Routes

By Rhiya Pau

At the core of this debut collection is a question – what is worth holding onto?
Through poetic experiments that blend the academic and the artistic, Rhiya Pau queries complex characters and tender landscapes. Routes journeys from Ba's kitchen in Sonia Gardens to Independence hour in Delhi, across the pink shores of Nakuru, to meet a painter on Lee High Road.
Celebrating fifty years since her community arrived in the UK, Pau chronicles the migratory histories of her ancestors and simultaneously lays bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. In this multilingual discourse exhibiting vast formal range, Pau wrestles with language, narrative and memory, daring to navigate their collective fallibilities to architect her own identity.
'[Routes]...holds up to the light the wisdom of the past, and asks what else is passed down along with it...a work of humane intelligence, formal experiment and linguistic verve' - Sarah Howe, Judge of Eric Gregory Awards 2022

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arachne Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913665722

Rhiya Pau

Rhiya Pau is a British-born poet of Indian heritage from a community with a rich history of migration. She is one half of Origins Poetry Duo, who host multi-disciplinary fundraisers, platforming emerging artists of the global majority and is a member of the Poets for Partition collective. Rhiya was the winner of the 2021 Creative Future Writers’ Award. Her debut poetry collection, Routes, won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2022.

Book preview

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First published in UK 2022 by Arachne Press Limited

100 Grierson Road, London, SE23 1NX

www.arachnepress.com

© Rhiya Pau 2022

ISBNs

Print: 978-1-913665-71-5

eBook: 978-1-913665-72-2

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of Arachne Press.

Thanks to Muireann Grealy for her proofreading.

Cover design © Suman Gujral 2022

ROUTES

RHIYA PAU

Contents

Preface

Roots I

Oral Traditions I

Bandhani

Enough

Homecoming

Sightseeing

From Madurai to Rameswaram

The Highway Hunters

Ride for Darjeeling

Pilgrims

At a Dhaba, Dahl is Frying

Calling on Monsoon

The Girl in the Water

Inheritance

Silverware

Oral Traditions II

Black Eyes

On Lust:

On Shame:

saturday night fever

Goddess

Last Spring

Five/Eight Thousand Miles Away

Roots II

Thought Experiments at Oriel

Partition

Conflict of Interest

Kaliyug

Entropy

Author’s Note

We Gotta Talk About S/kincare

To Save the Planet: or To Send Your Kids to Private School: or After You Send Your Kids to Private School, but Before You Have Enough:

Ode to Corelle

Routes

Mombasa Heat

Sonia Gardens, 1999

Sonia Gardens, 2004

Sonia Gardens, 2011

Dying

Departure Lounge

Eighty-Five in Dove Park

Salutation

Beyond

Roots  III

Notes

Acknowledgements

Preface

There is an illustration in Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe, of a peach seed being bombarded first by marbles, then by smaller pellets, and finally by particles of light. The experiment uses the patterns of these objects as they scatter to uncover the architecture of the fruit seed, with the moral being that smaller firing objects produce a more granular expression of the target. This simple illustration, calling attention to the limitations of the tools we use to interact with the world, is one I continue to revisit.

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When my Ba and Bapuji moved to the UK in the seventies, they never suspected that their grandchildren would not be fluent in their mother tongue – that instead we’d hold clunky, grammar-backward sentences like marbles in our mouths. Words are the smallest unit of discourse and imagination, and without a breadth or precision of vocabulary, we have been left with a tepid understanding of one another. Across the South Asian diaspora, I find our intergenerational relationships malnourished in this absence of language. Although we cannot name the loss, we do our best to fill it with rituals of cut fruit, oily earth-fragrant head massages, summer riches of puri and pulped saffron mangoes and the enthralling melodies of qawwali and kirtan.

All this is to confess that, although as a child I was well steeped in culture, I learnt much of my history in translation. Bapuji was a mighty man, a freedom fighter in the Independence movement, and yet I frequented India most often through the white man’s gaze, watching Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Mahatma Gandhi, reading Kipling and Theroux, studying the British Raj from white-washed curricula and even experiencing my first back-packing trip through the