Poetry

By Mukesh Williams

Namaste to the Ghost of the Queen

(for Indira Gandhi)

 

I once imagined that

Someday I’ll write about her,

About the young woman whose pale skin

Stretched like the 5 o’clock dawn,

Standing against the Muir tower,

Mufflered, in her peacock-dancing sari,

Braving the shadow of a bo tree

With her lantern jawed father, looking towards freedom,

But I forget as I flew my fighter kites with vanara sena friends,

Or roamed the backyard with a catapult;

People cleverer than I took advantage of her ancestry,

You know how it was just after independence

All the bigwigs scuttling across the floors in Gandhi kharaos

In rickshaws and white Ambassadors

And begrime journalists, famous now,

Remembered for nothing,

Were writing like timorous street hawkers,

Holding on to nationalist aspirations.

 

Here she was determined, aloft, this Prayag Ganga,

Waiting for the right moment to water the land,

Or inundate it with her zealous ardor,

You may berate her for the Emergency, Operation Blue Star,

Left wing reforms, agricultural productivity,

The fabrication of a golden nation, the smiling Buddha,

Or censure her for packing her bags and waiting to scoot,

But she still flashes on the inner eye,

Giving solace, Amma Indira, mothering,

Even if she once promised more than she could deliver;

I tell you we Indians tap each other’s shoulders

And confide that it is impossible for us to govern

A disparate people within conglomerate secularism,

But remember just a handful of fundamentalists

Right out of the brazier of Bankim

Can derail democracy like a firefly skidding train,

Then leave for other post-constitutional anarchies

In blood trickling meshes.

 

Now the right wing and left wing-wallahs

Declare somewhat wistfully that she brought

Hypothetical hope to huddled women

Peeling onions on the doorsteps, and

Even gave a copper shine to shrouded men

Twisting their weak forms like slow-moving Devanagari alphabets

On foggy morning by the ghats, garibi hatao,

But complaints fly as irksome specters

Within the intense aftertaste of colonial cavil:

The conclusion is that we just can’t govern a goddamn country,

With or without feminist, masochist or minority leaders;

Even some no-wing-wallahs write pretentious Naipaulese

Canonizing solemn rubbish in self-enhancing punditry

Ignoring the sleaze and self-interest

That stares them long,

Bleary-eyed with cataract

Furrowed with frozen leather anxieties

Smeared with questions of revenge and old histories.

 

I waited silently like hundreds others

In the graffiti-tar paradise around AIIMS,

In the beeping hearse-murkiness,

For the painfully lonely Priiyadarshini

Catching eye smudges,

Vengeful slaughter and crumbling empires,

With outstretched hands,

Half remembering my monkey brigade

That once moved effortlessly on land and sky

With dexterous childhood limbs

Jumping over birch and pine logs,

Skirting pariah kites;

I panted in the shadow of the wisdom tree

Waiting past the midnight caliginosity,

Unlike Utsinov,

For the black automobile-infested flow to cease,

For my forfeited childhood to return,

For the ghost of the queen to go by.

Great Events against Great Men

 

Our respect for the language of exculpation

Grows into a proto-fascist belief

As we hunt for great men in the past,

Men like Napoleon, Stalin or Asoka,

Giving them a mission and a design

That far exceeds their capabilities,

Masking their ambition, opportunism and expedience,

With imagined altruism, largesse and egalitarianism,

Using a morally untenable historiography

That refutes their involvement in holocausts, purges and carnages.

 

But if we deny their greatness by asserting that

Socio-economic fiends, statistical matrixes, impersonal causes

Direct human history and not individuals,

We somehow absolve them of collusion

In escalating desolation, misery and gloom, and

We inadvertently fall a prey to their adventurism,

Self-serving propaganda, cynical pragmatism,

We create a histoire à clef

And exculpate them of complicity

In those great events that ostensibly supersede them.

 

Our Pathologies

 

Whether you trace a pattern,

Follow a hovering leaf,

Or a shifting sand dune

You will find a bricolage

Creating ersatz propensity,

Masking a flaw,

Revealing those critical junctures,

In the symbolic order

Of a fantastic cartography

That can be traced differently,

Balanced anew,

Anticipated against a new curvature,

If given another chance.

 

The sensuous impulse

Respects no hard facts,

No rational paradigms,

But seeks its own satisfaction

Leaving behind a sticky string

Of enigmatic pathologies,

Half-drawn conclusions on paper,

Which are then mass-produced

As pliant geography

Within a cultural gamut

Of illusion and contingency,

Creating an umbrage,

Radicalizing a belief.

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Mukesh Williams has been published in The Copperfield Review, Muse India, Youth Times, Centrifugal Eye, The Blue Fog Journal of Poetry, Foliate Oak, Plankton, Istanbul Literary Review, The Mainichi Daily News,Autumn Leaves, Kavya Bharati, Best Poem Journal and many other poetry magazines. His poetry and fiction possess a startling mixture of Japanese minimalism and Foucaldian coups that place his squarely within the postmodern context. His works have been quoted in reputed journals from The Journal of Commonwealth Literature to The Other Voices International Project. He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in the World 2010, the World Poetry Directory of UNESCO 2008, The Encyclopedia of Poets 2009 and Encyclopedia of Indian Creative Writers in English 2010. Williams has published two books of poems, Nakasendo and Other Poems 2006 and Moving Spaces, Changing Places 2007. His co-authored book Representing India 2008, Oxford University Press has been favorably reviewed in the media and academic journals. He teaches at Keio University-SFC and can be contacted through his blog site.