Maps From My Perspective


Map of maps.             Ah! Maps where I belong.
Maps which have made me.   Maps I’ve helped to make.
‘Draw us a map,’ I was told, ‘but don’t make it interminable!’
You’ll see why            a map that such a one as I
draws may be a little longer than expected.

Memory begins at Meherpur, now in Bangladesh,
with a rough map, naturally.
Looking out from the bungalow, a tamarisk tree to my right,
that low whitewashed building’s my father’s workplace.
The sissoo tree’s in between.             The river’s on the left.
Around us stretches the encompassing grid
of earth-ridge-crisscrossed rice-fields.
                                                Far off, the railway line.
                                                A fat moon holds sway,
with its old woman spinning, unyielding at her wheel.

Bats, bees, rats, whales – all must carry their maps,
as large as they need them.     Thus I, in that bungalow,
leaned over a map of Europe
while my mother spoke of a grim battle.
‘When that battle finishes, the Ingrej leave our land.’

Calcutta.    The road to school.    Rashbehari Avenue turning at a right angle
at Deshapriya Park into Lansdowne Road, where school was
and also the maternity home, primal grotto,
my natal debouchure.
                                   Well, speaking of birthing,
a detail in time’s map intrigues me.    I was conceived
in September ’39.        My beginning as me –
had it anything to do
with that distant battle beginning?
                         Questioned in her last years,
my mother couldn’t make a connection.
                                                She’d been trying to conceive
since she got married in ’38, and I was the first to embark.

Heave ho!        Here I go, assiduously learning my maps.
Dead serious business – this school geography,
for she who has learnt her maps thoroughly will be at home
wherever she lands in the world.        The torch in her hand
may run right down, but the stars will show her the way.
Born in the plains, she will recognize conifers.
Reared amidst guavas, she will adore greengages.
Head tilted, one fine English evening she may allow
that the old woman spinning in the moon could just about
become a man’s face – an Expressionist grimace.

At the centre of all maps hangs a country like a jewel – marvellously.
Mother of maps.         The Ingrej have just left her.
But at school in ’48 we still use the old maps.
She is the model.         Lakshmi out of the waters.
We draw her lovingly in life classes
freehand – doubling, tripling her coast-lines.
                                    Her head’s in mountain clouds.
                                    Lanka, teardrop, washes her feet endlessly.
She’s made of many parts.     Gujarat juts out chunkily.
And Bengal, goddess in her own right,
still without a line down the middle,
rides on the Bay like Durga astride her buffalo.
In newer maps she grows a scar, near-vertical,
as if she’d had a grisly misadventure –
a hysterectomy, but from head to toe.
There’s so much blood and bones buried in maps,
and such thick sutures to hide them!

Every vole knows her habitat, but to be a cosmonaut
we must know distant spaces – that’s what we,
grandchildren of an empire, were taught
at St John’s Diocesan Girls’ High school
at the corner of Lansdowne Road and Elgin Road.
Thus South America was the first distant continent
I clambered on to at the age of ten.     Next, Africa.
                                                            O the sheer juice
of mouthing those names: Congo Basin, Guinea Coast, Tierra del Fuego!
Years later the Danube’s curve, from an aerial view,
would match the map exactly, like a prophecy coming true.
Later still, zigzagging across spaces –
New York, Miami, Guayaquil, Santiago –
I would drop down at Buenos Aires.

Growing into sari.       The crossroads at Gariahat,
heady with tuberoses, led to Lady Brabourne College,
where the starry patterns of deductive and inductive logic
were imprinted on the brain’s sky.
                                     After that, at book-lined College Street,
an almost adult animal climbed the stairs of Presidency College,
meeting witches on heaths and a blind man on his way to Dover,
drinking coffee at the smoke-filled Coffee House,
lying, with a detached retina,
at the Medical College Eye Hospital – lying almost in state.

Autumn winds stirred the puddles
in the dimples of dark concrete
in the college by the Cherwell
as I expressed the hope
to see crocuses in the spring, and of course, daffodils.
Oxford’s a neat map, but for a quarter-century
Kidlington’s fields, canal, and farers’ ways
have become the main markers.
                        Here’s where the woman in the moon
will, of an evening, reveal herself as a man’s face.
                                      Here too, at times,
as I walk alone in the fields in afternoons,
fear will prick the map,
for monsters are part of maps too.

Watch this for contrast.          Three magic vertices,
a guesthouse, a library, and a post office,
in Tagore’s Shantiniketan mark out a space,
where in a power-cut night
Veena, Sutapa, and I, in our night kaftans,
wrapped in shawls, walk up and down without fear,
laughing, singing – under clouds engaged in a romp
with the woman in the moon.

