalese
bought an exercise book. One
with lines and a little square
on the cover
which said 40 pages.
like those
we used
for tuition classes
after school.
wrote songs. Beautiful
songs.
jammed
together into the wee-
hours, T-
shirts saturated
with the sweat
of creation.

scribbling

If their
Instruments were to mi-
ngle and
the beats
entwine

would girls
still
be told to marry "OUR
people"?

Would
history books
and poli-
-tical
crooks

still
spout
Aryan-
-Dravidian-
-Yin-
Yang
sh*t?

Would people
still sing
of bombs exploding
so
proud-
-ly? Would an airbrushed
Dutugemunu
return
to the movies?

If the hybrid melody

Was heard by a
roomful of
kids

mebbe
mebbe!

they'd take the colours
smells, letters, the
different feels
of
different types
of sand

ENERGIZED

to the light
of a lamp
(no
rubber stamp!)
round-which Meroo
fly

as
the
bass
tremors the
air, memory
darkening the stare,
of those who
sit

in a circle on the floor
who

SYNTHESIZE

take the chances take the
Stances that my
generation
Failed
To take.

Can you? (can you!)
Can you

Feel the beat?

Mallemolen

2009-05-21T02:29:00.000-07:00

In the spring, we moved into a tiny house on a street named Mallemolen ('crazy mill') named after a mill that (milled?) there till 1693. Mallemolen is a cul de sac. You turned off the main street and suddenly disappeared into a jumble of old houses with small gardens and ivy-hung, whitewashed walls.

There’s a decent kitchen, so I’m more inclined to cook. When I’m hungry, sometimes I read about Thai food. Red curry, yellow curry (vague memories of chanting 'red lorry yellow lorry') green curry, massaman, tom ka...the smell of lemon grass... Sometimes, when cooking, I feed the craving for spice by scooping seeds of green chillies into stir-fried tuna. Later, as we eat, watching re-runs of Midsomer Murders, (aging laptop balanced on a shoe box on the bed), the chillie bites through savoury shreds of fish. (The first time I made shrimp Thai red curry I shaped a hill of white rice in the middle of the plate, turned it into a minaret with a cone of pateh bean sambal. Spooned the glutinous shrimp in a half-circle round the hill. my flatmate photographed it, with a silver fork laid alongside)

I'd wake up every day to the sound of seagulls. Dull light streaming through the blind of the skylight. The bathroom is in the attic. Has an aluminium floor with a herringbone design. The shower head looked vaguely like an old fashioned telephone. There’s a skylight as well. Sometimes, when I shower, I see a bird circling, way above. And a chimney. Shaving mirror on an extendable metal arm. On holiday mornings I listen to the kettle boiling-up the morning tea and picture the croissants in our tiny fridge, waiting to be eaten with honey from Clingendael park. The label tells you which bush the bees fed on. Metallic clinks of spoon against china. The tv switches on. Animal Cops. News. ('A cell phone video captures justice, Taliban Style.')

We bought a white couch with a comfy, worn look. I like lying on it and watching the garden, people, the huge orange cat from next door, who looks perpetually concerned. (Once, when we returned late at night, he was in a solemn conference with Percival, the black rabbit, who is also our neighbour.) Another cat, (black, with a small moustache of spotted white fur, bushy tail) likes to perch on a stump in the fence. When we cook, he arches on the window sill. Peers in curiously. Rushes in whenever the door is open, runs upstairs and disappears under the bed. Strange chap.

Outside, there’s a small iron table, three chairs, flowerpots, and an old fashioned garbage can. When it’s sunny, I like to sit in the garden. Read Coetzee ('Disgrace'). (I'm trying to read it in French so half of it is guess-work. It's a dry, Japanese-garden of a book. Bleak as an office desk). Feet on another chair. Listen to rustling in the hedge. Bees. Mug of tea (sweet, with condensed milk) on the window ledge.

Lonely Planet Guide to Africa

2009-04-11T02:00:00.000-07:00

At the top of the wooden rack next to the bath, the extra soap (tiny stones of olive soap, bought at Dille & Kamille and never used) and toilet paper with the picture of the puppy (my favourite) and the shower-gel sit in a square white IKEA basket.
They’re crushed beneath the weight of the 30th Anniversary Edition of the The Lonely Planet Guide to Africa.

