Poetry Alok Saini Poetry Alok Saini

An Introduction

I don’t know politics but I know the names of those

in power, and can repeat them like days of week or 

names of months, beginning with Nehru. I am Indian,

brown, born in Malabar. I speak three languages, write

in two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said, English

is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave me alone, critics,

friends, visiting cousins, every one of you? Let me speak

in any language I like. The language I speak becomes

mine, its distortions, its queernesses all mine, mine alone.

It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it’s 

honest, it is as human as I am human, you know…

It voices my longings, my hopes, and is useful to me 

as cawing Is to crows or roaring to the lions, 

it is human speech, the speech of the mind that is here, not there, 

a mind that sees and hears and is aware. Not the deaf, 

blind speech of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain 

or the incoherent mutterings of the blazing

funeral pyre. I was child, and later they said I grew, 

for, I became tall, my limbs swelled and one or two places 

sprouted hair. When I asked for love, not knowing what else 

to ask for, he drew a youth of sixteen into his 

bedroom and shut the door, He did not beat me but my sad 

woman-body felt so beaten. The weight of my breasts 

and womb crushed me. I shrank pitifully. Then I wore a shirt 

and a black sarong, cut my hair short and ignored all of 

this womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl or be wife, 

they cried. Be embroiderer, cook, or a quarreller 

with servants. Fit in belong, said the categorizers.

Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better still, be just 

Madhavikutty. It is time to choose a name, a role. 

Don’t play pretending games. Don’t play at schizophrenia 

or be a Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when

jilted in love…Later, I met a man. Loved him. Call him

not by any name, he is every man who wants his 

woman, just as I am every woman who seeks love. 

In him the hungry haste of rivers, in me the oceans’ 

tireless waiting. Who are you, I ask each and all. The answer is, it is I.

Anywhere and everywhere I see him who calls himself I.

In this world, he is tightly packed like the sword in its sheath. 

It is I who drink a lonely drink near midnight at hotels 

of strange towns, it is I who make love and then feel shame, 

it is I who lie dying with a rattle in my throat, 

I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover 

and the beloved. I have no joys that are not yours, 

no aches which are not yours 

we share the same name, the same fate, the same crumbled dreams…


—Kamala Das, from ‘Signatures - One Hundred Indian Poets’ published by the National Book Trust, India.

Read More
Poetry Alok Saini Poetry Alok Saini

चीनी चाय पीते हुए

चाय पीते हुए

मैं अपने पिता के बारे में सोच रहा हूँ।

आपने कभी

चाय पीते हुए

पिता के बारे में सोचा है?

अच्छी बात नहीं है

पिताओं के बारे में सोचना।

अपनी कलई खुल जाती है।

हम कुछ दूसरे हो सकते थे।

पर सोच की कठिनाई यह है कि दिखा देता है

कि हम कुछ दूसरे हुए होते 

तो पिता के अधिक निकट हुए होते

अधिक उन जैसे हुए होते।

कितनी दूर जाना होता है पिता से 

पिता जैसा होने के लिए।

पिता भी

सवेरे चाय पीते थे।

क्या वह भी 

पिता के बारे में सोचते थे-

निकट या दूर?

—अज्ञेय, ‘संकल्प कविता-दशक’ हिंदी अकादमी, दिल्ली

Read More
Poetry Alok Saini Poetry Alok Saini

CAVED—7.8 Billion

1.
This one looks like a planet of red windmills whirring
or a field of poppies, a wild corona of a star, heart of sunflower,
this pretty thing is fanged, arsenal in Death’s stockpile,
small unseen things are perfectly precise,
Hanuman burnt the city of Lanka thus, eroding pride.
2.

The bush is bursting with red berries,
spring has slipped through the crevices breathing green on the city,
a musician plays his oud to the sky in himself,
the trees are gravestones to the forgotten dead,
the deer conglomerate driven to community,
more families staked by windows notice the heartbeat of nature.

3.
The camera has vertigo, it’s crazy arc
leering on the hoarded splendor of one family,
(what madness was this to record and pridefully share?)
lines of bottles on the kitchen cabinetry
riddled with oil of bright urine hue,
toilet roles, bounties, tissues, food cans,
a pantry full of debris for doomsday,
this raid of the innards of stores,
this back-to-basics, to Freud’s Id of fear and self-first.

4.
Where do we send our unclaimed sorrow?
The unlabeled debris of life?
The racking cough of unprocessed wounds?
There is no island to send them off, be done, be free.
Like those lines of caskets in dirt in Hart island,
where New York City is belching unclaimed bodies
its gut overflowing.

5.
The mind is like an abacus now
computing deaths on the excel sheet
of consciousness; from the Spanish flu 20-50 million,
from the Black plague 50 million, from COVID… 
what black hole continues to gorge up souls
or is it an empyrean of hopeful light,
what joust happens in the universe’s annals
between what forces, this unending play
into and out of life, where is that mighty
being who once gave the song of life
to a tremulous warrior’s heart in the middle of battle?
Each of us is a naive question as we have always been
curved like an embryo, full-stopped by death.

— Usha Akella, from ‘Singing In The Dark - a global anthology of poetry under lockdown’ published by Penguin Vintage

Read More