Falling, 1968
So later, after birthing kingdoms
from the gauze of her Celtic belly,
she can say she was the illumination
Full House Doodle ©Billy Roids
My mother arrives in India
breathless, leaning against
the airport railing, looking sad,
bereft, as though she’s never put
her head against the wind before.
It is Guy Fawkes Day, 1968.
The start of National Small Pox
Eradication Week. It has been raining;
cruel, historic, monsoon rain,
uprooting posts along the border,
where Pakistan, only 21, like her,
is drowning in silver cattle skulls,
locust dreams. My father,
standing on a cusp of sudden light,
waits like sin to watch her fall.
The rest of the world is falling too:
students, Bedouins, lorry drivers,
in West Berlin, Amman, Ootacamund.
Throwing their Marxist lives into ideas
like liberation, like love.
My mother, moving across the air
of all this, must have known how falling
in love is something like dying after all.
Something the seas and sky evade
to survive the centuries.
Perhaps this is why she agrees to tumble
to the blackened chambers of the earth
like a virgin queen ant on her nuptial flight,
burying the snow-lit nights of her youth
in galleries of dust, blades of wing.
So later, after birthing kingdoms
from the gauze of her Celtic belly,
she can say she was the illumination
once – the slow possibility
of love in my father’s life.
From the collection “Everything Begins Elsewhere” by Tishani Doshi, being published in the US this summer by Copper Canyon Press.
CBK would like to extend a special thanks to Shikha Sethi for guiding us through the world of modern Indian poets.
