The World Breaks

When I want to speak of what counts,
I return to the fact

that there’s always a woman in a yellow sari
outside the Taj Mahal.

I want to say that when I once
went down in a submarine

and saw fish shivering past,
their gazes incurious,

wetly amoral,
against the foaming detergent

of an ocean floor, I found it’s even okay
not to have questions

about our true element,
that overwater,

we will always
be out of our depth,

and the man in the gabardine suit
will always

(like the rest of us)
be a spy,

which makes it as simple
as buying the groceries, house-sitting the cat,

and being the medicine,
unique and unlabelled,

for someone at the other end of the line.
The world breaks

(how it breaks) –
eggshells, china cups, countries, bones and all –
and still,

the woman in a yellow sari
outside the Taj Mahal

And Suddenly It’s Evening

Above your head,
the Grownups speak
of deleted bus stops

and renamed streets
and how they cycled to school
across lathering rivers of paddy,

long replaced
by the municipal corporation
and the city improvement trust colony.

You snooze fitfully,
and now you must be grownup
because the Grownups

now have grandsons
who vigorously trim
hedge funds in Atlanta,

and you think back often
on an Irani café
that once hung precariously

over a cracked ceramic sea
where you sipped a man’s dark
and endless mouth,

while your nieces call to tell you
that they’re climbing mountains
and counselling the dying.

When roofs fly away
and the wind blows
– cold, blinding, fire-blue –

will you remember
(the way swimmers never forget how to swim
and lovers never forget how to drown)

what it takes to live without
ancestors, gods, shamans,
without grownups,

just a pulsating density,
headless,
under a blood-orange sky?

The Tailor

I knew a tailor
beneath a peepul tree

(flanked by a dog
that was always asleep).

He walked twenty miles
to reach his tree,

never looked up
from his Singer sewing machine,

never took holidays
even when the roads flooded and the skies blazed,

and when the buses stopped
and then the trains,

when shutters came down
and doors slammed

and the plague raged,
he sewed masks, except

that one day his heart decided
to lock down,

and then a denim sky was rent apart –
buttons bursting, hemlines snagging,
zippers flying, elastic snapping.

He left behind an unspooling sky,
a sleeping dog,

a whirring machine,
that knew all about songs
outliving their singers,

and he left behind a planet
unravelling,

unravelling
all the time
into a more perforated,
ready-to-wear
original,

closer to what another man,
under a peepul tree
seemed to know
two thousand five hundred years ago.

All because he’d been
survivor enough
to darn his share of black holes,

seamster enough
to know
that an awakening
is often an unseaming,

Indian enough
to have seen the world end
many times over.

Excerpted with permission from The Gallery of Upside-Down Women, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Penguin India.

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