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 Sampurna
Chattarji is a poet, fiction-writer and translator. Her
publications include Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of
Sukumar Ray (translation, Penguin/Puffin,) and The
Greatest Stories Ever Told (short fiction, Penguin/Puffin).
Her poetry has featured on RTHK Radio 4 Hong Kong; in the
international documentary Voices in Wartime; in First Proof: The
Penguin Book of New Writing from India 2; Fulcrum Four:
Fifty-six Indian Poets (1951-2005) and Imagining Ourselves, an
anthology released by the International Museum of Women (IMOW)
in San Francisco; as well as in Wasafiri (UK), The Little
Magazine, Chandrabhaga (India) and Wespennest 144 2006
(Germany), to name a few. Sampurna is an Executive Committee
Member of the PEN All-India Centre, Mumbai, and on the Editorial
Board of its Journal Penumbra. She was the recipient of the
Charles Wallace India Trust Creative Writing Scholarship 2005,
which took her to Edinburgh. Her first book of poems Sight
May Strike You Blind has been published by the Sahitya
Akademi (India’s National Academy of Letters), New Delhi, 2007,
edited and with a foreword by Keki Daruwalla
Salt
Salt
of the earth,
all subtlety dies
with a pinch too much.
You taste freedom,
the knife-edge on your teeth.
Faceless men eat saltless food
in a north-western frontier town.
You cannot eat the salt of a man
you might one day need
to kill.
A blood-feud bursts,
froth at the corner of your mouth.
It kills you one grain at a time.
You crave it cold,
crusted on a glass,
a leech of lemon on your lip.
In hard times a bite of chilli and salt.
In good times a bite of chilli. And salt.
Then one day,
tired of domesticity,
you turn into a pillar.
No looking back now.
Your saline gaze fills oceans.
You melt into tears
warm and salt on my tongue.
From her new book Sight May Strike You Blind (Sahitya Akademi,
2007)
Translations
for Joyda
i.
His words are escaping me.
There is a man somewhere
who might have known what to do
in my place.
I picture him dark,
lean face, burning eyes,
cupped hands around the warmth
of a chance meeting at a tea-stall.
The unseen passing of hours.
My unmet twin.
The ghost who bears
the masculine form of my name,
an apparition of rain.
He rears up through these pages,
through the scrawl of a hand
I have not shaken yet,
but will.
Torturous with ink,
these revelations meant for my other.
The breath of open graves.
Under my skin, my ghost twin walks,
a premonition of meetings to come.
He laid the way for this openness,
possible between men.
Providential, this mistaken shape I come in,
it rules out rejection.
For now, I am the boy the poet liked,
the one he spoke to, hours passing with the trains,
glasses of tea whetting the appetite for more
conversation, sweet and strong,
the brew of chance encounter.
But I must break it to the poet – I am not he.
Not that bright boy, returning
from the silence of many moons.
Expecting the end
of a conversation barely begun,
I get instead
an apology, unembarrassed.
No offence meant, none taken.
I have learned manliness in these last few hours.
I have learned
inadvertent wounds
must not bleed.
Inhabiting my own body again,
I make room
for other apparitions.
ii.
Clarity is a place of fire.
I am mute. It is the letters on the page
that are leaping into flame,
tending already towards ash.
But the moment of coldness has not yet come.
A blaze on my cheeks,
I listen to the crackle of each word
singeing towards me,
telling me which I must choose.
Face dark, eyes burning, hands cupped
around a chance encounter that I must save
from cinder, inscribe in a shape so different
it is already becoming its twin,
two extremes that must, inevitably, meet.
Ghosting through the dark,
our separate languages,
each tonguing the words
the other does not speak.
Faithful as mirrors,
I give him back the lines
he might have written
from my side of the mercury-sheet,
the sheen that films our eyes
and reflects us,
each the exact inversion of the other.
No explanation for madness.
From the place where listening
becomes a movement towards sound,
I am following the traces,
quicksilver, joy, sadness,
trawling for the word
that will be exact and unmerciful,
that will be synonymous
with truth.
Parallel worlds running out of words –
and still they come, whisper-vagrant,
sharp with honing, homing beaks and feathers,
landing without pulling in their claws.
There are no laws in this land of doubles.
I must make my own,
and when I am caught for trespassing,
I will know I have crossed the line
invisible to all but those whose eyes are flame,
tending already to cinder.
Gift
Japanese man with a Japanese wife.
Nothing unusual about that
except the well
the lane
the rut of cows
slowly chewing up the shade.
The bindi
the sari
the folded hands
the shaded forehead
the demurely lowered eyes.
The colour of the walls
so blue and brazen pink.
The colour of the skins
so brown with waiting.
Indian village
with a Japanese man and his Japanese wife.
Nothing usual about that.
Not the painter with his faith
that we would surely see
the pride in every stroke.
The crossing over
stone by scorching stone.
The gift he made us of his gift.
Transposed
absorbed
and melted into life,
his one vivid brush with our land.
He, at home.
We, estranged.
Windchimes
Wood, metal and bead
chime for me at different doors –
a trinity of chance.
Earth, fire and air.
They speak in separate tongues.
Wood a monastery muteness,
concealing its history in the
burnished bamboo fluteness
of its sound. I drift along
the River Kwai, both banks
thickly wooded before me,
water turning quickly
into sky.
Metal sings.
Silvery, cowbell,
anklet in a room of mirrors.
Tuned to the slightest whim,
it rings of polished hallways,
empty and full of charm.
I walk on tiptoe, a traitor
on nightingale floors.
But the beads are laughter.
Childish wings
on a cartoon heart,
a little gaudy as they catch
the light. I see a dark head,
two small hands willing them
to fly away.
And on a still and windless day
all three in consonance,
a dream of movement,
a silent longing for air.
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