Fragment of a novel
In the halls of cedar, pine and maple, the first thwacks of iron into wood, into sap, a dent into the felling season, still in late fall embryo. The men have been at work since before daybreak; sweat pouring off their fingers and onto the blades of their Swede saws eating woodchip. Occasionally one of them would begin to hum a song in a language they spoke to among themselves, now the language of the night, the language of bunkhouse, of bonfires. Bulla ki jana – Bulla doesn’t know who is, a song of spiritual abandonment, now also, quite aptly, a song for exile.
The boy looks up at the men a few stumps away, one of whom is now humming, catches the hummer’s eye and gets a grin back. His more taciturn partner keeps his nose to the saw, a man of silence and attention. Both are kin, kinder, and in a place like this where such affections might be burdening to the individual, even quite kind to him after sorts.
Did they feel obliged to be kind because he was to one a loved sister’s son, and to the other a grand nephew? Or more simply because he was their only link into the future, so bright in their mind’s eye that they couldn’t gaze at it anymore? Or because it was they who hatched the plan to fudge the age of the orphan, who was under their care and brought him here with them, across the black water? But the boy had learnt to carry his own weight. It was right around his age, when the older men signed up as foot soldiers to fight a Queen’s war, their lithe and strong bodies providing cannon fodder, the lance into the heart of China, the wills to put down another heathen rebellion. Boxers the officers called them.
But now both of them were done with war, damn the Queen and the devil. The boy will not have to crawl through mud, will not have to learn how to cut a man’s throat after identifying him as friend or foe by the way he laced his shoes. He will be a rich man when he returns to Lahore in a few years. They have promised themselves that. They earn ten times here what they did farming their combined few acres, yes the work is dangerous, but then they had both seen danger, had met the devil face to face. And the taciturn one is also approaching artistry in shearing branches off the trunk, as the jovial one was already an artist in the wrestling arena.
This is what the boy saw: the man instinctively, an instinct born out of great watchfulness, knew how to pull a falling tree in exactly the required direction, felling it in such a way that the first branch supported the trunk so it didn’t sag, and thus was easy to trim. And all the subsequent trunks cut in such a fashion that they fell on the top of one another crisscross - lumber as thread, wood as a weave. And then the branches when trimmed fell neatly into one or two bonfires without having to be hauled away and burnt separately.
Topics to research:
- History of Sikh regiments in the British Empire’s Armies
- History of lumber industry in British Columbia
- Technical information on lumberjacking & woodcutting
- Technical information on wrestling
- Agricultural practices in Punjab, the layouts of the villages, folk songs etc
A Novel In The Works
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Fragment of a story, maybe?
He knows if he reached across the table and pulled her jaw to his, she wouldn’t resist, she would give in gladly, the jaw with that serrated scar. She said she got it when she fell off a bicycle learning to balance her weight on twin circular rims. If she could she would have preferred wings. A sparrow’s would be sufficient to lift her frame, now nearly all bone, into space. He knows so much about her without asking or being answered to. The creak of her laughter, like a safe’s tumblers falling into place to reveal lambent stones – agates, rubies, crystal. The next stone her thoughts would leap to from the one they both stood on, holding each other by the elbows.
But he doesn’t. Apart from his shyness, a promise holds him back, the iron code that he had placed around himself like a diver’s cage sinking into a spiral of sharks. Does fidelity come before love is a question he will often ask himself later? He can’t knife the mask he has donned, out of his own choice, from his skin, and he doesn’t want to kiss her with its lips of plaster, of burred wood. He knows ahead that he will regret it in the years to come, even as he might console himself for keeping his conscience clear. Then why did he come? To test himself? To hold his timorous doubts to sea air?
That he is now yoked to his own kind. That the color of hair that curtains his eyes as he makes love is that of his own, black. That she is a strange continent made up of three different countries, and as many etymologies, and epics. That her hair is not black but polished copper, a tangle of wires pulled out of their colorful plastic sheaths, conducting currents, music, thought. That he can’t look into her eyes for long because years later an archeologist would find him supine in their jade or a vintner breaking open a cask would find his brown skin scattered in their green wine.
My Daily Notes
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A Poem In Toronto
Wind from the great lake funnels
Through the alleys of this strange
And brutal city, that was just released
from an icy straitjacket.
You, a convict from a prison ship, Are stranded here like a sea anemone, Which will eventually become rock,
Which is chained to this heart, a dynamite cap Waiting for its fuse to be lit, to explode Your body’s caverns veined with emotion.
Footsteps follow behind you. A few paces away a body sluices through The hole you left behind in the night.
At those high windows, invisible to you Since you have been denied ascension, she stands, An insomniac, awaiting morning light, the arrival of birds, and of beloveds.
My Poems
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