I tell myself I should read it in some sort of organized fashion. Start with the Swahili-speaking places in the East? Or with South Africa because of the townships and Table Mountain and Wilbur Smith?

Often, I get stuck reading the bio-blurbs about the writers. They have amazing lives. And names like Firestone and Clammer and Ham…

Or I read the Itineraries. One hour and twenty minutes before work, 30 minutes before I have to knot my tie, I mouth words to myself, like “Nampula” and “Quirimbas Archipelago”…. Picture Arab-African houses of stone…and dhows…and obscure books of explorers, anti-slavery activists that I could read so that I could re-trace the steps of the author….S would busily take pictures of rooftops and eaves of houses. Squeak sleepily on trains. Mebbe there’d be night trains. (I love night trains).

We could start from Maputo, at the bottom of Mozambique. (mebbe during ZIFF festival, for the afrojazz and hiphop and food and films…)

(In the American bookstore there is a book called Africa Art Now. Its big and almost 40 euros. Every Saturday after studying at the café, I drop in and read a little bit. There’s an artist from Mozambique in it. He collects guns left over from the civil war and works them into art.)

Then head to Beira…see the ruins of Sofala (an old gold-trading port) and Ilha do Mocambique, the island from where the Portuguese ran their chunk of East Africa. There are two towns. Ones Makuti, (reed), the other, stone. The book says that north of there, “…you’ll start to hear the lilt of the Swahili language with its mixture of African, Arabic and Portuguese words…” . We could take a dhow from Mocimboa da Praia to Mtwara in the South of Tanzania.

The take an overnight boat to Dar es Salaam. See buildings from the German occupation and where Mobutu came to meet Kabila….

And then to Zanzibar and Mombasa and Lamu….

ADD prompted by the sounds of people waking up… I begin to flip quicker…past Botswana’s Okvango Delta…Mali’s Dogon country…the mud mosque of Djenne, Timbuktu, the film festival in Ouagadougou…

I have to shower now.

The off-white (once-fluffy)towel hangs off the shower-curtain rail, accusing.

Office

2009-04-08T02:43:00.000-07:00

I like the office early in the morning, or on weekends. Its like an abandoned spaceship with flat blue-grey carpeting, thin white walls and shredders that eat paper and CDs.

Behind me there's a faded, water-smudged painting, dedicated "to Sumwun, love Nora". Nora is my ex-boss's daughter. She was around 5 when she drew that. Precocious kid. She could never figure out my name.

For a long time, I had a card on my computer from my sister which said "Happy Birthday Monkey's Uncle"! (she calls her son Monkey. He calls me Munkle. Christ we're weird.).

In my drawer I have a stash of instant Cappucino and Weiner Melange. I'm a coffee nerd. as in, sometimes, I read about coffee on wikipedia. So I know that a Latte Machiato is a lot of milk "marked" with a dash of coffee. I know an Espresso Machiato is an Espresso "marked" with a bit of milk. I know that a Ristretto is not necessarily twice as strong as an Espresso. I like to watch coffee powder pour out of a sachet into my green mug with the Chinese squiggles. I even own a (single shot) Moka, inherited from an Italian flatmate. She wrote out how to use it on blue exercise paper ("instructions for dummies"), and stuck it on the back of the stove the night before she left.

There's a map on the wall. I like maps. I like knowing where places are. I wish there was a giant world map in our apartment. I would point out Turkey to visiting friends and we'd talk about how it faces Central Asia and the Middle East and Europe. Sometimes I wish Istanbul was the biggest city in the world so I could work there but still explore another country every month or so.

I listen to music on YouTube as I work. I have the most extensive YouTube playlists in existence. I have "Upper" lists and "Downer" lists, one called "No Pigeonhole" (much of this is Cat Empire, the closest songs have come to poetry for me after the Counting Crows). Sometimes I type to ryhthm. Nodding, eyes focused, feeling like a train carrying a bongo drum going over a bridge...

MIA, Baile Funk and HIV

2008-05-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

I've listened to a lot of M.I.A. Argued about her writing with friends, ref to her randomly in my own writing. Love how she's eclectic and fearless and borrows from everything. mixes everything up. I've major issues with her lyrics and videos though. But all that'll feature in another post. Reason I mention her today: one of her influences is Baile Funk - music of the shanty towns of Brazil.

