anjum hasan was born in 1972. she has published one book of poetry entitled “street on the hill”. her writing is rich, clear, and resonant in its ability to draw you inside the collective whorl of her sensing of her experience. her writing is intensely visual and threads together details in such a way as to make the reader feel that they are being guided across a painting with a magnifying glass. i find that i have to let the myriad images settle into me and then allow it to assemble in its own time before i can really get a complete sense of what she is telling through her poem. here are three poems by anjum hasan.
mawlai
for seventeen years we passed through mawlai in a bus —
saw waxy red flowers in the pomegranate trees and a man
pegging brilliant white napkins on a clothesline against the wind.
we didn’t live there and those who lived there didn’t care about
the buses passing through at all times of the day, right up against the
mauve beef hanging in its pockets of fat, and the shops with shiny strips
of tobacco showing through shadows, and the new houses and the
old houses where the same sort of people lived, or at least that’s
how we felt, passing through in buses for seventeen years.
but we won’t be doing it anymore — looking out of a window
at a patch of maize in its copper earth, eggs in a wire basket,
hand-painted signs near open doorways that remind us
of sunlit drawings in children’s books about places that grow
sad in their unreality with every passing year, simple signs in
white paint — hangne ngi die tiar, hangne ngi suh jainsem.
we’ll forget what they looked like, the rough golden clapboard shops
with their unwrapped cakes of soap, the windows in houses no
bigger than a man’s handkerchief, and it will be difficult to remember
where each of the cherry trees stood because they flowered so briefly
before lapsing back into their dark green anonymity.
the graveyard on a gentle slope, the fence weighed down with roses!
we’ll want to urgently tell someone, if we ever happen to return,
that we knew this place, passed through it in a bus for seventeen years,
but having said that we won’t know what else to say about mawlai
because we never really got off there or bought things from its shops
or stepped into someone’s boiled-vegetables-smelling house
to watch the street through netted curtains. we’ll keep quiet then
and try to ignore that sense which is not pain but has pain’s cloudiness
and its regret and its way of going and returning.
in my mother’s clothes
i walk in my mother’s clothes on the street,
feel the cool sweat under my arms soak her blouse
timidly: shy, damp flowers of my sweat on her blouse.
i let the white dust with its years of spit and sweet
wrapper, its agonising lifelessness, pass over me
in my mother’s clothes, her rust and bright blue
and burnt orange, my mother’s colours on my skin
in the dust, as if they belonged to me. i cheat people:
men, girls in high heels who pretend not to look
and fidget and sulk, girls lovely and empty with want
who I destroy with my Look of Elsewhere.
it’s so easy to break girls, spoil their carefully planned
afternoons, their elaborate ploys to sweeten the air,
tantalise. their eyes are bright with their love
for themselves, while I walk on the street
in my mother’s clothes, laughing inside, relieved
of the burden of being what one wears, since in my
mother’s clothes i am neither myself nor my mother.
In her inky silks, her cool green gardens of chiffon
that once filled me with thirst, i dream of elusiveness
(which is actually the dream of all girls in high heels
on the street, who I scorn!) Is it only one woman we all
want to be? the woman who opens her eyes and looks
at the mirror into the eyes of a child. the child who drifts
like a shadow through long summer afternoons when
everyone sleeps, the spindly creature of six who slips
onto her fingers her mother’s gold rings, pulls on
an old cardigan that smells of sunlight and milk,
and conducts herself, drowsy with love, through rooms
with their curtains drawn against the honeyed light of June.
does she always begin like this—seeking love by trying
to become the person whose love she seeks? rolling up
the sleeves of her mother’s cardigan and sitting with legs
dangling from a high chair, her frail little shoulders stiff
with pride, her sisters jealous. her mother slowly waking
to the calm evening light, laughing at the serious girl-clown
who is opening her eyes to look at the mirror into the eyes
of a woman, when all that there is of that unfathomable
grace she has taken with her, and you are suddenly cold
in her cardigan.
rain
you will hear it waking to the roar of a ceiling fan,
in the rustling of dry palm leaves, in pebbles pouring
from a lorry onto the dusty street. the lips of the warm
wind, trapped between scaffolding and terrace, will whisper
soundless words of memory through the window’s
grating. you will hear it in the last aeroplane of the night
(whose sound you will mistake for thunder), in the alphabets
of the birds, in indignant pressure cookers.
your thirst will be vast as the sky. you will look
for it in the evening, searching for one cloud among
tremendous shadows, and at night when it might come
from a great distance and touch the city with a new light.
you won’t find it in the few grey leaves of march
or behind the thin red crescent burning itself out
on a fevered patch of sky. your hair will grow electric
with the dry heat of the day, your dreams shot with
the silver lightening of monsoon nights, the blue green
violet nights celebrated by crickets, the mountain nights
where fate is linked to umbrellas, and feeling to the violent
hours that clatter on those heights.
but venus’ eye is clear here. you will look for it
in refrigerators at night, slice water-melons with
its taste on your tongue - unfeeling, red-hearted fruit -
and buy cucumbers in despair. you will almost forget
the sadness of mist, but remember how quickly mirrors
darkened and streets turned grim, and wait for the same
blanket to be fastened over the sky and change
the quality of this harsh, unvarying light.
always the ’where’ of where you are is a place in the
head, established through skin, and you recognise
the address not in numbers or names but through familiar
patterns of bird-song, traffic, shadows, lanes.
and when you go away only envelopes bear the name
of that tiny dot of geographical space where everyone
knows you now stay. for the memory of each of the body’s
ancient senses remains the same, for years remains the same:
bewildered by dry winds in april, aching for rain.
