Prayer: Three Poems by Karan Madhok
First Published on Cathexis Northwest Press (December 2019)
prayer
breathing in the incense agarbattis in my
dadi’s personal gurudwara, where her gold
arches harboured the holy guru granth sahib—
the heaviest book i had ever seen—i sit
with my cousins on cushions opposite to her
on sunday, after breakfast but before talespin
on doordarshan, and we close our eyes, pretending
to pray in anticipation for sweet halwa
that awaits our short penance, unaware that two
years later she will evict my father—her son—
out of our home, and break me away from the same
cousins i watched cartoons with; i am unaware
that the agarbatti's fragrance polluting mom’s
little shrine will also fail to hypnotise me;
and i will remain negligent to the chaplain
at school who reads his testaments; and pilgrimage
up to the monastery only for mutton
momos; and when the mountains where i grew up sing
the song of sunset’s magrib, it would be muffled
by bouncing basketballs; and on the day before
graduation i would pretend to be saddened
by dadi’s death; because when she is cremated
under a red and gold cloth at the shamshan ghat,
and her ashes join the river where a million
other skulls have cracked, and their incense has escaped
into the dusty air, i won’t be there to look
at the horizon for something beyond these shores.
*
waterlogged
the monsoon makes it all visible
raining on the smog and dust flooding
holy river and sewage
until streets overflow with underbellies
we thought we had banished
beneath us
they call it the New Colony
in the cemented village
but there was nothing modern
paused in our own vacuum of time
much like most of my country
somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow
i was fortunate to have wheels
underneath that survived
flooded potholes of the naked
broken road protected behind tinted glass
air-conditioned comfort
when i saw your young face
drenched and dirty
my reflection
in tributaries of the street
thirsty in the rain
with a rusted metal spoon
in your little hand waiting
to grow up
*
the line of no control
on both sides of the line that doesnt exist
there is snow, and on the snow there are footprints,
boot prints, swallowed their soles, crusted kashmiri
earth and red blood; and wearing these boots are men,
and on these men are costumes that delineate
one side of the imaginary line
from the other, and the costumes differ
but the men are the same, spilling the same
blood, red streaks on white snow, shattered limbs, broken
hearts, tethered to flags tethered to colours
tethered to faith and other fictions
of the meats they should avoid and the men
they should murder, slogans in different dialects
of the same language, repeating stories
of separation, stories of partition,
stories of two nations fabricated
from one land, divided by arbitrary
lines drawn by other arbitrary men
who would never set foot on the snow
but knew everything there was to know
about lines.
*
Note
‘waterlogged’ is my attempt to write an Ekphrastic poem, a literary inspiration from a piece of art. But the scene that inspired ‘waterlogged’ was real. It was a small moment, a fraction of a second, stuck in traffic on the flooded monsoon road of my hometown in India. It was a moment that millions of us experience in the developing world every day, the juxtaposition of poverty and comfort, of the haves and have-nots, of seeing one’s own privilege in relation to others. But this image—this flashpoint—has stayed with me forever, tugging and gnawing at me, confronting me to acknowledge it.
This poem is that acknowledgment.