SMALL-SCALE
REFLECTIONS ON A GREAT HOUSE
- A.K. Ramanujan
Sometimes
I think that nothing
that
ever comes into this house
goes
out. Things come in every day
to
lose themselves among other things
lost
long ago among
other
things lost long ago;
lame
wandering cows from nowhere
have
been known to be tethered,
given
a name, encouraged
to
get pregnant in the broad daylight
of
the street under the elders’
supervision,
the girls hiding
behind
windows with holes in them.
Unread
library books
usually
mature in two weeks
and
begin to lay a row
of
little eggs in the ledgers
for
fines, as silverfish
in
the old man’s office room
breed
dynasties among long legal words
in
the succulence
of
Victorian parchment.
Neighbours’
dishes brought up
with
the greasy sweets they made
all
night the day before yesterday
for
the wedding anniversary of a god,
never
leave the house they enter,
like
the servants, the phonographs,
the
epilepsies in the blood,
sons-in-law
who quite forget
their
mother, but stay to check
accounts
or teach arithmetic to nieces,
or
the women who come as wives
from
houses open on one side
to
rising suns, on another
to
the setting, accustomed
to
wait and to yield to monsoons
in
the mountains’ calendar
beating
through the hanging banana leaves.
And
also, anything that goes out
will
come back, processed and often
with
long bills attached,
like
the hooped bales of cotton
shipped
off to invisible Manchesters
and
brought back milled and folded
for
a price, cloth for our days’
middle-class
loins, and muslin
for
our richer nights. Letter mailed
have
a way of finding their way back
with
many re-directions to wrong
addresses
and red ink marks
earned
in Tiruvalla and Sialkot.
And
ideas behave like rumours,
Once
casually mentioned somewhere
they
come back to the door as prodigies
born
to prodigal fathers, with eyes
that
vaguely look like our own,
like
what uncle said the other day:
that
every Plotinus we read
is
what some Alexander looted
between
the malarial rivers.
A
beggar once came with a violin
to
croak out a prostitute song
that
our voiceless cook snag
all
the time in our backyard.
Nothing
stays out: daughters
get
married to short-lived idiots;
sons
who run away come back
in
grandchildren who recite Sanskrit
to
approving old men, or bring
betelnuts
for visiting uncles
who
keep them gaping with
anecdotes
of unseen father,
or
to bring Ganges water
in
a copper pot
for
the last of the dying
ancestors’
rattle in the throat.
And
though many times from everywhere,
recently
only twice:
once
in nineteen-forty-three
from
as far away as the Sahara,
half-gnawed
by desert foxes,
and
lately from somewhere
in
the north, a nephew with stripes
on
his shoulder was called
an
incident on the border
and
was brought back in plane
and
train and military truck
even
before the telegrams reached,
on
a perfectly good
Chatty
afternoon.
