Eye for the obscure things

Anjum Hasan

Anjum Hasan is an Indian poet and novelist. She was born in Shillong, Meghalaya and currently lives in Bangalore, Karnataka, India where she works for India Foundation for the Arts. 'Street on the Hill' (Sahitya Akademi, 2006)was her debut collection of poems about Shillong and her childhood experiences in the hill town.Her debut novel Lunatic in my Head (Zubaan-Penguin, 2007) was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award 2007. Set in Shillong, a picturesque hill-station in north-east India, in the early 1990s, the novel weaves together the stories of its three main characters, ranging from an IAS aspirant who is obsessed with Pink Floyd to a college teacher struggling to complete her PhD and yet longing to find love. The novel has been described by Siddhartha Deb as 'haunting and lyrical' and as acquiring a 'critical intensity'

Her next novel titled Neti, Neti which is in progress, was longlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. She has also contributed essays and articles to the Hindu Literary Supplement, Outlook, the Deccan Herald, Little Magazine and many other journals and newspapers.

Some of her poems
Neighbourhood

On the narrow steps leading
to our gate, the pakoriwallah from Bihar is often found
kissing an anonymous woman at night.

Amazing act. My parents switch off the sitting-room
lights whenever this happens. The car beams show
them up – one unbroken secret silhouette.

The steps invite other actions. The local fakir some-
times lies there, coloured like a ditch, and passers-by
might climb to have a better look at the orange trees.

But this is different. The soft-spoken pakoriwallah
smelling of his pakoris , his half hour island of
defiant passion on the steps of somebody's house,

while around him everyday: the brash freeloaders,
the kick in the groin, the familiar words of abuse
spoken in an unfamiliar language.

Mawlai

For seventeen years we passed through Mawlai in a bus —
saw waxy red flowers in the pomegranate trees and a man
pegging brilliant white napkins on a clothesline against the wind.
We didn’t live there and those who lived there didn’t care about
the buses passing through at all times of the day, right up against the
mauve beef hanging in its pockets of fat, and the shops with shiny strips
of tobacco showing through shadows, and the new houses and the
old houses where the same sort of people lived, or at least that’s
how we felt, passing through in buses for seventeen years.
But we won’t be doing it anymore — looking out of a window
at a patch of maize in its copper earth, eggs in a wire basket,
hand-painted signs near open doorways that remind us
of sunlit drawings in children’s books about places that grow
sad in their unreality with every passing year, simple signs in
white paint — hangne ngi die tiar, hangne ngi suh jainsem.
We’ll forget what they looked like, the rough golden clapboard shops
with their unwrapped cakes of soap, the windows in houses no
bigger than a man’s handkerchief, and it will be difficult to remember
where each of the cherry trees stood because they flowered so briefly
before lapsing back into their dark green anonymity.
The graveyard on a gentle slope, the fence weighed down with roses!
We’ll want to urgently tell someone, if we ever happen to return,
that we knew this place, passed through it in a bus for seventeen years,
but having said that we won’t know what else to say about Mawlai
because we never really got off there or bought things from its shops
or stepped into someone’s boiled-vegetables-smelling house
to watch the street through netted curtains. We’ll keep quiet then
and try to ignore that sense which is not pain but has pain’s cloudiness
and its regret and its way of going and returning.

Small Town

The man who runs the sports goods store
that also sells old unopened books and
board games in faded boxes, sits with his
tattooed arms folded in the sun.
He drinks a lot of beer and doesn’t ask
stupid questions. His friends loiter
around small music shops all morning,
in slippers, with their shirt-tails out.
The distant air lights up the furrowed edges
of the hills. Sometimes he wants to describe
the smell of brown oaks ageing in the sun
and bakeries where boys in dirty aprons
lit their ovens in the early summer morning.
But the tattooed man dozes on when
his friends talk and the sun whitens the spines
of pale detective novels and books full of
blond-bodied girls and cross-stitch designs.
When a man is killed in the afternoon,
knifed and left to die with his face down
in a drain, the tattooed fellow has an opinion.
But he shuts the door and sleeps on a wooden
plank behind the counter that smells of cigarettes
and stale tea, till rain cools the streets. All the
farthest sounds of the city wake him up slowly,
till he hears the rain on his own window
and thinks of the dirty water running below
the dead man’s face.
In the evening when the rain lets up for a bit
his friends might return and joke about it.
He switches on the lights at five. People drift in
With damp trouser-cuffs and notice the Chinese
dragons on his arms. They talk and again the cool
air outlines each noisy car and softened tree.
It’s Saturday. He rests his elbows on the cracked
glass counter and watches a girl across the street,
scrubbing a couple of neat stone steps till they
gleam in the clear blue evening.

To The Chinese Restaurant
for Daisy

We come in here from the long afternoon
stretched over the town’s sloping roofs,
its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours,
its melancholic second-hand bookshops
with their many missing pages.Life’s not moving.
We sit at a red table, among the dragons,
near the curtained-off street-facing windows
with their months’ old orangeade.
Out in the streets there are schoolboys with
their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers.
We eat more than we need to. We eat
so that our boredom’s no longer dangerous,
so that from the comfort of soup,
with the minor pleasures of chopsuey,
we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited,
unknown and unknowable affairs,
people with never-fading lipstick and
confident gestures who we will never be.
One day soon we’ll be running,
our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus,
and we won’t read each other’s letters thrice.
But right there we’re young, we count
our money carefully, we laugh so hard
and drop our forks.
We are plucked from sadness there
in that little plastic place with the lights
turned low, the waiters stoned from doing nothing,
the smells of ketchup and eternally frying oni