Echoes of ‘Home’ | Nalini Paul

The below is a new sequence of poems by Nalini Paul, commissioned by the Book Festival as part of New Passages, an international author residency conducted in partnership with An Lanntair and Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival. Read more about the project here.

Nalini Paul was born in India, grew up in Vancouver, and has been living in Scotland for most of her adult life. As a keen walker and lover of the outdoors, her writing often touches on themes of migration, memory and landscapes. Read her initial reflections on the project here and here.

Parsvanatha
Basalt deity, 12^th Century, engraved with Colin Mackenzie’s initials and the date, 1806

If I told you I could see
it all at once –
            birth
            death
            rebirth –
a vision of your rise and fall
like waves of navigation
across oceans to stolen paradise
– what would you say?

If the dead could speak –
if stone could make sense
of your wanderings.

Are names forgotten when you cut
cut them out with your dark
desire, your black-edged cunning?

On entering the tomb
or temple
or palace
the walls are lined with damaged mirrors.
Your lamp picks out the edges,
smooths away the ugly corners.

Letters creep into my skin,
forming words in the language of your kin
but my language is yours and what is yours
covers the surface entirely,
until stone becomes skin and skin
becomes stone again.

Your name cannot rename me,
no matter how hard you tried
or how sweet was your smile.

An encounter changed us forever,
gave a flavour of darkness
that was already spreading within you;
so that conversations with the long-dead
will continue
until bone and stone return to earth
and earth to dust.

Untitled fragments

The empirically beautiful partition:
hand-crafted by slaves
in ornate iron,
its faded splendour winking as fallen
stars to heaving crowds.

Carriages in painted metal: gold,
coral, vermillion and rust,
drawn by starved white horses;
eyes sunk into sockets like too many
haze-covered sunsets.

Outside the guest-house, unsleeping
endless footfall:
fires for chai, broken clay cups scatter
in night.

Echoes of ‘home’
Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata

Culzean
            MacMillan
                        Dalgleish.

Mackenzie (CMK)
   our blessing
            our tainted blessing.
‘We thank thee, oh Lord,’
resounded in the streets of Stornoway,
at nearly every corner
            a church.

In the musty interior of the chapel
future sight of the past –
St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta,
its pews chock-a-block with Indians.

And finally, me, filing in late
for the service;
trying to re-learn how to pray like this –
communal space
sacred place –
a visitor in my birth-mother country.
Kolkata/Calcutta is not me.

Mackenzie
            our blessing
            our grateful blessing
   our asked-for
   thanked-for
reason for being – sunlight
scatters over tombs.

A quality – the stillness
bathed in heat that I once breathed,
now rebirthed:
   honour
   military splendour
   polo matches
   chai in the garden
   supper with the Viceroy
   dinner at the club
   recordings of this and that
   culture
   mappings
   gin and tonic
   quinine.

As if Buddha
            Shiva
            Krishna
            Rama
   Astronomy
   Medicine
   Philosophy
   Yoga
   Textiles
Poetry
   Maharanis
   The Ganges

could be crammed into two white centuries.

Niseaboist, Isle of Harris

Water does not differentiate,
its azures reflecting the earth’s only sun
into crashed foam and pale light.

No need for words, like
            black
                        like white.
No space for hierarchies
            or dictators
            no sleight of hand
    to write in borders
    to write in margins
    to cast out far
like herring nets
for reasons to conjure
East or West.

When a strong wind blows
from the North onto coastal
waters, nutrients, deep in the seabed
upwell.
Moving Pole-wards, they leave
behind heat and energy
and all the detritus of the journey:

the pearls and jewels
    the trinkets and rubies
    the sapphires and diamonds
    the coloured-glass windows
of temples and churches
of Hindu and Christian
traversing the centuries in objects
that outlive us.

What would a pair of hands
in the future make of these fragments?
Fingers sift through broken glass
like the ocean moving
its cargo into the Deep Waters.

Will it all ever speak,
the marble and gneiss?
Could the gravestones and temples
and churchyards speak?

Craggy mountains
gold sand
tear-streaked hillsides.

I take a small stone
and add it to the cairn.

Flow

With a drop of gin to line
the poem
With a drop of water to raise
the dead
With a drop of sky to see
the temple
With a drop of compassion to paint
it red.

Words languish in the broad,
white spaces between what is said
and what the mind colours its canvas with.

These polarised unities exist,
just as truths do,
just as blood flows
through veins unheeded.