Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing

By Anjum Hasan

This anthology brings together one hundred contemporary Indian poets and fiction writers working in English as well as translating from other Indian languages. Located anywhere from Michigan to Mumbai, the sources of their creativity range from the ancient epics to twentieth-century world literature, with themes suggesting a modernist individuality and sense of displacement as well as an ironic, postmodern embracing of multiple disjunctions. The editors present a historical background to the various Englishes apparent in this collection, while also identifying the shared traditions and contexts that hold together their uniquely diverse selection. In aiming at coherence rather than unity, Hasan and Chattarji reveal that the idea of Indianness is as much a means of exploring difference as finding common ground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781636280325

Book preview

FUTURE LIBRARY

ARUN SAGAR

Black Leather Shoes

All is wordplay, word as play. And as each particular takes away a part of my self to fill in the gaps in myself, I can only speak of the unnecessary—the images and ways—the flock that sprays itself across the evening. And so all this is but the comforting resolution of the mind, over meniscus and radii, the future that is waiting on eBay! And I am left alone with winter’s stock of images, Christmas trees in January, black leather shoes. And all is perfect in decrepitude. All is addition, concatenation, collation, all is connected by the and. I can but swing forth and back, from and to like. Like, all is metaphor. Unavoidable as Swiss cheese. Il a fallu qu’on introduise le corps, the old man said. The body is a tyrant, yes, and and and like are both escape. Bilingual dictionaries, black leather shoes. All is rhythm and blues. All is comprehension, interpretation, summation, in between, coming from, moving to. I got nothing to lose, I got my black leather shoes. There is no and or like, mere allusion, illusion, shadowy rhetoric. All is introduction, refrain, intermission, repetition, refrain; I must speak to you. I must speak to you, from the scented lemon groves, from the hot sun. In summer blues and lavender, and shoes of black leather. And all is September, October, drawing back towards you. O white heat of summer, I must return, and speak to you.

Naming

Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus,

Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster

—Rilke

It’s useless, but I’m trying

to name the trees across the river, testing

my beginner’s eye, wanting to say

cedar, cypress, pine,

but the words dissolve in clear greenness,

pure tree, arbre, baum. So much is nameless

or too easily named:

Friday, Rouen, France, wings over the Seine,

cormorant, kingfisher, crow, names

made up or made familiar,

syllables settling on my tongue. Creatures

are living in my earlobes, unpronounceable,

crawling up my legs,

milling about my head, fly, mosquito, midge,

names conjured from air, lightning, raindrop,

names built of stone,

cathedral and spire, shadow and silhouette;

la Tour du Beurre, a tower made of butter,

cumulus clouds,

woman, stranger, wife, figure on a bridge,

statue of Corneille, house where Flaubert lived,

sunset on the ridge,

Bois-Guillaume at evening, name on a photograph

or said aloud each morning, things that one can spend

one’s whole life naming.

The Fourth Day

So this is the smell of death: lilac

and frankincense, a charred

winter freshness

filling the ritual hall.

The prayer book

speaks forth in tongues, and there

remains the need to praise

or prophesy. But

outside all things continue

like before, the petty

robberies upon the steps, the forceps

twisting in the bone.

Last time we met,

you spoke of lust, and how it

should take precedence. And here I

stand with offerings

of petals, and sunlight

on white cloth, and armfuls of leaves

fresh from the trees.

The elegy must be of these.

Note:

The Hindu memorial ceremony chautha (fourth) is held on the fourth day after a death.

ROHAN CHHETRI

The Blueprint among the Ashes

The old man loved his sleep,

my father remarked to the visitors

a week after Grandfather died.

I was twelve

& the cruel metaphor wasn’t lost on me.

And indeed, that’s how I remember

him in his final days, slumbering

through afternoons on end, alone

in the dank, half-constructed first floor

of the house we called upstairs,

with stray cats for company,

the other rooms crammed

with old wood & chests of rare coins,

brooding over this failing architecture.

This man once feared by the whole town

now reduced to a fetish

of hoarding lumber, an unreasonable fear

of hospitals, & a refusal

to face the waking hours.

So when he did die, for days

it felt like he would cough at the door

& enter & no one would dare say a word.

Upstairs, where I never went alone

for years until

my mother cleared a room

& opened a beauty salon.

One day I took my friend there

& plucked his eyebrows clean

gnawing at a thread wound round my fingers,

just the way I’d seen my mother do it.

Five years later, a fever killed him.

I came to the city.

My uncle married again & moved

to a room on the first floor with his wife,

& my mother closed down the salon.

Now when I’m back home & go upstairs,

sometimes there is a moment

when I walk across the balcony

& enter the hall. A moment

when the old hesitation comes back

in the cobwebbed dark when a bruised cat

slinks through a broken window,

& I smell Grandfather’s musk

in the sunless air, fossilized in the dust

& old teak hollowed by termites.

I think of the dream my father had,

months after Grandfather’s death:

the old man waking up here,

resigned & hysterical as the night he died,

making a soft noise of our names in the dark,

still hearing our voices downstairs,

tentative laughter testing the air,

us going about our days through

the quiet, forgetful grief,

& hearing too the gray clamor of the street.

I imagine him wanting to burst forth

into our bright static of flesh,

through my father’s dream,

& now through this air I stand on

that his will is kneading so thin

& timeless, like a yawn that quietens

the whole world for a few edgeless seconds

to a seclusion of jaws.

Visitation

A bleak day, but for the pale sun bruising the air

to a color of wine. Across the street, a yellow

dollhouse on a tenement balcony & scrawled

across it in red, a little girl’s initials I will not reveal.

But what it all stands for: the same flaring sadness

I felt leaving her house on mornings like this.

I remember the bright days after, how I leaned

my forehead against the fogged glass door of the train

each morning, undulating along the brief stretch

of the cantonment, where the forest thinned

into a few trees, burnt ground, & a rampart of concrete

and barbwire. I waited every morning to see