Amitava Kumar
Poems for the I.N.S.
I
The cigarette smoke lingered
in the blue Minnesota chill
as my friend said, "I'd like to talk
to you of other things.
Not politics again but things like
whether you are lonely."
"What could be more political
than the fact that I'm lonely,
that I am so far away
from everything I've known?"
But, the consular here has other queries.
Do you have property in India?
Land? Relatives? Anything?
"Write down, officer:
The yellow of mustard blossoms
stretching to the blue horizon.
My grandmother's tears
when she asks me what good is your learning
when it steals you from my embrace.
In our old house, with its dampness,
the music of my sister's laughter.
Four friends who bring news
of a new canal that has been dug by the villagers.
The bend in the river
near the tall trees where the spirits
of my ancestors are consecrated.
Women's voices from across the waters
that I have been hearing since my childhood.
The smell of hot pepper being roasted over a naked fire.
All of this from that one brief hour in November
during which my friend had asked her question."
II
"And how do I know
you are going to come back
you are that you aren't going
to stay there in the States?"
The officer is young, wearing a tie.
He turns my passport around
till he has my picture upside down,
the loose change for my bus-ticket
rolling out of my shirt-pocket
the loose change for my bus-tickeinto his lap.
III
A Marine walks around us, his attention cocked.
What does he want me to do?
"Rambo, Rambo." I shout exultantly.
But, that's too recent, let me mine
the archetypes. "Hey Charlie,
Give me a Lucky Strike. Some gum?
Want a good fuck? Very cheap. Dirty magazine?"
I do nothing, I say nothing.
In the garden outside the peacocks call.
I sip the coffee and plot my moves.
Now am I doing what he wants me to do?
IV
"Do you intend to overthrow
the government of the United States
by force or fraud?"
An old man who wants to visit
a son in New Jersey
wants me to help him
with this question on the form.
A friend tells me later of someone
who believing it was an either/or question
tried to play it safe and opted
for the overthrow of the government
by fraud.
V
"You can't trust them," one officer says.
I'm prepared to bet he is from Brooklyn.
There is no response from the other one. He is not angry,
just sad that I now work in his country.
This quiet American has pasted a sheet with Hindi alphabets
On his left, on his right there is a proverb from Punjab.
"You just can't trust them," the first one repeats,
shaking his wrist to loosen his heavy watch.
The one sitting down now raises his weary eyes.
"Did you, the first time you went there,
intend to come back?"
intend to come b"Wait a minute," I say, "did you get a visa
when you first went to the moon? Fuck the moon,
tell me about Vietnam. Just how precise
were your plans there, you asshole?
And did you when you went to Panama the first time
know that you'd come back, guns blazing, a century later?
And this," I fist my cock when I say this, "and this
is what I think of your trust. Do you understand
that every time a doctor, teacher, engineer, or scholar
comes to the United States from India
you save more on bills
than what you and Charlie here
would be able to pay
till the year two thousand and four?
So that your saying that we can't be trusted
is like the owner shouting his worker's lazy
after he has stripped his skin and taken his soul.
He's sold...do you hear me?
He's sold...do you hear mHear me
because I want this fact to be stored
like a bullet in your heart."
Maybe I did say all of this, and it was fear
that I saw in the officer's eyes
when in response to my shrug
he slowly turned the pages of my passport and stamped it.
|