Imtiaz Dharker Poems

Purdah I
One day they said she was old enough to learn some shame.
She found it came quite naturally.
Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
much like the earth falls
on coffins after they put the dead men in.
People she has known
stand up, sit down as they have always done.
But they make different angles
in the light, their eyes aslant,
a little sly.
She half-remembers things
from someone else's life,
Perhaps from yours, or mine -
carefully carrying what we do not own:
between the thighs, a sense of sin.
We sit still, letting the cloth grow
a little closer to our skin.
A light filters inward
through our bodies' walls.
Voices speak inside us,
echoing in the spaces we have just left.
She stands outside herself,
sometimes in all four corners of a room.
Wherever she goes, she is always
inching past herself,
as if she were a clod of earth
and the roots as well,
scratching for a hold
between the first and second rib.
Passing constantly out of her own hands
into the corner of someone else's eyes…
while doors keep opening
inward and again
inward.
Purdah II
The call breaks its back
across the tenements: ‘Allah-u-Akbar'.
Your mind throws black shadows
on marble cooled by centuries of dead.
A familiar script racks the walls.
The pages of the Koran
turn, smooth as old bones
in your prodigal hands.
In the tin box of your memory
a coin of comfort rattles
against the strangeness of a foreign land.
* * *
Years of sun were concentrated
into Maulvi's fat dark finger
hustling across the page,
nudging words into your head;
words unsoiled by sense,
pure rhythm on the tongue.
The body, rocked in time
with twenty others, was lulled
into thinking it had found a home.
* * *
The new Hajji, just fifteen,
had cheeks quite pink with knowledge
and eyes a startling blue.
He snapped a flower off his garland
and looked to you.
There was nothing holy in his look.
Hands that had prayed at Mecca
dropped a sly flower on your book.
You had been chosen.
Your dreams were full of him for days.
Making pilgrimages to his cheeks,
You were scorched,
long before the judgement,
by the blaze.
Your breasts, still tiny, grew an inch.
The cracked voice calls again.
A change of place and time.
Much of the colour drains away.
The brightest shades are in your dreams,
A picture-book, a strip of film.
The rest forget to sing.
Evelyn, the medium from Brighton,
said, ‘I see you quite different in my head,
not dressed in this cold blue.
I see your mother bringing you
a stretch of brilliant fabric, red.
Yes, crimson red, patterned through
with golden thread.'
There she goes, your mother,
still plotting at your wedding
long after she is dead.
* * *
They have all been sold and bought,
the girls I knew,
unwilling virgins who had been taught,
especially in this strangers' land, to bind
their brightness tightly round,
whatever they might wear,
in the purdah of the mind.
They veiled their eyes
with heavy lids.
They hid their breasts,
but not the fullness of their lips.
* * *
The men you knew
were in your history, striding proud
with heavy feet across a fertile land.
A horde of dead men
held up your head,
above the mean temptations
of those alien hands.
You answered to your race.
Night after virtuous night
you performed for them.
They warmed your bed.
* * *
A coin of comfort in the mosque
clatters down the years of loss
* * *
You never met those men
with burnt-out eyes, blood
dripping from their beards.
You remember the sun
pouring out of Maulvi's hands.
It was to save the child
the lamb was sacrificed;
to save the man,
the scourge and stones. God was justice.
Justice could be dread.
But woman. Woman,
you have learnt
that when God comes
you hide your head.
* * *
There are so many of me.
I have met them, meet them every day,
recognise their shadows on the streets.
I know their past and future
in cautious way they place their feet.
I can see behind their veils,
and before they speak
I know their tongues, thick
with the burr of Birmingham
or Leeds.
* * *
Break cover.
Break cover and let the girls with tell-tale lips.
We'll blindfold the spies. Tell me
what you did when the new moon
sliced you out of purdah,
your body shimmering through the lies.
* * *
Saleema of the swan neck
and tragic eyes, knew from films
that the heroine was always pure,
untouched; nevertheless
poured out her breasts to fill the cup
of his white hands
(the mad old artist with the pigeon chest)
and marveled at her own strange wickedness.
* * *
Bought and sold, and worse,
grown old. She married back home,
as good girls do,
in a flurry of red the cousin -
hers or mine, I cannot know -
had annual babies, then rebelled at last.
At last a sign, behind the veil,
of life;
found another man, became another wife,
and sank into the mould
of her mother's flesh
and mind, begging approval from the rest.
Her neck is bowed as if she wears a hood.
Eyes still tragic, when you meet her
on the high street,
and watchful as any creature
that lifts its head and sniffs the air
only to scent its own small trail of blood.
* * *
Naseem, you ran away
and your mother burned with shame.
Whatever we did,
the trail was the same:
the tear-stained mother, the gossip aunts
looking for shoots to smother
inside all our cracks.
The table is laden
and you are remembered
among the dead. No going back.
The prayer's said.
And there you are with your English boy
who was going to set you free,
trying to smile and be accepted,
always on your knees.
* * *
There you are, I can see you all now
in the tenements up north.
In or out of purdah. Tied, or bound.
Shaking your box to hear
how freedom rattles…
one coin, one sound.
...

