Pratik : PRATIK SOUTH ASIA SPECIAL : Indian Poet ASHWANI KUMAR's "Secret History of Silk Routes"

ASHWANI KUMAR

Secret History of Silk Routes

When I travel

I leave my eyes in the corner of my home in Susa-

They make the journeys difficult.

In my stories,

There is truth and falsehood alike;

Foxes are symbol of collateral love and

Cranes are atheists from our folk tales.

With an army of stone soldiers, exiled poets,

And rogue traders, we go down crooked, perilous

Roads of memories,

Buying and selling cruelties of nations along the way.

Most days were yellow and dusty, but

Often, the sky in Gobi Desert was sliver green as in Aleppo.

All summer, all winter, we walked with greed and grief

Searching for burnt emeralds and

Thin arrowroot biscuits for Buddhist

Monks in Kublai Khan’s court.

When we reached the city of Shandu, we saw

Upon a colonnade of handsome pillars,

Corpses of newly married young men and women

Hanging together, whispering, counselling each other

Against using unlicensed spices from Indus.

There were no frontiers between

Madness and non-madness. A perpetual

Unfettering of desires to become travelling

Gods led us from one city to another-

Selling picture postcards of savage Samarkand cliffs.

Slowly, we became accustomed to ancient habits-

Petty haggling over occult mysteries of War and

Peace in the bazars of Kinsai.

Now, you can imagine why

We could not fault our austere mules

Flirting with dragons with five- claws in cold Mogao caves.

When we arrived at the noisy roadside taverns

Heavy-breasted dancing girls

Refused to serve us sumptuous meals;

They were so fed up with sleeping and slimming pills that

They had turned carnivorous in

Good times and hermits in hard times.

By the time we realized

They were obsessed with the perfume of freedom

We had abandoned them to rebels,

Camouflaged in militia uniforms.

With all my spoils of fish and flesh

I return home

find a snake hiding in the eyelids of my

Abyssinian slave mother,

vaccinated against the poison of silk worms.

I kiss her forehead, confess my sins, and

Watch happily my Mangolian dog Pelle

Chasing frightened gazelle on the shores of Tigris.

@ Names of cities used in the poems are taken from Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, writer, and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences. His major poetryanthologies are My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter and Banaras and the Other first of a trilogy onreligious cities. Widely published and translated into several Indian languages, his poems are noted for ‘lyricalcelebration’ of garbled voices of memory and subversive ‘whimsy’ quality. Recently, a collection of his selectpoems titled Architecture of Alphabets has been published in Hungarian. He is also author of Community Warriors, and one of the chief editors of Global Civil Society’@ London School of Economics. He is co-founder of IndianNovels Collective for translation of classic novels from Indian languages, and writes a regular book column in the Financial Express.

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