Goirick Brahmachari 
A Town Lost

Drunk-walks in Shillong rain through the waterlogged roads and pavements at night, running away from the crowd, traffic jams and newly acquired fascinations of shopping malls with plastic waterfalls, for Shillong is too cold for Subway anyway – and Dukan Ja and Sha would do to keep me warm and light my wet cigarettes; but when you search for your favourite tiny coffee corner, all you find is a big, fat retail giant monstrously chic for your taste – and the streets are filled with obnoxious tourists who come to dirty and buy, as if vacation meant shopping – so you run in the rain – and escape the filth that has taken over this dream – to forget, to remember friends you have lost and friends you have found to lose again – you run, you walk, you take a drag, try hard not to wet your smoke – and those pine trees, they eat memories – through time and rusted pages of alternate realities – and you walk through the night on streets that lead to sky, neatly stitched tin roofs, clotheslines, wooden houses that hang on the hills of Lumparing, oh Lumparing! and further up at Upper Shillong where Phyll still lives – as clouds dance like patterns in your Windows Media player, listening to random Bollywood songs that ooze out of a black and yellow Maruti 800 which used to strictly play classic rock, few years back, until reality TV came and danced over the crops of music that was this town. Maybe, only the direct diction of vernacular hip-hop revolution can clean this noise now.

Last taxi to Sohryngkham
(An elegy for Angeline Kharmalki) 

Memory is triangular
We burn to fight a cold, cold winter.
Night brings strange insects
Feeds her anxiety
Moths plan a mass suicide
Inside her mind. The windows are a blur.
The humming pine winds set the score.
The rain was always a part of the plan.
Until a coal truck slides and falls over
As she finally flies.

(and all our love-
hate games
unread letters
and scores
settled
in a flash)

She appears and disappears

like a childhood memory. 
Her skies are silver, her voice 
Like that of the breeze.

She tells me tales of the forests
And secrets of the great seas.
She knows the senses 
Of life and death and other miseries. 

In the space between the note
And the sound, she hides; 
She fights the norms,
All she says is through her craft. 
She knows too much 
To sound profound.

How do you feel?

A purple leafless tree
How do you feel?
Thirsty
What’s in your mind?
...
What’s in your mind?               
...
What do you want?
To die like a waterfall
Where do you want to go?
Where the roads melt into rhyme
What do you love?
Slackery
What’s in your mind?
…
What’s in your mind?
…
What do you see?
End of the world
How do you feel?
…
How do you feel?
Scared, maybe?
What do you hate?
Anything slick
How do you feel?
Bored
What’s in your mind?
Electric wires
What do you want?
Cigarettes
What do you see?
Radiating light
What do you hear?
Loud isochronic tones
What do you see?
…
What do you see?
…
What do you see?
Blue grass, green skies
What do you like?
Distortion
How do you feel?
STIFLED
How does it taste?
My mouth is dry
What’s on your mind?
…
What’s on your mind?

Self-portrait (2020) 

My mouth is dry
I do not trust this existence
I don’t trust myself most
I am not here

Only bones
Broken teeth
Skull
Nails
Parched toes
Bitten fingers
Bitten skin

Tramadol
Tastes like charcoal
And I smell like decomposed fast food
Wastehills

What is a good life?

Habit

We enter the exit
On a Sunday night at half-past seven, trying to erase time
Unacknowledging, as if the hills were never there,
No freezing moonless lonesome nights; as if
The bus never returned, and the coffee cups were all empty
And we never lost the road back to where
We would eventually crash; as if
The sounds weren’t played and the doorbells were never rung.
Nothing was ever there.
Nothing is never there.
Nothing       is             never           there.

Avner Pariat
Pavlov’s Dogs

Imagine the beggar people at Sani Mandir responding instantly to the ring of that bell. I saw an old Marwari man throw bread packets to them, as the Khasi shoppers stared on with only the slightest affectation, because there were no snatching Khasi hands holding up for Dkhar bread. These are dogs. Does it shock you? Insult you to hear me call them dogs? Don’t be. Do we not roll over or sit when we are told? Do we not fetch and play dead on command? Don’t be insulted.
Listen.

