Just a turn in the road & Picnic at the zoo
by Revathy Gopal
[ poetry - march 05 ]
Just a turn in the road
Small towns named after big battles.
Chandernagar and Arcot,
Madras and Masulipatnam,
names from history texts
that send you to sleep in class.
Death under a tropical sun
comes in so many forms...
malaria and dysentery, syphilis and plague,
a tropical sun that drives men mad;
and bullet wounds that fester.
European hostilities explode
a continent away and foreign blood
and bowels leak into Indian earth.
Here a fort is besieged and taken,
ships sunk, local rajahs bought and sold...
small accruals in a war that happens elsewhere.
Small men, mere Company-wallahs
like Clive and Hastings who seized their chance
and went down an uncertain road...
And here we are now, ruled by Macaulay’s
Minute, not the Code Napoleon.
Shaped and made aware
by the blood and sinew
of the English tongue instead of
the froth and airy lightness of
s’il vous plait and je t’en prie.
Picnic at the zoo
Most of the cages are empty, now;
once there were civet cats, panther and jaguar,
even a family of white tigers from the Sunderbans
that made a splash of light in the infernal dark;
a black bear and a binturong
I remember particularly,
because of its droll name.
They died or were moved
to kinder climes, perhaps.
But when the kangaroos (strange import!)
died, one by one,
the local paper said they
probably pined away.
Somewhere between the orang-otan
and the peanut vendor,
she lies stricken in the dust,
Victoria, Queen Empress,
head averted in clotted rage
as pigeons strut
and cheeky boys clamber
on that capacious lap
from which once flowed,
the long tedium of empire,
the unending reproach
of widowhood, somewhere
a haemophilic grandson;
and the men who walked away,
father, husband,
a recalcitrant son.
