Cover

Also by Ranjit Hoskote

Poetry

Zones of Assault (1991)

The Cartographer’s Apprentice (with drawings by Laxman Shreshtha, 2000)

The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001)

Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985–2005 (2006)

Central Time (2014)

Poetry (In Translation)

Die Ankunft der Vögel (in German, 2006)

Feldnotizen des Magiers (in German, 2015)

Poetry (As Editor)

Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002)

Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (2012)

Translation

A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992)

I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal De?d (2011)

Art Criticism and Cultural Theory

Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala (1998)

The Complicit Observer: Reflections on the Art of Sudhir Patwardhan (2004)

Atul Dodiya: Antler Anthology (2004)

The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala (2005)

Baiju Parthan: A User’s Manual (2006)

The Dancer on the Horse: The Art of Iranna G.R. (2007)

Bharti Kher (2007)

The Crafting of Reality: Sudhir Patwardhan, Drawings (2008)

Praneet Soi: Still, Life (2009)

Zinny and Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (2010)

The Dialogues Series (with Nancy Adajania, 2011)

Mohan Samant: Paintings (with Marcella Sirhandi and Jeffrey Wechsler, 2013)

Atul Dodiya (2014)

Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People) (co-edited with Maria Hlavajova, 2015)

In the Presence of Another Sky: Sakti Burman (2017)

Cultural History

Kampfabsage (with Ilija Trojanow, in German, 2007)

Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West (with Ilija Trojanow, English version, 2012)

Artist Books

Pale Ancestors (with Atul Dodiya, 2008)

What’s He Going to Be Next? (with Sakti Burman, 2016)

Advance Praise for Jonahwhale

‘The poems in Ranjit Hoskote’s Jonahwhale are brilliant annotations on the giant landmass of history. With wisdom and erudition in plenty and a masterly grip on the quiet but lethal drama of verse, Jonahwhale is, on any measure, a major achievement.’—George Szirtes, poet and translator; author of The Burning of the Books and Bad Machine

‘A wonderfully ambitious, sophisticated and charged collection: a symphony of the sea in three great movements. The first explores history, language, geography, the Indian Ocean and colonization, with Shakespearian echoes of The Tempest. Then comes contemporary and personal human “traffic’’ – and urban alienation; and the third delves deeply into art. The forms, exquisite  lyrics, philosophical insights, prose poems, epics with still moments of pure  simplicity, are as multiple and shape-shifting as water. An astonishing achievement.’—Ruth Padel, professor of poetry, King’s College, London; author of Darwin: A Life in Poems and The Mara Crossing

‘What is each poem in the world but a speck of land lost upon the ocean of language itself? We must then navigate ourselves through poets like Ranjit Hoskote and books like Jonahwhale. As ever before, through his imagistic, complex, dazzling poems, Hoskote’s grand grounded intelligence, and the width of his learning, comes concentrated into brilliant meditations on what poetry can do when reflecting upon an essential theme of human culture. For, reading Jonahwhale, it is clear to any reader the poet’s name is Ocean, and these poems are both the water and the sea creatures, with this book as our raft.’—S.J. Fowler, poetry editor, 3:AM Magazine; lecturer in creative writing at Kingston University; curator, ‘The Enemies Project’

‘Epic in scale, yet written with curatorial precision, Jonahwhale is Ranjit Hoskote’s magnum opus. Here is a poet with extraordinary sensory awareness – especially hearing and sight/vision – who applies a poetics/poethics of listening, one that is consistently generous and open to the world, therefore truly of the world. Linguistically innovative, but always social and ethical, these poems are, above all, sensitive to the precariousness of human knowledge and existence. The whale evades capture as we stand “on this narrow island of what we know” (or presume we know). Ranjit is one of the great connoisseurs of English language poetry, someone who holds up each word before him with the care of a jeweller. His mastery of form and lineation is constantly impressive (read the long-form poems like “Cargo and Ballast” and “Poona Traffic Shots” amid several short lyric poems, many dedicated to others). Poems like these reappropriate the love poem in an age often lacking friendship and compassion. Jonahwhale is an essential and humbling reaction to the world we live in and it should be read widely.’—James Byrne, editor, Wolf; author of Everything Broken Up Dances

Dedication

In memory of Chandra Hoskote (1934–2015), my mother, my first reader

the great fish glides through the river

touching the near bank

and the far

the self swims the currents

of dream

and waking

—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (4.3.18)

I

MEMOIRS OF THE JONAHWHALE

The Churchgate Gazette

I.