Maps are of space and of time.          And necessarily
so many landscapes, cityscapes jostle in my head.
Brighton by the sea, where the girls wore miniskirts.
Vancouver by the Rockies, where I first gave birth
and brought the boy home to a house with an apricot tree.
A night, lying alone, trying to get some sleep,
in a hotel-room with bugs and monster-wardrobes
in Boulevard St Michel, where no one goes to sleep.
Starry starry night at Aurangabad,
window looking to Bibi-ka-Maqbara,
where tomatoes bursting with flame-juice were pennies a kilo,
and ants in rows lusted after our sultana grapes.
                                                               We put the bowl in water
and a handkerchief over it. All these are part of the map.

Maps are social.          Travelling south to north,
as soon as I hear the English tongue pronounced
in the sweet northern way, a feeling-at-home
laps me like lake waves, for it reminds me at once
of my gentle in-laws, children of the Pennines,
now reclaimed by the earthworks.
That’s how I, tropical slug, grew the shell
of my Yorkshire end-name.    And how the genes mix,
the forked ways of talents, quirks, disabilities,
is another map too.     The tick-tock mix and match
of the biological map.

Maps are to do with the vowel-shifts of cookeries.
My canny sons smile when food is served in restaurants
in miniature baltis and korais.
              Watch out!       Soon they’ll be parading
tiered tiffin-carriers!    But who would have thought
that the Portuguese bucket, balde, would have made such a late entry
through a remote regional cuisine from the subcontinent
into that stockpot – the English vocabulary?

Maps are to do with slily shifting borders.
They get up, walk towards each other, peer into each other’s eyes.
They embrace, weeping over each other’s shoulders.
So my play in Bengali
is first staged in a Manchester festival by a Calcutta company.
Just imagine those travellers to India from the nineteenth century
hitchhiking to this Britain and discovering, to their disarray,
‘heathenish nose-rings’ on the noses not only of females
but of males too!
Wouldn’t that give them a sense of dislocation
stronger than anything I’ve ever felt, or could feel?
Birbhum’s ginger lily in a pot in Kidlington,
kicked into flowering by the summer of ’95
after twelve long years, quietly re-draws a map.

Above all, languages make borders, for language is communication.
The young man who fetched me from Buenos Aires airport,
delivering me to a young woman in the city,
said with relief, ‘Entiende.’     ‘Understands.’
Understands Spanish, that is.
When I see stubble fields, I think of Keats
and of Jibanananda.
Jiban-ananda.  Life’s joy.  Twentieth-century Bengali poet.  Get it?
Many such poets live in me by the side
of others whose names look smarter in Roman script.
Walking in me, they happily exchange their dreams.
It isn’t me who is dislocated.              It’s just that others don’t know
the landscapes of kingdoms I carry in my layered pockets.
Maps live in me whose names look strange in English,
but that’s the function of a mappa mundi, isn’t it?
Myself, I find my locus everywhere,
accepting what the Isha Upanishad says,
that all this is in the Lord.
Maps of heaven and hell heave within this ark.
How can I be out of place
in this seamless unity, however uncharted in parts,
which, with the slightest puranic change of pace,
becomes the Lord’s body
gently snoring, between creations, on the primal ocean.

Gaps yawn in the soup, but we stir with the spoon of language
and close those gaps.              The mindlessness
with which they searched me at John F. Kennedy airport
for drugs, when I returned from Buenos Aires!
It happened because I was not inside their map.
Amongst all those passengers on that interminable flight
from the southern port of good breezes to northern Nueva York
I was the odd one out –
in a sari, carrying a British passport, heavy with the aftermath of flu,
claiming that I had gone to Argentina
for literary researches!
I let them sift through my saris, my used paper hankies,
the pages of my Spanish-English dictionary.
                                     In the end communication prevailed
and they let me go, but they had bust my suitcase lock.
Now this couldn’t have happened at Calcutta airport,
for they would have known my name even on the UK passport
and claimed me as part of their poetry map.

So language is a border, and a passport across borders as well.
Key to the walled garden of a lost incarnation, sharp with lime blossoms.
Telescope to a future which is being sculpted.           For ever Miralrío,
love’s outpost, looking towards La Plata.
And here’s just a little of my scrolled cartography
unrolled for you, but without its diacritics.
These I’ve omitted, lest they increase confusion.


Ketaki Kushari Dyson,

Written in English. This poem was written for Britain’s Southern Arts and Poetry Society for their Poetry Map project. It was later included in my collection Memories of Argentina and Other Poems, Virgilio Libro, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, 1999.