Write and Wrong: A Place for Poetry

 In pursuit of his favourite business, poetry, the ever-hopeful and gentle Aswin has produced the first issue of a promising online magazine, Write and Wrong. 

I am super-proud that my poem gets to be in such exalted company – many of the other poems blew my mind. Born of a short academic excursion into the area of fairytale studies, it is titled 'Wuns'.

A toast to this newborn.

<clink>

Witching Hour

A god, they call him

that sets ablaze the morning.

He can keep his bland light

and his lumbering chariot.

For me the blackness of the night.

The chilly breeze beckons,

charged

with a thousand possibilities.

I soar,

the wood slim and firm

between my thighs.

My laughter fills the sky like moonlight.

The witching hour, they call it.

Airbound Musings

<If nothing, to prod this sluggish blog into some activity>

Airports always get me thinking – my mind’s whirring and it’s hard to keep my eyes on the page. It’s a sensory overload, watching the plethora of people milling about, their facesliveshistories reflected on vast shiny surfaces. A place so huge that no sound ever fills it except the periodic sterile and well-enunciated announcements (ting, ting:). Everything else just floats about aimlessly – you hear snatches sometimes and they’re always pregnant with so many unknown things.

Tap-tap-tap-tap some of them walk briskly, knowing exactly where to go. Others shuffle along, confused or conversing or just ambling, taking in perhaps the same things as me (Tap. Tap. Tap). The little squeaks that wheelchairs emit – the attendants look hypnotized, as if they wouldn’t notice if the warm piles of bone and wrinkly skin that they were carting along fell off on the way. Everyone’s shoes are clean. Mine aren’t. There’s a girl with bright pink hair. She looks away from everyone who stares – you don’t dye your hair a bright fucking pink without practising in your head the exact sort of nonchalant looking-away that you’ll do. Moments of panic – someone digs in a bag for a possibly misplaced something, someone else is turned away for having too much luggage, or the wrong sort. So many people are afraid of this ominously glinting space – they are impeccably dressed in brand new clothes, they are afraid to ask the stewardess for anything, they are afraid to respond to her perfectly tinted mouth shaping alien noises in a faux-pleasant voice. Others stride past looking glamorously shoddy; it’s a long way to go before one can afford to look shoddy in airports. Of course there’s diversity – there are flights going from everywhere to everywhere. There’ll be Jain monks and emo teens and pink-haired girls. But some things you’ll never see: white cleaning staff; Indians wearing surgical masks (germs, ha!); women with young children looking like they wouldn’t chuck them in a suitcase if they could; young children looking like they’ll stay quiet for the flight.

The whirring winds down. Back to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And then the flight.

നാട്

മലയാളിയാണോ?
നാട്ടിലെവിടെയാ?

There are many Malayalis who cannot read this universally accepted, bond-forging exchange between two Keralites. It is a curiously clannish bond. One day, in my class in school, my (non-Malayali) friend and I placed a bet on a test of this bond. The question “Where are you from?” yields diverse answers in a class in UAE: “I’m from Pakistan”; “Bangladesh”; “I come from Sri Lanka”; and more commonly, “I am Indian”. My Malayali classmates, with few exceptions, replied “I am from Kerala”. My friend won, and I took one step away from the staunch belief that ‘The Malayali Identity’ was a brand created by the many (many many) social clubs, restaurants, TV channels and whatnot to play upon the nostalgia-distorted memories of first-generation expatriates. Perhaps there is more to it.

My notion of home, as a second-generation NRI, has always been troublesome. I have envied my parents their unquestionable certainty that there is a ‘നാട്’ to go back to. Dubai, for me, was always a place from where leaving was imminent – it never felt like home. Kerala, in turn, is that place I saw for two months a year.  I have been taught to call it home, but the irony of it has always struck me. My written Malayalam is formal and stilted, picked up from textbooks and the odd decades-old classic I read. My spoken Malayalam, like my നാട്, is an inheritance from my parents. I know enough about the films, little about the literature and nothing about the politics of Kerala. I think in English and crack jokes in Malayalam. I have possibly recited the UAE anthem more than the Indian one. Where does that leave me? Not in നാട്, surely. 

For those two months in Kerala, my parents radiate the confidence of those who know every nook and cranny; they walk as if they own every stone. For me, by the time a place takes on soothing familiarity, it is time to leave (as it will be here, in Chennai).  The response this evokes has mellowed from sadness to a vague puzzlement to some semblance of acceptance. I now have friends who have lived all their lives in Kerala, yet speak Hindi or English better. We switch to Malayalam for jokes. Always.

But the question remains: where is home? ‘Home is where the heart is’ seems rather trite and unhelpful. Yet there are glimpses of home in the ഓണസദ്യ we have in our flat, in the welcoming signboard ‘ഊണ് തയ്യാർ’ on some nondescript restaurants in a hot Arab city, in the rainy vacations – yes, even in ‘Brand Malayali’. For me, though, home is to be found in a pleasantry between two absolute strangers; one that gives no space for the troubling question ‘നാടെവിടെയാ?’ – ‘where is home?’ Home is to be found in

മലയാളിയാണോ?
നാട്ടിലെവിടെയാ?