‘A Saint Came to Die in Our Land’ and other poems

Akhil Katyal

A Saint Came to Die in Our Land

I keep telling G 
I will peak at forty. 

He doesn’t believe me. 

In the afternoon  
we leave the marble tomb 
behind us, its white 
blistering in the sun. 

G says, ‘Can you stop 
the sun for me?’  

My father notes down 
his favourite couplets in a notebook  
smaller than my palm. 

He would have copied  
out G’s line. 

All of childhood, we were told 
there will be a school trip 
to the marble tomb. 

It never happened.  

But we did not learn  
to not look for peaks 
in the small orbit of our lives. 

As kids, we knew that ‘wonder’ 
lay under that white dome. 

Our plans were made  
of outside-food, living 
next door, trump cards and  
claims made in little corridors.  

The first time I saw the marble tomb 
— years later, a friend drove us —  
I did not believe there could be  
such a white in the world. 

We asked the guide to explain it. 

Kaifi said, ‘duudh kī nahr meñ  
jis tarah ubaal aa jaa.e’ 

The marmar translated, as if  
‘a stream of milk had suddenly  
come to a boil’.   

When I said I will peak at forty 
I meant to abdicate the failures  
of so far, to augur my way 
to where the railway tracks meet. 

In the cab, the breeze 
fills up our masks, while I hold  
the future to ransom. 

I keep telling G I will peak 
at that age far enough to make  
seesaw promises about. 

He replies like a general 
negotiating terms of surrender. 

As if his sound  
was its own meaning 
needing no separate parsing 
or prophecy. 

Some sounds need no parsing. 
They are their own prophecy. 

The year Bismillah Khan died  
I was in Malkaganj, sitting under  
the clock tower. 

In the crowd, I could not distinguish 
the passing of an age. 

In every palm, they held 
large crescents of jaggery, 
martbaans of trapped songs 
and a piece of an irreversible world. 

When G left,  
it was that twoscore again.  
The future is always  
more reliable than what we hold  
in our inept hands. 

I wish I hadn’t made claims 
he could keep  
in his pocket 
and leave. 

There are so many kinds 
of leavings, some, which can 
flower an entire people 
in another land, where slowly 
the fingers of their arrival 
grow, and their jasper hearts,  
and some, which leave a rock  
of silence in their wake.    

Once, a friend  
told me about a saint 
who walked many hundreds of miles 
to come and die 
in the town where I was born 

only so that people  
may make wishes  
by the edge of his tomb    

tie threads on a window 
trellised with wishes 

in each twist  
a promised son or daughter 
a lover’s return  
a pay rise, or the early death  
of an abhorrent in-law.  

When he passed,  
he’d already done the penance, 
sung the dirge 

and performed the miracle  
that made this fallow piece of land  
the darbar of an eccentric  
and generous king 

who could grant you  
anything, if only you opened  
your hands in a surrender  
underwritten by faith.  

His resting place  
yielded desires like a desert,  
each shrub, a promise of water.  

By his head,  
lay a granite mortar  
filled with salt,  
that once tasted,  
could cure all illnesses.  

When my people came 
— G did not say your  
people — axe in hand,  
to demolish this shrine,  
they knew that behind  
their thirst was the girder  
of a common silence.    

They want to open the basement rooms 
of the marble tomb. They say  
they will find our gods. 

I don’t want anything to do with the gods 
for whom the dead have to be disturbed. 

Will the firoza in our eyes outlive 
the animus of our hands? 

I don’t want anything to do with the gods 
for whom they stalk the street.   

Will the sulaimani in our hands 
survive the haneri of their eyes? 

They are still your gods 
whether you like them or not. 

The guide told us nothing 
of how the stone turns into papier-mâché. 

You cannot go on abdicating gods 
like this, not owning up to their failures. 

In the notebook smaller than my palm, 
my father notes down a line  
of sight that goes straight  
to the finial. 

We peak together, 
if some of us are not  
thrown down 

if some of us do not learn 
— not every discovery 
is a form of growing. 

Manucci tells me 
‘in the foundations’  
of my city were ordered 
the ‘several decapitated criminals 
to be placed as a sign of sacrifice.’   

Doubt the motivations  
of those who go looking 
for gods with a shovel. 

To let the dead sleep 
is a learned art. 

To become literate 
in living next door. 

Own up to the gods you were born to, 
don’t mitigate the image of their poison,  
find antidotes to their sting.  

In front of you, a people  
are being turned  
into a foil. 

No use telling them 
you don’t believe in the gods 
stitched to your name. 

We will have no-one  
to give this world to. 

No-one except the river  
to carry our dead. 

We don’t peak in a manipulable future 
of dawns. We have no beginnings  
like the day’s first prayers.  

We will only dig the ground 
and find what we already know: 
our animus made into a god.  

When you left, G, I asked 
every part of my city  
to yield all its memories, 
entered them in a register 
so that no one would say 
they weren’t there. 

In Ankahi, made before 
I was born, the little boy 
with a hole in his heart 
speaks only in aphorisms: 
Baaji, aap zindagi ko 
kya samajhti hain? Jibran kahta hai  
zindagi milne, aur phir 
judaa ho jaane, aur phir 
mil jaane ke amal ko kahte hain.  

With a shovel, I thought  
I could go looking for assurance  
of having been loved. 

The previous generation is too eager 
to pass this world into our hands. 

They make it sound like a gift. 

To let go of the past is a learned art. 
To not go digging for something 
only to plot its spurious return. 

To understand  
the passing of an age 
allows us to live in the coral 
of the present.   

Every ground is sacred. 

We must not turn  
god into evidence.  

We should not sieve 
the dust of Jamuna for anklets.  

My people must not look 
for a sleeping god  
under the doorsteps 
of the living.  

We should not claim as our own 
every stone we touch. 

There is god within the rooms 
of our miserable hearts.  

We should not seek him  
in the agate of our neighbour’s sleep.