This is the last of mine from Fulcrum 2. I'm very worried that the
plain text format may maul the stanza shape, so for reference, it
looks like:
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except for the sung parts, which are just indented.
--V.
TRAIN SONG
All the way
from Mankhurd to V.T., the lurching metal herd
of train compartments follow from
one another, weary
with obedience. Witness
the crumbled embers of daylight. And witness,
if you will, the jagged edges of neighbour-
-hoods, the mute succession
of unconnected events
punctuated into progression by the eye's sinusoidal
gallop, and a steady enjambing traffic
of lights. Three stations later
an entire row of men
have had time to forget their names. Behind them
a mother totes a baby in one arm, grabs
the vertical bar
with the other hand while
a modest planet of paan is born
from her lips. The train comes
to come embalmed
by dark. We yawn
around Chembur's clefted shoulder into the city's strangled
neck, and somewhere in the corrupted distance
a building falls
abruptly to sleep. Dadar is past and more
and more fall away—soon the cabin's
an empty dictatorship of chairs. A man—with no legs
beautiful voice coarser
than sandpaper molten eyes
the colour of copper—floats in and out
of the aisles, sings, "This is the hour
of changelings,
when cowbells take filmsongs
into the alleged horizon,
when the slumlords of the imagination
come to collect their dues…" I
turn. My sixth grade sweetheart
sits behind me, smoothing out her pink
multilayered dress. At one station a few stub-toed
bullies get on; at another,
teachers. Shabani
(who taught me my forgotten Swahili) taps my shoulder, and I wink
back at him. Outside, skyscrapers jostling against
an apportioned platinum sky
shrivel back
into a wound groin of coconut trees. The train
stops. Railway tracks
dissociate their parallel logic,
gnarl themselves
into the soil, learn to speak the meta-language
of roots and weeds. Aungier's lined notebooks wait
patiently in the wings
to give birth
to a city. The legless beggar and I
decide to sing a duet—
Legless Beggar (coyly): Rain in the a-air…
Vivek: Where from, my love, where from?
L.B.: Grass on the grou-und…
Vivek: How come, my love, how come?
—before the whip of history snaps back
to divide
and return: names
from their objects, the train from the tracks, the lathi
to the rioter's back, me to my seat and the beggar
to his floor. Outside
they're quenching linoleum thirsts
with matches and petrol; the sound
of human ailing grows loud and in the background
the grinding tarmac teeth
of the city. Brakes
harmonize against the surrounding chords
of Victoria's terminus and her impatient commuting broods
that now diminish
in the dim, halted
carriage home. Night ushers us further toward
its collapsing centre, dark matter, in which it is said
the entire pluriverse
will one day reappear.
--Vivek Narayanan
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