The place is full of worshippers.
You can tell by the sandals
piled outside, the owners' prints
worn into leather, rubber, plastic,
a picture clearer than their faces
put together, with some originality,
brows and eyes, the slant
of cheek to chin.
What prayer are they whispering?
Each one has left a mark,
the perfect pattern of a need,
sole and heel and toe
in dark, curved patches,
heels worn down,
thongs ragged, mended many times.
So many shuffling hopes,
pounded into print,
as clear as the pages of holy books,
illuminated with the glint
of gold around the lettering.
What are they whispering?
Outside, in the sun,
such a quiet crowd
of shoes, thrown together
like a thousand prayers
washing against the walls of God.
...

The school-bell is a call to battle,
every step to class, a step into the firing-line.
Here is the target, fine skin at the temple,
cheek still rounded from being fifteen.

Surrendered, surrounded, she
takes the bullet in the head

and walks on. The missile cuts
a pathway in her mind, to an orchard
in full bloom, a field humming under the sun,
its lap open and full of poppies.

This girl has won
the right to be ordinary,

wear bangles to a wedding, paint her fingernails,
go to school. Bullet, she says, you are stupid.
You have failed. You cannot kill a book
or the buzzing in it.

A murmur, a swarm. Behind her, one by one,
the schoolgirls are standing up
to take their places on the front line.
...

When I can't comprehend
why they're burning books
or slashing paintings,
...

Paper that lets the light
shine through, this
is what could alter things.
Paper thinned by age or touching,
the kind you find in well-used books,
the back of the Koran, where a hand
has written in the names and histories,
who was born to whom,
the height and weight, who
died where and how, on which sepia date,
pages smoothed and stroked and turned
transparent with attention.
If buildings were paper, I might
feel their drift, see how easily
they fall away on a sigh, a shift
in the direction of the wind.
Maps too. The sun shines through
their borderlines, the marks
that rivers make, roads,
railtracks, mountainfolds,
Fine slips from grocery shops
that say how much was sold
and what was paid by credit card
might fly our lives like paper kites.
An architect could use all this,
place layer over layer, luminous
script over numbers over line,
and never wish to build again with brick
or block, but let the daylight break
through capitals and monoliths,
through the shapes that pride can make,
find a way to trace a grand design
with living tissue, raise a structure
never meant to last,
of paper smoothed and stroked
and thinned to be transparent,
turned into your skin.
...

The skin cracks like a pod.
There never is enough water.

Imagine the drip of it,
the small splash, echo
in a tin mug,
the voice of a kindly god.

Sometimes, the sudden rush
of fortune. The municipal pipe bursts,
silver crashes to the ground
and the flow has found
a roar of tongues. From the huts,
a congregation: every man woman
child for streets around
butts in, with pots,
brass, copper, aluminium,
plastic buckets,
frantic hands,

and naked children
screaming in the liquid sun,
their highlights polished to perfection,
flashing light,
as the blessing sings
over their small bones.
...

