The King Speaks To The Scribe

POEMS
Author(s): Keki Daruwalla

Source: India International Centre Quarterly , JUNE 1984, Vol. 11, No. 2, LANGUAGE
(JUNE 1984), pp. 219-224
Published by: India International Centre
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23001661
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POEMS by Keki Daruwalla
The King Speaks to the Scribe*

(Third century B.C.)
First Kartikeya, there's no pride involved,

nor humility; understand this. I speak
of atonement, that is, if blood can ever
be wiped away with words. We will engrave
this message on volcanic rock, right here
where the earth still reeks of slaughter.
A hundred thousand courted death, mind you.
The battlefield stank so that heaven
had to hold a cloth to its nose. I trod
this plain, dark and glutinous with gore,
my chariot-wheels squelching in the bloody mire.
Nothing stands now between them and destruction,

neither moat nor bridge nor hut nor door-leaf.
No lighted tapers call them to their village.
It is to them that you will speak, or rather
I will speak through you. So don't enunciate
the law of piety, no aphorisms
which say that good is difficult and sin easy.
And no palaver about two peafowl
and just one antelope roasting in my kitchen
instead of an entire hecatomb as in
*Keeper of the Dead, Oxford University Press, 1982
219

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POEMS
my father's days. There may be huts where

they have nothing to burn on the hearth-fires.
Spare me the shame. And no taboos, please,
forbidding the caponning of roosters
or drinking of spirituous liquors,
the castration of bulls and rams and
the branding of horses. So listen with care,
Kartikeya, and I will tell you what to write.
First talk about the sorrows or conquest

and other miseries attendant on
enslavement. In all lands live Brahmins,
anchorites and householders, each enmeshed
in the outer skin of relationships,
that network of duty and herd impulse
through which each charts his particular furrow.
And the sword falls on such people and their
children are blighted, while the affection
of their friends remains undiminished.
Mark that, don't talk merely of rapine and slaughter
but also of separation from loved ones.
And about my sorrow what will you say?

How will you touch that weed-ridden lake-floor
of my despair and keep from drowning?
Say simply that of all the people killed
or captured, if the thousandth part were to
suffer as before, the pain would overwhelm me.
Tell them I have abjured pride, the lowest
can abuse me now and I shall not answer.
Let the dust of humility cover my head.
Even the tribals, dark and bullet-headed,
the blubber-skinned, the ones from whom our demons
and yakshas have borrowed their faces,
I invite to my fold. Let them turn from crime
and their aboriginal ways and they will not suffer.
Cut deeper than the cuts of my sword

so that even as moss covers the letters
they are visible. Write whatever
You chance on. Don't look for a white-quartz boulder.
Anything will do, a mass of trap rock
or just a stone sheet. And the language simple,
something the forest folk can understand.

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KEKI DARUWALLA
I am not speaking to kings, to Antiyoka

and Maga or Alikasudra. And no
high-flown language. I am now here
to appease gods. Even they must be ignored
for a while and their altar-fires turn cold.
Men don't have enough fuel to burn their dead.
Mind you, Kartikeya, between me and them is blood.

Your words will have to reach across to them
like a tide of black oxen crossing a ford.
The Mistress*
No one believes me when I say

my mistress is half-caste. Perched
on the genealogical tree somewhere
is a Muslim midwife and a Goan cook.
But she is more mixed than that.
Down the genetic lane, babus
and professors of English
have also made their one-night contributions.
You can make her out the way she speaks;

her consonants bludgeon you;
her argot is rococo, her latest 'slang'
is available in classical dictionaries.
She sounds like a dry sob
stuck in the throat of darkness.
In the mornings her mouth is sour

with dreams which had fermented during the night.
When I sleep by her side
I can almost hear the blister-bubble
grope for a mouth through which to snarl.
My love for her survives from night to night,
even though each time
I have to wrestle with her in bed.
In the streets she is known.

They hiss when she passes,
*Keeper of the Dead, Oxford University Press, 1982

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POEMS
Despite this she is vain,

flashes her bangles and her tinsel;
wears heels even though her feet
are smeared up to the ankles with henna.
She will not stick to vindaloo, but talks

of roasts, pies, pomfrets grilled.
She speaks of contreau and not cashew
arrack which her father once distilled.
No, she is not Ango-lndian. The Demellos would

murder me if they got scent of this,
and half my body would turn into a bruise.
She is not Goan, not Syrian Christian.
She is Indian English, the language that I use.
Hunger'74*
"It is equal to living in a tragic land

To live in a tragic time"
WALLACE STEVENS
Calendar, starting with june
They sprained their necks looking up for clouds,

the light so harsh that corneas
started smoking at the edges.
First the clouds flashed past like migratory birds

Then in answer to some unheard utterance
from the parched lips of this land
they settled like birds come to roost.
All the accessories were here, humidity, loam,

wet earth-odours—everything except rain.
The black buck got its coat in September, the sun

came out so sharp and stinging.
Never was the harvest moon clearer—a bloated,

well-fed, musk-melon.
*Winter Poems, Allied Publishers 1979.

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KEKI DARUWALLA 223
The sky an intense blue, the stars

lighted ulcers on the sky's belly.
December dust-haze. Cold turning grey.

A sky of bone.
January, still rainless, and the temperature

sinking like a cement-sack
hitting the lake-bed.
Frost, and in the shrinking jheels

the water-hiccup of the lake-fish
as they moved under the moss. Wind,
and the fledgeling grain scattered on the earth.
March—hail, and the last glimpse of a lean orion

as he tightens his belt
around his emaciated waist.
The April wind, hyena-mouthed,

goes for the mango-blossom.
Wind turning to loo that roams over the scar-tissue

land. Animal-tongues hang out. A woman ends her
thirst in a dry well, one babe in each arm-pit.
From the dust of the foothill pines,

long-shadowed and clear,
I walk downhill
to the dust of thickets,
short and stubbed
and frazzled with the cry of jackals.
The shrilliness of pine-crickets.

the crackle of locusts being fried,
is gone. Instead a night-jar works through the night
like pebble bouncing
along an ice-bound gradient.
Dawn:
the land, hard as rigor-mortis,
flowering with bone-bush.

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POEMS
The ribs prominent:

latitudes running around the body-map
Ribs prominent:
had there been flesh or skin
to encase them
you could have used the rib-bowl
to draw water from a well
had there been water in the well.
A hot wind throws

scabs of this once living river
into your sunstruck face,
as you traverse the bridge,
pylon after pylon
over a river of sand.
a swathe of iron-filings in the sun.
The land is an earthen dish,

empty as always,
baked and fired in a cosmic kiln.
There are smithy-fires overhead—
they are forging another sky!
The coppersmith bird shrieks insistent
that death is round the corner,
The gulmohar coughs blood,
the sagun leaves turn a warped bronze.
Only the blind koel, the stupid koel
talks of rain in the mango-grove.
Hope is a diseased kidney

which has already been removed.
The monsoons won't arrive.
They have forgotten to board the ship.
This is it
the last summer of our despair,
the inner desert shuffling across
with skeleton arms
to meet the outer desert.

14.139.38.200 on Sun, 21 Aug 2022 11:01:49 UTC

The King Speaks To The Scribe

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POEMS

Author(s): Keki Daruwalla

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23001661

This content downloaded from