Two Poems/ Firdaus Soni/ Issue 23
Swallow a Rock and Spit Out a City Or Hyderabad, Summer
An igneous rock, a blown-out star
lies shattered
blasted open on the side of the road.
The day’s debris
a neon wrapper, a spent tyre, the banana cart.
in a quick dark cooling of habit
life rearranges itself
the exposed veins of an ancient volcano.
The lake-view highrise
which first swallowed the cattails,
then the frogs, the yellow-billed babbler,
rises to swallow the deccan sun.
Above, the metallic cranes
perch their hydraulic necks
to peck at the sky.
In the shared contagion of our watching
we turn our faces away.
Meanwhile the world is a green tarp,
Flapping furiously in the wind.
The clouds run away.
The rains refuse to bring
the white hot concrete into relief.
Poet's note: Rounded boulders and rocks that were formed more than a billion years ago dot the landscape of Hyderabad city and the larger region. Geological time sits casually amidst the city’s everyday humdrum. These ecological marvels are being blasted off and razed down in the recent years as the city reimagines itself as some generic capitalist dystopia with glass buildings. The poem was written while a magnificent rock formation in my neighborhood was being gutted down to construct an ISKCON temple.
Sunrise
In the university library,
time had filmed over like chai someone forgot to drink
and then they forgot that they forgot.
By Monday
I was carrying the entire week under my eyes.
Stepped out and took the first city bus that stopped near the gate.
Behind me
a tumble of school children fell in.
Their voices filled everything.
Listen, you know the sound of coins dropped on the floor?
Multiply it. Make it twenty, make it a thousand,
Give them lungs and uniforms
and the terrible conviction that the world is theirs
and then, make it the whole loud furious prayer of being eight.
The bus, which had been performing
its usual impressions of a dying machine,
suddenly remembered it had somewhere to be.
I felt a school bag shift its small weight into my side
heat from inside the tiffin box
burnt through the worn canvas,
through the white cotton of my kurta
and into the skin.
The conductor appeared,
arms raised above the din
wading through the aisle.
Ticket ... Ticket ...
Pass pass ... Bus pass
Their daily game.
They staring back at him
two small eyes, unblinking moons
above the bag pressed against my side.
Ticket!?
Evil wolf in the children’s play
He made the voice big, word large, mock frown and laughing eyes.
Ticket!?
The little boy looked up at his akka
Far adrift in the river of chatter,
oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding
under her elbow.
He looked back at the frowning conductor
Two tears hot as the steel tiffin
waiting
to
fall.
The bus lurched to a stop
Five minutes of walking through the rinsed air
I looked down,
on my white kurta
the morning had left behind
a mustard oil sunrise.
Firdaus Soni has recently submitted her PhD in the Sociology department at the University of Hyderabad. For several years she shuttled between the jatras (fairs) of Marathwada and the university campus, following the itinerant lives of people who knew how to move, while academia taught her the more sedentary forms of wandering. Her writings have appeared in Himal, The Caravan, Newslaundry and Economic & Political Weekly.