Amongst talk of Poetry and Art

I get bored
I walk quickly outside and hunt for late night cigarettes
I sit down and fart along with a beggar under a blanket
I can’t help this man, I can’t help anyone:
I have failed my Christianity

I look forward to these quiet sit-alones after hastily drunk booze
I’m not looking forward to the hangover before the morning flight
I go back in 'cause I’m scared someone will speak to me in Hindi
There’s a selfie-wall at the entrance
I worry about selfies, and being paid for my Art
I worry about the bathroom attendant who hands me a napkin after I piss

Someone’s fighting over the phone again –
Good old New Delhi hospitality –
Every single time. Always someone fighting over the phone.
I can’t penetrate the shield people have here
And I start to miss my home

I miss the small spaces I lorded over
I miss the little chaidukans
Where everyone knew me
I miss the non-professionals and all the useless tribal pieces of shit
Who made me   

Our Shiva

Let me claim you as the Veda did aeons ago,
Let me remind you of your previous life,
Pasan, my old uncle,
Whose shack was behind mother’s house,
Where you ate fish heads with local kyiad at night;
With every joke came a hint of malice;
We were always nervous laughing, wary of your curses,
Like Shiva, you danced one moment
Spat out venom the next.

During the day, you would prod about in the garden,
Harvesting taro and sweet potatoes.
You were always accompanied by our unceremonial dogs.

You bathed once a year before Christmas –
Upon my mother’s sharper insistence –
No-one called you deity but I know
You had something of the old gods;
Winter plants were nurtured by the silt of your meandering locks,
The mushroom in its underground prison festered joyfully again,
The wild rat smirked in its winter sleep within its earth womb,
Blossoms grew patient, waiting for the shot of spring:
It was all your doing, I know.

Important questions of the day

Will Matriliny get me laid?
Will Indigeneity get me paid?
Will living roots bridge my lust?

I’ll wear Tribality like a grass skirt, dance around
Eat kwai, and bare my red teeth at the crowd,
Show off my tribal temper, show off my tribal spear
Wear the pretty terms around my neck
Like so much coral-stone.

Once I speak, your hearts will open
This is my skill, which no ancestor knew
You will love it, then you will make love to me.

I’ll warm you with stories about matriarchs,
While we get high on Glen Morangie
Tribal rights? Mine are violated every day,
Invite me to speak about them in Delhi.

Come with me to the village
Let us eat organic pork
Let us talk about preservation
Let us talk about loss
Please shed a few tears for my loss

At night, we will go dancing
And I will teach you to howl
To celebrate a new-found pact
Between a pussycat and an owl

But there is always room for more
My welcome is wide and open
My tribal house (literally) has no door –
Please get me some funding.

I invite you all into the circle I own
Around the cold hearth
Let us make our flames

Where is the wild thing?

Somewhere in a ritual or habit. Wild, still. In spite of the communal hunting. Our nets and drumming cannot herd it. We never kill it all.

Wild grizzly Freedom out there in the courage I never had to turn wild. To turn tiger, jackal, no, rodent. My heart is smaller than a mole’s. I am not half as bold.

For I fear and love the dark spots under the trees. The same ones in broken-down houses. In unoccupied hospital rooms. Something dwells there. Something still dwells inside me. And thank god, for that. For that useless solitude.

Look East

Look East but not if this highway brings middlemen and murder;
Look East but not for the sake of nation or Delhi;
Look East but not if this highway takes from you, your health;
Look East but not for the sake of anything but your village;
Look East but not if this highway brings dust and drunk driving;
Look East but not for the sake of companies or tycoons;
Look East but not if this highway takes from you, your rice fields;
If these should happen: look west, look south, look north,
Look anywhere but east.

