HARBOUR LINE by vivek narayanan Title: Universal Beach , poems by Vivek Narayanan ISBN: 81 - 902981-3-5 Published by HARBOUR LINE Grd. Flr., ‘Chandri Villa’ Tejpal Road, Mumbai 400 007. INDIA. Email: harbourlinebooks@gmail.com Cover art coordinator / cover photographs: Shumona Goel (Cover photos shot on location at Elliot’s Beach, Planet Yum, Velankanni Church, Marina Beach and along the East Coast Road, Chennai.) Cover design / collage: Priya Sen Additional editing / proofreading: Ratika Kapur and Smriti Vohra Fonts used: Palatino Linotype, 7 Days, Shelley Andante, Shelley Volante Final Typesetting: Ivan Thankappan Printed by: Jehangir Patel at Some rights reserved by Vivek Narayanan, 2006. You are free to reproduce all or any part of this book without written permission for educational or other non-commercial purposes. However, you are asked to please identify Vivek Narayanan as the perpetrator of this work and, in the case of wide distribution, inform him at: naravive@gmail.com . For permissions to translate all or part of this work, modify it, incorporate it into another work, reprint it for commercial purposes, etc, please contact Vivek Narayanan at naravive@gmail.com . To the first fam: Amma, Appa, Harini, Gautam, Alli contents prelude Unfinished Business 3 Gujarat: Five Songs 4 Learning To Drown 6 An Account of His Fall 10 Notes on Chris Hani’s Funeral 11 Scenes from a Space Odyssey 12 Fernando Pessoa in Durban 14 Promise of an Airport 18 The Sadness of a Dog 19 Deathwish 21 the city Lust, A Cycle 25 The Pirate 32 The Dump 33 The City 34 The Horn 35 The Bus 36 The Signal 37 Ode to Cement 38 The Government of the Dead 39 Wind 40 Hymn 41 Primitive Lament (Money) 42 Translation 43 View 44 pluriversal beach Nostalgia for Elsewhere 47 Origins 48 Three Elegies for Silk Smitha 49 My Father’s Wound 51 In Church 53 Man Washing His Foot in the Bathroom of a Bus Station 54 Borrowed Mythology 55 MGR Meets God in Person 57 Thief 58 Train Song .59 Pluriversal Beach 62 Shireeza 63 Ode To Prose 65 Song 66 John Cage Concert 67 Two Epigrams 68 Invocation 69 Acknowledgements 75 prelude 3 UNFINISHED BUSINESS To Bheki who was taken when the earth shook us out of the interior, To Shireeza, orchid among the graves, To Sweetboy who fell and disappeared, To Patrick, drunk saint in shrouds, To Daniel, who heard the first knock and To the shadow that fell on us, Here I shake your hands at my table. 4 GUJARAT: FIVE SONGS 1. Boy Whipping Self He snaps a rope-whip on his brown torso and flays the skin, or so we are led to belief. Tea, snacks, trinkets and all of us unticketed appended watchers in a circles-and- -tangent dance, flame-ish around him: we blue his bruises by our looking. Who’s the boy who’s making him do it, what was his name, who took it away? What spirit yokes them so? Is it his own body he beats or that of a discreter another? Will it hurt us as it hurts him when prophecy and whim and sign conjoin conformably near, here in the theatre of the undeniably here? 2. Silence The flown-in politicos, they clap clap clap and the flown-in journos, they click click click and more has been said than ever before because more ćan be said than ever before. 5 3. Hindus on the Moon: The Tale of Pandit the Pundit (to Ranbir Sidhu ) Pandit the pundit, hyper-managerial software king, opened an office on the Moon, another on a Saturnine ring. Far from home he was, among the recognisable debris, far from home he was, from his own encrypted history— it was natural that he find something lacking in his new digs: smooth, unplashing, desultory. Plagued by half-memories revivable—one hope—through charity, he plunged his funds into development machines blind to the warlords there mongering. Thus, he blew up his home planet, unaccountably. 4. History History in its grand design alloys matter and spirit in time: Karlie Marx in the library, Toni Gramsci’s prison infirmary. History in its petulant detail prefers to sabotage retail: now the goondas use computers to distinguish their own from others. When Big History and Little History meet at the colonnade a terrible, questioning quiet falls on all that we have made. 6 5. Laughter After a massacre one hears a call to laughter:- Manto did, Vonnegut too:- a tinking thin-brass bell buckled under heat, a spell disjoining. Lapsible, crude and bitter hope of return, song of the tattered urn. Nothing will be the same. This house is not your house, my wanderer. Please, nurse your wounds. Recopy your name in this ledger here, begin. Oh, and find something to believe in.