I would have taken you to the Naz Café
if it had not shut down.
I would have taken you to the Naz Café
for the best view and the worst food in town.

We would have drunk flat beer and cream soda
and sweated on plastic chairs at the Naz Café.
We would have looked down over the dusty trees
at cars creeping along Marine Drive, round the bay
to Eros Cinema and the Talk of the Town.

We would have held hands in the Naz Café
over sticky rings on the table-top,
knee locked on knee at the Naz Café,
while we admired the distant Stock Exchange,
Taj Mahal Hotel, Sassoon Dock, Gateway.

We would have nursed a drink at the Naz Café
and you would have stolen a kiss from me.
We would have lingered in the Naz Cafe
till the day slid off the map into the Arabian sea.

I would have taken you to Bombay
if its name had not slid into the sea.
I would have taken you to the place called Bombay
if it were still there and if you were still here,
I would have taken you to the Naz café.
...

Ich hätte dich mitgenommen ins Naz Café,
doch hat es längst schon zugemacht.
Ich hätte dich mitgenommen ins Naz Café
für den besten Blick und das schlechteste Essen der Stadt.

Wir hätten Cream Soda und schales Bier getrunken
und geschwitzt auf den Plastikstühlen im Naz Café.
Wir hätten hinunter auf staubige Bäume geblickt,
auf kriechende Autos am Marine Drive, über die Bucht
zum Eros Kino und Talk of the Town.

Wir hätten Hände gehalten im Naz Café
auf der Tischplatte, über klebrigen Ringen,
Knie an Knie geschmiegt im Naz Café,
den fernen Stock Exchange bestaunt,
Taj Mahal Hotel, Sassoon Dock, Gateway.

Wir hätten Drinks genossen im Naz Café
und du hättest mich heimlich geküsst.
Wir hätten lange gesessen im Naz Café,
bis der Tag von der Karte glitt, ins Arabische Meer.

Ich hätte dich mitgenommen nach Bombay,
wär sein Name nicht ins Meer geglitten.
Ich hätte dir den Ort gezeigt, der Bombay hieß,
wenn es ihn noch gäbe, und wenn du noch da wärst,
hätte ich dich mitgenommen ins Naz Café.

aus dem Englischen von Uljana Wolf
...

You are nothing more than yourself,
not a message sent to change the world,
not here to save mankind or even me. You are,

like a snail or mollusc, only there;
like a leaf among thousands on a tree,
like the sea or the smallest of its creatures,

just there. And yet, and yet I watch your face
and see a star waking in your eyes
like sap-rise to a leaf, tide-rush to the moon.

I try to live the life inside your head, think
what you are thinking, feel what makes
your heart beat fast, small body, small weight

in my arms. More than my self, I want to know
you. This is the gift you give. Cradling you close
I feel the world and all its waking life.

Holding you, I hold the world,
wishing it for ever safe.
...

Du bist nicht mehr als du selbst,
kein Eilbrief, geschickt, um die Welt zu ändern,
um die Menschheit zu retten, oder mich. Du bist,

wie eine Schnecke, ein Weichtier, einfach da;
wie ein Blatt unter tausenden an einem Baum,
wie das Meer, die kleinste Kreatur darin,

einfach da. Und doch schaue ich in dein Gesicht
und sehe einen Stern in deinen Augen wachen,
wie Nährsaft für das Blatt, Gezeitenrausch dem Mond.

Ich will das Leben in deinem Kopf leben, denken,
was du denkst, fühlen, was ein Herz schneller
schlagen lässt, kleiner Körper, leichte Schwere

in meinem Arm. Mehr als mich selbst möchte ich dich
erkennen. Das ist die Gabe, die du gibst. Wenn ich dich
umschlungen halte, fühle ich Welt, ihr waches Leben.

Wenn ich dich halte, halte ich Welt,
wünsche, dass sie immer sicher wär.

aus dem Englischen von Uljana Wolf
...