again.
It's
the common man you're interested in,
the one in the street,
living
under a blanket,
a sheet of paper,
almost naked,
in his
laundered white
dhoti,
wrapped between his legs,
clean, even in
the stench of India.
It's the common man,
jostled and jostling
in the streets,
smoking on the steps,
enervated by the heat.
O
Devayani,
it's the common human being
that interests
you.
What have they got to say for life,
for God, for the love
of being alive?
Even the children's eyes have
that deep black
look
of millennia of pain,
the knowledge of eons,
the patience of
the earth
and the rains.
Eating, sleeping --
where do they
sleep?
Patience.
Note, O Devayani, they sleep
where they
are.
Fortunate people,
turned back
to the mother bosom.
Even
on concrete put down
by the English, they sleep on
their mother's
breast,
familiar with smells and bugs,
and rats, perhaps, like
hot
winds across their face
in the night,
next to the
earth,
next to what the cow has eaten
and returned to the
earth,
next to the cow,
the goat, perhaps on the
ridge
between the rice fields
if lucky enough to be in the
country
-- home -- where their land is.
They squat, and
live.
They moan, too, you can hear them
sometimes in the
night,
absorbing the death, the tragedy,
the pain,
eager for
the sun to rise,
to go on being,
being.
Finding something to
eat,
someplace to sleep,
shitting.
And grinning! high
laughter,
eager curiosity,
intent on the study of their
fellow
creatures, scratching.
O Devayani, did anyone ever get
rich
and move closer to his fellow man?
You envy their aplomb
with the earth, and the earth's gifts
of food and filth,
hot
and cold,
sun and the monsoon rains coming down,
pounding on the
naked shoulder
turned to the sky in the night,
covered with one
large leaf.
The leaves grow very large in India,
you can eat
from them
or sleep under them.
Let's look at the old films of India
again.
Let's Look At The Old Films of India,
not for the
maharajahs with their jewels
and their elephants.
(It's an odd
intention to get rich enough to be
rocked about, dangerously,
in a
howdah on the back
of the largest beast on earth.)
How little
interest you have
in their turbans, their silks,
their wrapped legs,
and the
be-diamonded lips of their wives.
They are elegant, and far
from the earth.
They use a stairway, Devayani, to climb
an
elephant, to go higher and higher winding around emptiness
to the
palace roof.
Do the common people mind --
the roofs and the
ladders so far beyond their means?
Do they mind the unlikeliness of
climbing even a foot from
the bald, littered earth?
(How odd that
some should want so much
and others have so little.) But
India,
unchanged for 5,000 years, didn't seem to mind.
The yields of
the earth were often meager,
the squandering of millions by their
rulers
in golden food and jewel paved tombs
often seemed food
enough
to the common man.
Let's look at the old films of India
again.
Will a refrigerator, a car answer
the millennial
knowledge in the dark eyes
of the women who have suffered too
much?
Will a pair of jeans
sit more comfortably at home
on their
mother's sandy, rocky, corpse-strewn lap?
Life may be more about
corpses
and manure
than a Westerner, O Devayani, looking at
the old films of India
might
ever imagine.
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
From The Jocasta Poems #15, Blindness
The Woman Who Had No Necklaces