Categories
Poetry

Rasam and Sunil the Brahmin

By Marc Nair

Rasam for Grandma (1926–2017) In her last hours, birdlike, heaves of brittle breath flutter like grace notes in a sodden sonata. A bursting heart shudders under this slip of skin. Nothing made of words drips into evening. Her mouth a soundless nave, mind a widened sieve, eyes a dim room of racing monitors, diodes that map a flailing terrain held by the memory of daughters, women now; strange women of quibbling hours, who rock her with distant tears. She does not know who she sees; no thing of memory remains, not in muscle or breath, not in the taste of rasam lost beyond her tongue, thin spices souring over years of simmering in a dusty kitchen, morning sun ageing the linoleum, a ‘For Sale’ sign growing in the yard. Sunil the Brahmin Just keep following the heart-lines on your hand Florence and the Machine He would read me the truth of words spliced by the lines on my hand, in fisted heartbeats of callused stories. His own thumbs will not bend; steeled by a certain inflexibility to step from the haveli of his fathers into this pulsing world, sheared by jagged roofs and backpackers. The valves of his blue-daubed house open and close their doors with older sight, blood etched from the lineage on his palm; a history of Brahmins as soothsayers, the holy lines on their head clear as the need for a city’s arteries to flow, a sure pump of wisdom that foiled uprisings. They walked for centuries in the fault lines of kings, telling of fame and famine, although Sunil speaks to me in smaller worlds: of my own love-lines split like Jodhpur’s road winding from the unconquered fort, as my palm reveals its map of the maker’s blade, the unfinished road pressed against my heart.

( First published in Vital Possessions, Ethos Books, 2018)

( First published in Postal Code, Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2013)

Marc Nair is a poet who works at the intersection of various art forms. He is currently pursuing projects that involve photography, movement and creative non-fiction. His work revolves around the ironies and idiosyncrasies of everyday life. He has published ten collections of poetry. 

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