In These Hills 

My people – ancient people – who remember nothing:
Who do you sing to now when the creeks are yellow?
Is it worth praying after the black stones are gone? 
Do trucks from Assam pledge bountiful harvest? 
Our sacred mountain is in a Bangla depot,
The site of our lovemaking is under construction, 
The orchards rot away, the grass is emboldened
Your known tact dies with your shell:
Now amnesia only, only wood fire,
Fruit supplanted by famine, pond by pyre.

Polo 

There is the dump where the chicken bits would rot in the open air. Nearby, a wine shop and a wall where men line up to piss into the drain. Across the road, the women stand, waiting for cars, in front of the butchers’ shops. For some reason, I hated this place as a child, inheriting bias for the squalor and the smells. I always said it was a place for mutants because of the old woman whose back was so crooked she walked with her face downwards. She frightened me in her white sari then – which is now pure and poor in the mind, now a symbol of resilience. Polo was also where I saw the man in tattered clothes with one enlarged earlobe that hung like an earring on the side of his face. He was always coughing and I would make a face whenever I saw him, unable to stomach the sight. I do not see him anymore. Here too, I would see the woman with the asymmetrical face, her left side slightly drooping. I do not see these people anymore and I want to, now. Now I think about them and, of course, I think about myself as I was then. Then, I wanted to see Polo mowed down and yes, they have tried so many times to do that. Polo, after all, is unsightly and lumbering and diseased and its people pollute the river that runs alongside the length of it. Yet somehow the crazy people, the poor rag-pickers, the broken men and the bad women manage to roil every time under the boot. Every time the debris crumbles into a familiar position, these people find their place again; every year there is flooding and the moment it subsides they are out again – just a matter of shovelling out the slime, I suppose. Polo seems to have a place for everyone – the way a Church is supposed to be.

Playing in the Garden

As children, we had insects for toys. To the cicada, we tied string and it became our hovering and droning ‘dog’ on a leash. We taunted the hairy caterpillar with ‘kut kut’ believing it was attracted to the sound. We squeezed out web, and life, from the garden spider’s abdomen. We especially loved the click beetles who would shoot up into the air if we placed them on their backs. Fireflies and bees we attempted to catch and imprison in bottles, though the latter arthropod never went down without a fight. Our swollen fingers bore testament. The scores of brightly coloured beetles that hid in the squash flowers were our jewels.

Tribal Writes Back | Guwahati 

That Ganeshguri giddiness. That time once when a scrolling LED sign, screening useless info, astounded a child’s mind. This was the nineties. It was a time when the Ganesh Mandir at Khanapara, then by the highway – not under a flyover – waited for our Christian children’s coins. Maybe it was an old hangup from olden days, or maybe it was just fun tossing money in there, throwing around cash. That time of auto-rickshaw rides when no Mawlai ones plied the road. That thrill of polluted air through the hair. That joy of unpacking a toy at home. My father’s home where we spoke Khasi. A school vacation home, a home where I first saw MTV, a home with fans and marble floors, a home with mosquito nets over the beds where I was a tiger in the City Zoo, a home with foul tasting water. Every time I breeze through Guwahati on to the airport, I try to recollect the name of that neighbourhood where that house sits, now someone else’s home.

Nail Polish

Bengali boys of Laban used to have nail polish on their fingers –
Almost always red or a bright pink – now they feel shy, I think.
Now, boys must be big and strong and say they head something:
Whether battalion, business or bureaucracy.

Once, the Khasi boys from Mawlai also painted their pinkies.
Almost everyone had an amulet those days –
Some a bullet on a chain and others a sacred gem –
Boys could be big but gentle.

They did not have to be angry – just young men.
Aunts would gather around and tell the boys how good-looking
They were or how tall they’d grown since they last met,
And once boys allowed themselves to be flattered by this.

Maybe once, boys weren’t defined
By other boys but by women.

ILLUSTRATION: PAPERLILY STUDIO