for Caatu

The first things I collected were stones. Pebbles down in the gullies through Which runoff sluiced after rains, At the edges of unsealed streets Of my childhood. Then in the wilderness Of school - if one has to have an Eden Before one falls, this satisfies my claim – I foraged in the bush for crystal, for quartz Tetrahedrons, for rocks veined with mica, Which when rubbed on one’s cheeks Made them glitter like butterfly wings.

I was obsessed with sand, with clay too. In the construction lots of a still unbuilt Concrete jungle, I shaped castles. I threw Bridges of matchstick and thread across Deep gorges of imaginary rivers. I learnt The uses of solitude and metaphor, i.e., Letting one thing stand for another as I Let fire ants stand for massing Nazis And festive firecrackers for bombs with Girly names – Daisy, Rose or such like. When and how did I become a pacifist?

To mimic progress I turned to hunting. The first victims of course were shiny Emblems of the kingdom of air: butterflies. In spring, after rains, in fields of wildflowers A mob of schoolboys trapped them with Writing pads, and carried the treasure home In pencil boxes, lunch boxes, fingers overlaid With pigments. There were also pig hunts – A local goon reared his pigs among our houses, And we took revenge by riddling them with Arrows – bamboo splits tipped with thorns.

There was also a stage of gathering. What did I gather? Velvet bugs in green wet grass, red And soft buttons, mobile on my white school shirt. Once a baby field mouse in a shoebox – Mother Wouldn’t allow me to keep it, as she didn’t allow Stray puppies with doleful eyes for more than a day. Too much work she said, and too much pain When they die, remembering her childhood deaths. Then raids for fruits: almonds that one had to crack With a substantial rock to get at the edible core. Also buds From gulmohars for squirt guns that spat sap and molten fire.

As I tell my sister this, she tells me I was a strange kid Who could be found under the trees of our backyard, Fingers caked with mud, muttering to myself audibly, At whom the neighbors looked upon kindly, with mirth, And that I am yet to cease my foolishness for pebbles, For shiny feathers, for shells, for stray pieces of wood, For dry leaves pressed between pages of old books, For anti-social tendencies that might leave me stranded, Bereft of adult friends, of lovers, of wives – an idiot child!

Tully walks into the cool of the barn from the summer sun of Imperial Valley. Southern California. Hundred-degree heat. The top of peach trees burnt brown. A lover had pressed his face to the earth, and scorched her mildly. This is where he comes to in the late afternoons when it is too hot to stay on the stepladder, prunes in hand, claws of metal snapping foliage, to gather breath, to eat his lunch of rotis, dal and lassi.

The three cows he keeps eye him steadily and mow in low voices. He touches their white faces. That secret coolness of skin. With such tactile responses he satisfies his hunger to touch something living other than his own face in front of a mirror every morning. He must get a dog he keeps telling himself. But after abandoning the stray bitch he had kept in that season of sawmills in Oregon, even through two hard winters when they had to ration coal for heat as well as cooking, feeding it warm rotis off his own plate, he can’t bring himself to act on this wish.

As he moves further into the barn – someone watching from the door would see a man claimed by the dark put out by hay, by the odor of manure, by something within himself – he senses that someone had just been in there, no less that an hour before. A distinct ghost of human scent, his nose rattle-snake alert, as if listening to the approach of rain. He looks for the key concealed above the rafters to unlock the deepest sanctum of the barn, the room where he stores sacks of seed, of fertilizer. And steps into symbols of struggle, a scattering of grain, the unmistakable odor of semen, now a white stain on the spread of grain sacks.

He steps out thinking of that person would have known of the exact location where he hid the key, a slender piece of patchy rust wedged into a gap in the wood. Outside his hundred acres of peach orchard, a patch quilt of brown and green, perhaps still holding these two, whoever it was who has passed through. It must have been two of the Mexican iterant farm workers from the group that he was forced to hire in the previous season of abundant harvest and family death.