Baile Funk and Techno Braga ("Kitsch Techno" - played in the Brazilian state Para) are forms of Brazilian music that are not available in stores - they're distributed exclusively through street vendors. and this is part of a revolution in the way music is made and passed around - involving a radical approach to intellectual property. I heard Ronaldo Lemos talk about this recently. and it got me thinking about how something similar could be done for ARV drugs - HIV medication.

(Out of time. Aaarg. Will post the second half soon)

Freshly Ground (Part II)

2008-05-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

In a recent post I wrote about afro-fusion. I think one reason I like this sort of music (or any fusion, basically) is because it involves mixing bits and pieces of different cultures and worldviews - hybrid music

Similar thing: while listening to Alex Ross (music critic at the New Yorker) talk at google headquarters, I heard him play an excerpt composed by Osvaldo Golijov. The piece was called "Tancas serradas a muru" from a longer work named "Ayre". At the gut level, I liked it because it wasn't like the classical music I was used to - had Dawn Upshaw witch-cackling - makes me feel a little nuts listening to it.

At a different level, I liked it because Golijov was trying to borrow from the sounds of Moorish Spain: The idea of a Spain under Islamic rule (relatively broadminded rule - Moorish Cordoba had 70 libraries in the city, around the same as the number of branches of the public library in NY today - and the Islam of the time involved "Itihad"- critical thinking) fascinates me. The idea that an Argentine Jewish composer (who also relies on his own ethnic heritage) would rely on this sort of source, I think, rocks.

Rosling, TED, and the White Man's Burden

2008-05-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

Saw two presentations on development and the artificiality of the labels "Developed" and "Developing", by Hans Rosling - one at TED 2006 and one at TED 2007. Great presence, great sense of humour, absolutely amazing graphics using Trendalyzer, developed by the Gapminder Foundation (inspired by "mind the gap"). I've never been a fan of a heavy focus on quality of presentation when arguing something in public, but the way Rosling brought development issues to life is forcing me to re-evaluate that bias.

Anyway, both presentations focused on the multi-faceted nature of development, and the fact that most countries have unique features which make a broad categorization into developed and developing very deceptive.

Interesting corollary - Rosling argues that, if you take into account how long traditional "developed" countries took to get to their level of development, several countries in the past couple of decades have rocketed up the HDI. (He didn't say the HDI, but the factors he sketched seemed similar).

Was good to listen to Rosling, especially since I had recently listened to William Easterly, famous for writing "The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good". Not a cheerful guy, Easterly.

His arguments, when examined in detail, are sound. Basically, he says the Aid project (globally) won't work if it is a) the only approach b) a top down approach c) if you don't discriminate between initiatives that work and that don't work. He says development projects need CIAO (Customer feedback, Incentives, Accountability, Outcomes) - all of which are lacking in the current planned-at-macro-level environment. All ideas I agree with. Easterly is not an aid-skeptic. Only the title of his book is. Maybe his publicist chose the title.

He doesn't like the Millenium Development Goals, tends to be a little rude about Jeff Sachs, even ruder about Bono, and is allergic to the UN.

What bugs me about Easterly is
(a) I like U2. One should not speak ill of members of U2. Only Bill Bailey should be allowed to speak ill of U2 (I like Bill Bailey more than U2)
(b) Despite his fine-print being sound, Easterly tends to speak in sweeping generalizations which are not helpful (e.g. his dismissal of the UN). Even his choice of title for the book feels unhealthy - describing aid-for-development as the burden of the west is not a great way to motivate an interdependant and constructive approach to development. Regardless of the pros and cons of Kipling's poetry, describing the West as "White" = aarg. (aarg arrg).
c) He doesn't realize the value of ideas as a catalyst for mobilization: He's right about the fact that some of the Millenium Development Goals are dangerously faffy and that there is no one accountable for achieving them, but he doesn't seem to see their value as rallying points.

All this being said, I wish Sachs would also work-in a bigger CIAO element (as well as a bottom-up element) into his writing, and ease up on the grandiose statements before random Google.org audiences.

Anyway, point of the post:

watch Rosling's TED performances. They rock.