Last word on the subject, I promise.

I walked into the train station and it was terrifying.

Like nerve gas had laid the architecture out flat,

the tall glass columns bloodshot and the booking clerks

slumped over, all dead at the till.

A plaster Gandhi with sulphur-rimmed eyes

stopped me (what a substitute for kohl and why?).

You missed the last train, it said, he said,

you missed the last and only train that was safe

for a man who’s left half his life behind.

II.

A straggler from a late-night movie had more advice.

You could so easily gag on a wine-red, tasselled silk scarf

stuffed in your mouth, he said, you could so easily gag

on sour saliva or a shard of bay leaf

or a letter swallowed just after the bell has rung

and before the door opens.

III.

I thought of the possibilities as I left the station without a compass.

Walk straight enough, said Gandhi, and you could walk into the sea.

At the wharf, the sailors’ wives were keening together:

they were singing the last songs of the whales.

I was their brother and I had killed them

with my broken harpoon and my rusted smile.

IV.

Find affection, I told myself. That’s fundamental.

Find a voice that doesn’t draw blood

each time you hear it. I walked past myself,

I rippled across lean men and sleek women

laughing behind plate glass, their hands caught

in pools of light, wine gleaming in brittle flutes.

V.

Birdsong disturbs the king of incomplete lives.

He wakes up in the middle of the novel he’s writing

in the Midnight Hotel. His eyes need shielding

from the raw clarity of neon. He is back

where he began, with a plate of waxy grapes

and a blunt silver knife on his bedside table.

VI.

Break, ice, for me.

Let me fall through stinging water

in my skin of rust and flame.

I’ve jumped from a tree

that’s branched into the clouds.

It’s sucked up all the reality

I’ve watered it with.

Its fruits are red and wrinkled.

I plunge into drowned gardens

where I walked once.

Sinking, the water stroking

my crown of leaves

as it comes apart,

dark tribune, archaic clown,

I open my eyes.

The Map Seller

for Nikola Madzirov

The roof’s dripping with pigeons and I’ve just escaped

the worst of the sun, strapped on my scuffed leather bag,

and in a moment – this shade’s delicious – and before

the pedlars start shouting, Say your piece! Say your piece!

I’ll start calling out names and pulling countries from it:

big countries, small countries, countries broken in two,

countries the size of handkerchiefs and countries engorged

with other countries, buffer zones jostled by failed states,

island republics sinking by degrees. Even nuclear powers

that started as papaya plots or guano archipelagos.

Whatever you like, I’ve got a map that looks like it –

and you can have any piece of my flaking jigsaw atlas,

if only I could reach you across this accordion sky

that’s billowed open to rain on all the hats I wear:

tribune of nowhere, midnight’s newscaster,

out-of-work weatherman, all-terrain refugee.

And across this trench that a JCB’s dug along my street:

tomorrow’s avenue, today’s wide sludge grave.

The Atlas of Lost Beliefs

Without waking up, turn to page thirty-seven

in the Atlas of Lost Beliefs

and surround yourself

with apsaras, kinnaras, gandharvas, maenads,

satyrs, sorcerers, bonobos, organ grinders,

stargazers, gunsmiths, long-distance runners,

gravediggers, calligraphers, solitary reapers,

beenkars, troubadours, rababias, ronin,

nagas, pearl divers, Vandals, Goths,

mummers, snipers, collectors of moths,

hobos, dharma bums, bauls, drifters,

djinns, mahjubs, marabouts, qalandars,

griots, mad hatters, speakers in tongues,

trippers, star angels, batmen, punks,

eggheads, buffoons, lay preachers, agitators,

friends of the court, friars minorite, agents provocateurs,

bird-spangled shamans, fainting oracles, screeching owls,

wise men of Gotham, and women who run with wolves

all blessed by the blue hand of a reckless dancer

who spares a thought or two for the world but no more

as she poses, heels in the air, Cossack-kicking on a crumbling reef.

