The Son of a Hindu Refugee
I am the son of refugees.
It's been fifty years since
my plow furrowed the earth
or my legs sunk to the calf in mud,
small stones ripping at my feet and ankles,
mud darker than the color of my own skin,
a colour thicker than blood, thicker
than the brine of the ocean
that separates me from my brothers.
To the soil, the language from which I grew
I am foreign.
The sons of refugees never own land,
We always rent.This woman is land.
I plow her deeper, darker, greener
than the valley of the Indus.
More blood than the riot-reddened
streets of Karachi,
more alive than the land-tied passions
of my Hindu and Muslim brothers.
She is not the void.I am her vessel:
I hold her, she fills me,
allows me to paint her,
permits me to fence her,
so I can plow, plant seeds, sink my legs in her
and slowly, heavily walk.When my father left Sindh,
he carried the smells of valley soil and dung,
coconut oil and saffron, in his hands,
the burnt hair, flowers, flesh
of a nation being cremated,
like fingers in his nostrils.
The smell his son reaches
when he cups his hands over his face
like an oxygen mask
is the red, sweet sweat of woman's soil
and the knowing that land is thinner than blood.
About an Anger
When India ripped for a few pockets
in '47, idol lovers in the land
of the pure died like Calcutta
Muslims crushed by the need to not
blame hunger on God. Dead Hindus
fresh as new purdhas drove us to other
continents, leaving the guilt of South
Asians for imagined invasions and spies.And for my anger, I've looked
to this land's winter
that makes memories buckle
to the surface like bay ice.Memories of boyhood:
being pulled by the ankles over
gravel ‘til the skin on my hands
and arse tore. Making me white
with dust and turning me black
and afraid of never being right.Days when my mother held me, whispering,
"Putu, raja, who did it tell me who?"
And she hid me like a port hides ships.
Filling me with food and love. She
who spent her days crying with the curtains
closed, sipping Lipton's tea, its yellow label
draped over the lip of her cup.
She would color her cheeks and dress
before I got off the school bus, like the girls
in the Barrio de Isleta, good and happy
every time a ship arrives.
She gave me chocolate milk in a tall
glass and rubbed cream in my scabs.At sixteen when anger turned to hate,
I carried a steel chair leg in my coat's
arm, tempting skinheads with my color
and a fake Indian accent, saying,
"Excuse me, sir, please could you
tell me the time?" And they, not used
to Pakis who fight, would either kick
the shit out of me or turn away and run.And I carried a stick of chalk
in my pocket and wrote on walls:
"To the Officers of the East India Company,
When my mother played her short drum
with a flat hand and a fist as hard
as a nursing nipple, when she sat spinning
cotton in the shade, you were blind.
You saw the rings in her nose, around
her fingers and toes. You smelt the spice
frying in her kitchen, and you fondled
through the silk wrapped around
her waist. But you never saw my mother."But here between the Mississippi and Lake
Michigan, I've learned to love color
blind. Midwestern skies
turn from black to white on storm
warning nights, when not even the buses
are on the street and the factory chimneys
pour their heat into the river and bay,
making the geese forget other places.And for my anger, I have blamed
this land's winter that makes lips rip
and memories buckle to the surface
like bay ice. Memories of a land
south and east, and the one hundred
million refugees, hopping from continents
and pasts, who won't let me forget
we have been blamed
too long for having lost our home.
