English Literature

A Hot Noon in Malabar by Kamala Das  This is a noon for beggars with whining  Voices, a noon for men who come from hills  With parrots in a cage and fortune-cards,  All stained with time, for brown Kurava girls With old eyes, who read palms in light singsong Voices, for bangle-sellers who spread On the cool black floor those red and green and blue Bangles, all covered with the dust of roads, For all of them, whose feet, devouring rough Miles, grow cracks on the heels, so that when they Clambered up our porch, the noise was grating, Strange . . . This is a noon for strangers who part The window-drapes and peer in, their hot eyes Brimming with the sun, not seeing a thing in Shadowy rooms and turn away and look So yearningly at the brick-ledged well. This Is a noon for strangers with mistrust in Their eyes, dark, silent ones who rarely speak At all, so that when they speak, their voices  Run wild, like jungle-voices. Yes, this is A noon for wild men, wild thoughts, wild love. To Be here,

 The Sunshine Cat   They did this to her, the men who know her, the man She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget To forget, oh, to forget, and, they said, each of Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you. They let her slide from pegs of sanity into A bed made soft with tears, and she lay there weeping, For sleep had lost its use. I shall build walls with tears, She said, walls to shut me in. Her husband shut her In, every morning, locked her in a room of books With a streak of sunshine lying near the door like A yellow cat to keep her company, but soon Winter came, and one day while locking her in, he Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a Line, a half-thin

 The Freaks   He talks, turning a sun-stained Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark Cavern, where stalactites of Uneven teeth gleam, his right Hand on my knee, while our minds Are willed to race towards love; But, they only wander, tripping Idly over puddles of Desire. .... .Can this man with Nimble finger-tips unleash Nothing more alive than the Skin's lazy hungers? Who can Help us who have lived so long And have failed in love? The heart, An empty cistern, waiting Through long hours, fills itself With coiling snakes of silence. ..... I am a freak. It's only To save my face, I flaunt, at Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.

 My Grandmother's House by Kamala Das   There is a house now far away where once I received love……. That woman died, The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved Among books, I was then too young To read, and my blood turned cold like the moon How often I think of going There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or Just listen to the frozen air, Or in wild despair, pick an armful of Darkness to bring it here to lie Behind my bedroom door like a brooding Dog…you cannot believe, darling, Can you, that I lived in such a house and Was proud, and loved…. I who have lost My way and beg now at strangers' doors to Receive love, at least in small change? Kamala Das

Hunger  It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back. The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly, trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself. I saw his white bone thrash his eyes. I followed him across the sprawling sands, my mind thumping in the flesh's sling. Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in. Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth his old nets had only dragged up from the seas. In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound. The wind was I, and the days and nights before. Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls. Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind. I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen... Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine. The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile. Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber. She opened he

 A Missing Person In the darkened room a woman cannot find her reflection in the mirror waiting as usual at the edge of sleep In her hands she holds the oil lamp whose drunken yellow flames know where her lonely body hides Jayanta Mahapatra

THE WHOREHOUSE IN A CALCUTTA STREET  Walk right in. It is yours. Where the house smiles wryly into the lighted street.  Think of the women you wished to know and haven't.  The faces in the posters, the public hoardings  And who are all there together,  those who put the house there  for the startled eye to fall upon,  where pasts join, and where they part.  The sacred hollow courtyard  That harbours the promise of a great conspiracy.  Yet nothing you do makes a heresy of that house.  Are you ashamed to believe you're in this?  Then think of the secret moonlight of the women left behind their false chatter, perhaps their reminding themselves of looked after children and of home:  the shooting stars in the eager darkness of return.  Dream children, dark, superfluous;  you miss them in the house's dark spaces, how can't you?  Even the women don't wear them  like jewels or precious stones at the throat;  the faint feeling deep at a woman's centre  that brings back t

 Indian Summer Over the soughing of the sombre wind priests chant louder than ever; the mouth of India opens. Crocodiles move into deeper waters. Mornings of heated middens smoke under the sun. The good wife lies in my bed through the long afternoon; dreaming still, unexhausted by the deep roar of funeral pyres. [Note: midden = dunghill] by Jayanta Mahapatra #indian_summer #indiansummer #indiansummerbyjayantmahapatra