TABISH KHAIR [15.690] Poeta de India

Tabish Khair

(India, 1966). Nació y se educó en el estado de Bihar, trabajó en Delhi y luego se mudó a Copenhague para hacer su doctorado. Es poeta, novelista y ensayista. Su significativa producción poética incluye Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000) y Man of Glass (2010). Ha recibido el premio de poesía All-India por algunos de sus poemas y una beca honoraria en escritura creativa de la Universidad Bautista de Hong Kong. Vive en Aarhus, Dinamarca.

Selected bibliography

Poetry

Man of Glass, Harper Collins, New Delhi, 2010, ISBN: 8172239793

Where Parallel Lines Meet, Penguin-Viking, New Delhi, Allen Lane, New York, 2000,  ISBN: 9780670894321, 0-670-89432-X

Prose

Filming: A Love Story, Picador, London and New Delhi, 2007, ISBN: 0330419226

The Bus Stopped, Picador, London and New Delhi, 2004, ISBN: 0330419218

Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, ISBN: 0195679032

An Angel in Pyjamas, Harper Collins, New Delhi, 1996, ISBN: 8172232314

The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2009, ISBN: 0230234062

 Inmigrante

(Basado en “La sirenita” de H. C. Andersen)

 Duele caminar sobre nuevas piernas:

la maldición de las consonantes, el temblor de las vocales.

 Y tú por quien renuncié a un reino

nunca podrás amar esa cosa que fui.

 Cuando miras en mi pasado

tú ves

solo

algas y escamas.

 En cierto tiempo tuve una voz.

Ahora tengo piernas.

 A veces me pregunto

¿fue un intercambio justo?

Otro país

 Arundhathi Subramaniam, poeta, ensayista y compiladora 

Rumi and The Reed

Listen to the song of the reed flute:

It sings of separation.

Torn from the leaf-layered, wind-voiced

Banks of the pond,

It is joined to sorrow and joy

By a slender sound.

Who, asked Rumi, can understand 

The reed's longing to return?

  Let its raw lips rest then;

Let all words be brief then.

And I, O Believers, cried Rumi

(Having lost the man he loved),

I who am not of the East

Nor of the West, un-Christian,

 Not Muslim or Jew, neither

Born of Adam nor Eve,

What can I love but the world itself,

What can I kiss but flesh?

Let my raw lips rest then.

Let all words be brief.

(First appeared in Where Parallel Lines Meet, Penguin, Delhi, 2000)

South Delhi Murder

For three days she took it for spilled red ink 

Or nail-polish. Then a scab of flies

Peeled to hint at the wounds shut

Behind that door. Her head buzzed

As she called the police. Such a sweet boy,

She later gasped to Mrs Guha, a little dense

But smiling and so-sweet, to think he bottled up

In himself the rage of 26 stabs, twen-tee-six,

You never can tell with these people, no, not ever. 

To which Mrs Guha sadly shook her gold earrings.

The officer who turned up with two policemen

Also shook his head when told of the old couple

Who had lived in that flat with one serving boy

And presents from guilt-stricken sons in the US.

Having broken the door and located the crime,

He came out holding a large hanky to his nose,

Spat and asked, Nepali boy, no? Bihari chokkra ?

Some clues are so obvious they don't have to be pinned:

The incision of murder is always the outsider's choice,

Someone on the edge of life, driven by ghostly scalpels.

Sometime in the morphia of night when the roads of Delhi

Were white swathes of loneliness and smog, sometime

Three or more nights ago when the occasional truck's

Back lights faded to wavering bandages of yellow,

Sometime in a gauzed silence broken by yapping

Street dogs, so-sweet Shyam had crept to the locked

Front door and let his accomplices in. Steel rods 

Had been used, and knives; the old man clubbed in bed,

His wife surgically stabbed later. A cousin was asked

By the officer to make an inventory of missing items.

Which was long: two TV sets, radio, Banarasi saris

All the inherited silver, jewellery, cash, in fact everything 

Of value except the laptop, which had been left behind

In panic or ignorance of its value. Bihari chokkras,

Scoffed the officer, what do they know of computers,

Or alphabets for that matter. It turned out that this time

The chokkra in question had been filmed, holding

Loaded trays in parties, and his address noted. 

Justice was clinical, sweet Shyam nabbed in his village

With fifty rupees on him and a sari for his mother.

(First appeared in Where Parallel Lines Meet, Penguin, Delhi, 2000)

ALMOST A GHAZAL

For My Grandfather's Garden 

A flock of sparrows leaves the mehndi bush like a shudder.

Two squirrels chase each other around the trunk of a kathal.

Herons stand stilted like village ancients beside the pool.

The soft coo of a pigeon betrays neither distance nor place.

Parrots squabble on the bare top branch of the spreading gullar.

Five orange trees hunch laden with unplucked and acrid fruit.

The pomegranate plant still retains a cracked, crowned an�r.

Mango trees stand mute, lacking their summer voices of yellow.

The ladybird changes from spotted red to a whirr of wings.

Half-plates of dark mushroom jut from the fallen log.

Grass is an intricate network of roads travelled by black ants.

The earth below is a breathing skin, veined with dark roots.

A dry green shell is all that is left of the snail and his tracks.

Translucent wings are all that will remain of dragonflies.

Perhaps I should put my faith in the crow and the subversive rat.

A bunch of builders measure out lines and angles from a blueprint.

(First appeared in Where Parallel Lines Meet, Penguin, Delhi, 2000)