Seven Islands

sand-wrought storm-humped

these islands

never complain

they take what comes

craft

one name for seven

from dropped iron lost rivers and

spits of reclaimed land starved

ocean

wind-ripped light-riveted

gravel-spun overrun

roads that take you step by step

to where the water is

sweet and deep

the only way up

until help arrives

is south

Ocean

my name is Ocean

I shall not be contained

my tides spell

starting gun and finish line

afterwards only shells

and scattered roofs

will remind you I was

there

my combers wash away the roots of trees, towns, the shaken heart

but mortals there’s hope

my breakers hurl seeds back at your shores

after the flood the chroniclers will write

in Konkani, Sabir, Aymara, Tulu, Jarawa, Krio, Tok Pisin:

after the flood the beach exploded with giant peacock trees

in whose branches on windy days you could hear

the surge

and swell

of Ocean summoning whales, whalers who chased blood-wakes,

red-haired women who fought pirates, sleepless harpooners

who sailed from fjordlands to where

volcanoes splintered the sleeping ice,

furies who choked pearl divers, drove catamarans aground,

voyagers who fell into the sea and grew wings

Ocean reciting from his depths

every drifting epic of pursuit, every song of shipwreck,

every trace of raft and sail and trailing anchor

flotsam jetsam buckram vellum

he could remember

Ahab

Captain of castaways, the pilot calls out and his curse carries

across docks, derricks, opium factories:

a typhoon in the horse latitudes.

He’s hurled his ship after the whale

that swallowed him and spat him out.

The monster is the only system he’s known.

At the bridge, he’s drenched in the dark:

locked on target, silent, furrowed,

Saturned to stone.

*

Across steep tides, through walls of water, his life has always been pursuit.

As the ship splinters on the reef,

the rigging becomes his noose.

Brine blistering his throat, he thinks:

If only I’d harpooned this monster on a page.

Spelling the Tide

We drew near the island, the surf a cannonade on its stony beaches,

no landing.

We dropped anchor.

Some fishermen came down

to the water’s edge and called out. We called back.

The surf roared in our ears, no one

heard no one.

The skirling wind shredded our voices and danced on them.

We pointed

at the canoes

they’d hauled out of tide’s reach.

Come get us.

They didn’t get us

or didn’t want to.

We made signs.

The skirling wind shredded our signs and danced on them.

They melted away in the rain.

Water in your sails, shirts, socks is wet lead.

Prayer in that storm

was just a mouth gone wrong.

We tried our hands instead.

We made all

the signs we knew.

The skirling wind shredded our sails and danced on them.

Cape Caution

When you’re swimming from Cape Caution to Impulse Bay,

don’t miss the line where jade touches turquoise and recoils:

this is the jolt where nerve end meets salt,

this is the neverskin,

this is where you grow knife-edged fins and plunge:

you’re one light tremor away from sabre teeth.

The Heart Fixes on Nothing

Zafar

The heart fixes on nothing in this wasted province.

Whoever made anything of a kingdom of shadows?

Go find another home, my smothered hopes.

This stained heart has no roof to offer you.

I prayed for long life and got four days:

two were spent in desire, two in waiting.

Gardener, don’t rip these thorns from the garden:

they were raised with the roses by a gentle spring.

The nightingale doesn’t blame the gardener or the hunter:

Fate had decided spring would be its cage.

Fate’s real dupe: that would be you, Zafar, your body denied

two yards of spaded earth in the Loved One’s country.

And Sometimes Rivers

And sometimes rivers

that run in your veins

change course.

Silt marks the spot

from where you set sail

to circumnavigate the globe

and where someone wearing your sunburned face

stopped thrashing about in mangroves that wouldn’t let go

and stood still, bleached hair ruffled by the wind,

as if, after a voyage charted across fevers and hurricanes,

riding at anchor.

Risk

The earth here is glass, the wind the sting of a thousand wasps.

Whoever is driven north wishes he could burn in the fires of hell.

On this sea without horizons we do not sail by the magnet.

Of wisdom, the deep says, ‘It is not in me.’

As It Emptieth It Selfe

I.

