[A] Cities Are Remembered

You meet S, and sniffing an accent - these marks we carry on our breath! - in the air, ask where he is from? He says he grew up in Cape Town and that he has wandered around the world, picking up languages, picking up cities, like a dog inviting fleas, but still Cape Town remains the most beautiful place in the world, the worm coiling and uncoiling in the heart. You nod with recognition; yes the places of birth have a demented beauty about them, which exiles somehow soon forget how to embrace, as if when one stays away long enough, the customary way of holding a woman is lost, as if one forgets how one usually used to walk in and kiss her, just below her ears. Or how she used to kiss him back. Yes, although these mechanics remain, the essence is lost. One raves upon return, many years later, crawling through the gutters looking for it.

It seems that exiles can’t forget the beauty of those old hags, grinning toothlessly under the sun. Bitches! You can’t live with them. You were miserable, or at the very least dissatisfied, rolling with them in the dust, saliva running down your jaws, and now that you have gone away their holy stink keeps attacking you in your dreams.

[B] Greetings Arrive

You cousin sends you a greeting for the harvest festival. She is eleven or twelve. Her sister too had scrawled a line beneath her clean printing. She is seven or so. And she is not afraid of you at all even though you are a bearded mountain. Playing hopscotch, swinging into the sky and squabbling with the placid big sister seem to fill up her days. “Where the hell do I have time to think existential thoughts?” she seems to indicate when she looks at your aging face. “Cheer up big boy!” But she is also growing up. Will she also become a monster, a dragon coiled around a hoard of dully gleaming words, as I have become?

[C] An Evolutionary Pathway Is Traced

Harvest festival. Time of carts loaded with long sugarcane poles plying up and down the rutted roads, all day, all night, from the village to the mill. One sleeps with motion in the limbs. Oxen are fed pulses and the water in which they are cooked in is scooped out and made into a rich soup, nothing like of which can be found any place else. Farmers sit on their haunches under a peepul tree (another of those holy trees) to catch their breath and discuss yields and other farm matters in code (to which you don’t have access) as they run hither and yonder. Grandfather Leather Hands has become a ghost who disappears before the vain rooster challenges the sun to match the reds of his plume. Hayricks go up, twenty or so feet tall skyscrapers where soon cobras will hunt rat snakes will hunt rats. And years later whenever you see golden hair tied up in fists or spread on the ground, a cobra raises its hood and digs its fangs into your bones.

Grandmother Stiff Fingers milks the cows. You put your hand into the froth hovering on the top of the pail grinning at miracles – how grass becomes sweet smelling milk full of fat! Other miracles are the bees in the honey box, which summon you to them with their buzzing, bull frogs in tailcoats with their orchestra to which all stars attend in the ditch behind the house, Farmhand Monkey Feet climbing the coconut trees and nuts thudding to the ground, Crow Thief who steals and eats the soap left for a second near the hand pump, but is forgiven because he caws all day, which means soon there will be more company, and soon enough other apes fall out of the sky, out of dusty red state road transportation buses, which are so busy playing hokey fishing in the canals that they are never on time, and soon enough marbles with tiger eyes sealed in glass appear, the females are practicing with their rag dolls, the marble warriors are served tea in ridiculously small cups, jaggery is alchemy-ized into sweets, Mother Kangaroos, who are sisters and sister in laws, cluck at the Kid Kangaroos leaping at the tins of goodies, and sit in circles plaiting each others hair, gossiping about family tenth removed, Uncle Ladder Legs is at the well drawing water with a coir rope, water in the well is tantalizing close here, the faces swim like fish and shatter when the bucket hits the water, cattle gather at the trough, hands caress Calf Black Nose’s back, and it too dances to jumping rope rhymes, soon every one is hiding behind tumbling stone walls, barn lofts, under the beds, behind sacks of un-husked rice much to the disapproval of spiders, someone is discovered, usually one of the younger victims who refuses to play any more, so the game changes, it becomes water and stone, Cousin Crocodile paces the water, which is the clay courtyard sprayed expertly every morning by Grandma with a potent mixture of cow dung and water, and the monkey horde jumps from cobble stone to cobble stone, sometimes dangling from the branches of the guava tree, teasing the Crocodile with its really small snapping mouth, eventually someone is caught and devoured, and is born again as a crocodile, the crocodile meanwhile climbs up to the stones from the water, learns to stand erect, develops a movable opposing thumb, and becomes a demented writer with the name I.