In January 2000, at the start of the new millennium, my mother grew a yellow hibiscus. When she first showed it to me, luminous, almost phosphorescent, on that dark, winter evening, I saw it, rather predictably, as a symbol both of the human capacity to create a unique beauty and also to tamper dangerously with nature’s design. Now, in retrospect, it seems to me to have been an augury as well.
Something about the orgasmic
Freakish beauty of this flower
Shedding its glowing petals within
The foul interior of a garden shed
Reminds us that it was bred
For purposes other than pollination.
The yellow hibiscus exists
For no other reason than
Someone imagined it in her head
And then graft after violent graft
Fashioned it as she would a poem
Symbol of inviolate perfection
Rising from a malodorous miasma
Human, as entirely human as we are.
GOATSONG
Yesterday, I stood on tiptoe like a goat
In search of high, tenderest leaves
The washing flapped in my face, a wind-
Blown tree on some strip of earth, somewhere
I turned to the sea, it lay at my feet
The Bay of Bengal, in a bucket, heaving
Now I had something rare, a catch
My clothes-line stretched across the sky
Six pegs dangled, coloured, tense and spare,
Out of reach, they would not let me hang
My new sea-treasures by their branches,
Their scrabby protuberances meant for such
What goats do in such a happenstance
Feeding, frustrated, on a high promontory
Off a coastal strip, I do not know
Perhaps they turn their hairy butts
And walk away, but instead,
I lifted My unwary face, lashless, to the salty air
It was the sun that lay in wait
Rushed at me, a wild and hungry beast
Afterwards, I could not see, my eyes
Dripped, and the colour of my washing
Was neither white nor wholly soiled
Crushed bones or clothes. I did not care
The taste of fear remained with me
Goat stalked and caught defenselessly.
WILD BIRD
These are the colours of his dying
A glossy black and vivid yellow
The delicate filigree of silver
Caged bird
Dark torrents flowed from him
From some deep injured centre
He was dead
Before we found him but he died
Again and again in mortal twists
Yellow flashes!
As if the spirit in him would not
Accept that quelling of the blood
And he dies still
A tossing Fury of black and silver
Wild bird!
GULMOHUR
(Freedom Song in Minor Key)
On a windy day like this
The rain clouds descend
Rough, tough, male
And the gulmohur
Forgets she is a tree
Rooted to the ground
Everything else thrusts
Upwards, red gold kites
Terriers’ pricking ears
Alert to a drum of thunder
Eagles, and stiffish buds
On small, petulant plants
These rise to teasing bait
The short glamour of sex
Then why not the gulmohur?
Why not she?
Today, the sky is a bowl
Each ribbed gulmohur leaf
An imprisoned angelfish
Swimming round and round
In the cold, grey lucence
Of the hooligan monsoon
But unable to escape, play
Her deft wit off against
A loutish rain cloud
The gulmohur loses heart
Sheds her vivacious fins
Her wild, scarlet flowers
Is this the nature of a tree
To be tied down eternally
Or can the gulmohur be free
Can she?
INTIMATIONS
At their most capricious, the dead
Return as art—sly patterns on canvas
Summer’s murmured conversations
In the tranquil square of the senses.
White flesh of a flecked, green pear
Mortality’s tang in our mouths
Oranges that glow with lust, a knife
Anointed with innocence, silver cool.
Desire in a blue, ceramic bowl
Imaged, imagined—within easy reach
The promise of convexity, golden
Ecstasy of peaches—perfect stasis.
By these, we remember the cunning dead
Crimson apples in some garden of plenty
Or amber, ochre, and dry leaves flaking
Benath decorum, the purple stain.
Concealed within the heart of paintings
In the art of dying well– colourless
As a tadpole and elegant as a wintry tree
Looking coldly down at humankind.
Our crow-black moods, our pallid faces
These show us less than do the vivid dead
The truth is—art is not in our nature
Until we die, we are never in the picture…
Selections from Yellow Hibiscus
Contributor:
RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR. Is Professor of Linguistics and English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge in 1982 and has since taught and lectured at various universities. She has received several awards and honours. Apart from her numerous academic publications, Nair contributes to major national newspapers and magazines.