At the mouth of the dog river

foam words foam words

currents of sand arrowing after fog birds

slack shadows engraved on the veil of the tide

that shimmers in and sags out

for the twentieth the thirtieth the emptieth time

the river going with the sea the sea going homewards

As It Emptieth It Selfe

You shall build your citadels on silt said the preacher

and sink your pride in spice currents

take your parakeets and painted cormorants

with you but leave the coconut palms and the Inca silver

leave behind a bloodful of curses

with strands of indigo wet bales of cotton

on this parched delta these dragged fields of salt

sweet strained with brack

For the Emptieth Time

II.

Splayed in his planter’s chair, the saboteur of silences toys

with a breech-loading Bible, cocked in defiance of treaties.

Nib sharpened by monsoon hungers, the chronic ache

of working in a country without plums or Bordeaux,

he writes home:

In this damnable climate, steel rusts, razors lose their edge.

Thread decays, clothes fall to pieces. Books moulder away.

Plaster cracks, timber rots,

the matting hangs in shreds. Fungus inscribes itself

on vellum bindings as the tattoo of rain on the roof

drowns out the mind’s arias.

The clouded mirror’s been my only proper companion

since Ovid and Seneca fell apart.

I’ve been reading palmleaf manuscripts with sour pandits

and picking up opium and Tamil from sallow lascars

in this pidgin district, waiting for the mailboat

to bring me the necessities:

sherry, walnuts, Trichinopoly cigars.

I have hidden in the houses of the bibis who breed

our scabby byblows, who run around the gullies

with their tow hair and improbable grey eyes:

their fortunes will be the fortunes of Homer’s sailors.

Before they indenture themselves

to war or shipwreck or sirens or mutiny,

we’ll tame the little devils, give them Greek

or Irish names, teach them a respectable tongue.

Then we’ll lop them off the family tree

and send them out on battered frigates

to fight and die for King and Country.

III.

Try mangrove instead of watercress.

Try chameleons instead of retrievers.

The earth webs your feet here, and look out

for rivers that bite.

Stone in the veins.

This country smelted from copper

and scented with mustard

has secret names that only

its lovers can nose out.

IV.

The river stabs the sea.

Water, salt and fresh, bursts up

through the splintered ribs of the scuttled boat

that’s trailed a wake of belly-up fish.

Thalassa. The compass bird points to the coast:

to a rivermouth disgorging crumbled islands,

to the tidewash that numbs the wounds

by which conquerors named it.

Trapped by the trader’s sovereign eye,

by the surveyors of revenue lands,

the purveyors of clove and camphor,

the coast signals its own tongue:

breaking with the horizon’s grammar,

a stutterance.

Lascar

Bombay–Liverpool–London, 1889

The lascar was always sallow. It didn’t help

that his name anagrammed rascal. He carried

a whiff of scurvy, a hint of rats in the hold,

hulls battered by typhoons.

He was never far from dirty work.

Here’s what the detective said:

There’s a trapdoor at the back of that opium den,

near the wharf, which could tell strange tales

of what passes through it on moonless nights.

Here’s what the good wife said:

At the foot of the stairs I met this lascar,

who thrust me back and, aided by a Dane,

pushed me out into the street.

Meanwhile her husband:

Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper

of a low den in which I used to lodge.

A lascar, well paid by me for his rooms,

my secret was safe with him.

Neither detective nor wife nor husband knew

the bleached village on the Konkan coast,

or had seen the forced parades at tropical noon,

the forts locked in rising silt, the standing crops burned.

History gave you one name. Fear

gave you and your cousins others.

To novelists: Savage.

To pamphleteers: Cannibal.

To scholars: Anthropophage.

To your captains: Seacunny, tindal,

syrang, topaze. Or mostly

as you swabbed the deck:

Cocoa-faced rascal!

You call yourself names

in the three tongues you speak in your sleep:

Lashkar. Tandel. Jahaazi.

They crowd us into the damp, shallow cradle

they call the fo’c’sle. Silly name. Phana, we call it,

phana: the hood. The wide fan-spread hood

of this coiled sea-cobra we’re sailing.

At the Belvedere

for Sandeep Parmar

The seaweed farmer from last evening

swung into the Belvedere again tonight,

this time asking for a Liverpool Gin

– citrus not watermelon, he specified

as he pulled the moonless key

to the alphabet lock

from his frayed trench pocket,

the hurricane lamps loud behind his glasses.

He dropped the key and a sand-crusted trowel

on the bar. His fingers had guttered out.

‘Let’s call it quits, shall we, mate?’

he nudged me. ‘I give up. I don’t know what

to call it, this mewling, this barking,

this mad overhead windwhack cackle of the gulls.’

Sycorax

Woke up trapped in a tree trunk,

speech slurred, though all I’d drunk

was berry-blood. It must have been the old man

with his cursed and cursing stick, which spanned

my rainbow-shored island in tight, cunning sweeps:

swamps, jungles, rivers all measured in leaps

and leached, cropped, dammed to suit his will,

the magus in his coracle, his eye fixed on the kill.

He has caged my bright-billed birds in new names,

mapped ash from his crucible across the flames

of my volcano, tamped it down. My skin is bark

on which his steaming slaves will carve his dark

memoirs of war. He will claim eternity as his own,

raise his monument on my stabbed muscles, my powdered bones.

A Constantly Unfinished Instrument

for Brian Eno

Begin with the creeper.

Follow its rustle

as it uncurls across brick, bark and thorn.

Go out in all weathers, craft a score

from the grunts and growls

that escape the world-beast in its sleep.

Stay the course until you’ve caught

the quick, true surge of the ocean

that’s felt the fire harpoon pierce its hide:

until you’ve heard the ocean flail, lash and roar

through the creeper,

heard it again, and heard it right.

Night Sky and Counting

for Teju Cole

You are in the dark

looking up at constellations and shooting stars

finding traces of adobe roofs and walls

at the eye’s radium rim while grass

tickles your back. You notice

some celestial objects move faster than others

sorting red shift from blue note

You are the samurai of wide open spaces

they scan you in their eyes you’re a ninja

betrayed by body heat you’re that grey-

glowing-to-orange smear in minutes

you could evaporate

leaving heat shadow

printed on the ground to mark the spot

You thought you were the subject the locus of consciousness

when the shooting stars look down they see

an object with eyes a moving threat

under the black mirror at which you point

to finger-link faint trails that might be a hunter

his belt his faithful dogs or a raven a boar

a river of eyes you have no cover

You are in the dark

Render

to provide a service, do [someone] a favour

to give, supply, make available for inspection

to submit an account or accounts

to deliver a judgement

to give up, surrender

to translate

to translate into form, give shape

to represent in a painting or motion capture

to perform a piece, animate a score

to create an image from binary code

to colour and shade that image

to make it solid

to melt fat down to clarify it

to hand [someone] over to [someone] in another country or territory

to extract protein, fat and other usable parts of a dead animal

the first coat of plaster applied to a brick or stone surface

before it’s whitewashed

Pompeii Mural

the colours have sunk

to evening whispers

the hours have spun out

across the bowl in fine cracks

these poems weren’t written in my garden

I’m driftwood in the wash of a winter sea

in the bowl a globe of honey gleams

the age and shade of amber

brushed with mint leaves

dark tides threaten my pages

this storm could drown out my music

lost avatar of nectar

the harbour I’m steering for is a reef

land holds more terrors than the angry sea

those dusty brown plums

were gorgeous enough once

for senators to eat

before the emperor’s scouts

marked them for the picking

Fly Away, Swim Closer

for Sunil Gawde

The blind lamp is a promise of dawn.

Fly closer, scorch your wings with praise,

grow a skin of distrust.

Somewhere, an insect is drinking the tears of a sleepless bird.

Somewhere, a boy has wormed himself into the roaring jet

that will take him across ice and rain to heaven.

Somewhere, reporters are shrieking as elephants rampage

through cities that used to be grasslands, looking for home.

Light can stun you. Light can sting.

Fly away, swim closer.

Marine Drive

There’s a colour whose name I’ve lost

to the ash fleece of cloud, the grackled light

of a monsoon sky seesawing in the gaze,

unframed, a trap for the sailboat wheeling in the bay:

this colour that hovers between tenses,

some call it violet, others squeeze their eyes shut

when it surges through slate-grey folds of water,

either not-yet or too-late, never tame at your heel.

But look, the rocks are coming into view,

dazed seals resurrected from the waves.

The tide’s worked itself loose of the shore

and drifted out. There are no explanatory notes.

What’s left behind is not the remainder.

There’s a colour whose name I cannot speak.

Natural History

A history of mammoths

salted away in warehouses

scrawled in chalk.

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