“On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” by Robin Coste Lewis
Not much larger than a Volkswagen. Smiling
on the dashboard: Gurumukh. Marigolds
so mild we can chew. What we call mountain
they say foothill. A whole vibrant green
valley of terraced balconies, rectangular
rice farms carved into every façade
for seven centuries. Now and then
a clay road washed out by rain. We wait.
Barefoot men in madras dhotis, bodies
large only as necessity, hoist twice that in boulders
back up the mountain, back to that place
where the road had been.
Monsoon. Uttar Pradesh. Twenty-eight days of rain.
At dinner, someone says, During
the nineteenth century, all this water
caused the British to go
mad. They constantly committed suicide.
Later, someone else
points out their Victorian cemetery.
I smile—a little.
That morning, seven langurs the size of six
year olds, gray and brown, white and beige, tall-tails
curling, jumped up and down, shucked
and jived on top my cold tin roof.
Somehow, I am still alive.
I know it is wrong
to think of a decade as lost.
The more I recover, the more I go
blind. Squat
naked beside a steaming bucket.
Hold a small cloth.
In Trinidad, one says clot.
The h is quiet.
A wafer of breath—just
like here. There’s no telling
what languishes inside the body.
Not mist, but a whole cloud
passes into one window,
then two hours later
out the other.
The American college students try
out their kindergarten Hindi: ha-pee-tal,
ha-pee-tal. Lips finger the sign’s script,
Then the United States break
open their mouths
into sad smiles when they realize
it’s not Hindi, but English
written in Devanagari: hospital.
For the whole day we drive
along miles of wet slithering clay
to find a temple at the top of a mountain
where Shiva is said to have once dropped
a piece of Parvati.
Every mountaintop made holy
by the falling charred body part
of the Goddess. An elbow fell
here; here
fell Her toe; an ankle—black
and burnt—Her knee.
The road is wet and dark
red, and keeps spinning.
I sit behind the driver, admiring
his cinnamon fingers, his white beard,
his pink pale turban wrapped so handsomely.
Why did it take all that?
I mean, why did She have to jump
into the celestial fire
to prove Her purity?
Shiva’s cool—poisonous, blue,
a shimmering, galaxy—
but when it came to his Old Lady,
man, He fucked up.
Why couldn’t He just believe Her?
I joke with the driver. We laugh.
Gurumukh smiles back. But then I think, perhaps
embodiment is so bewildering, even God grows
wrecked with doubt.
For a certain amount
of rupees, the temple’s hired a man
to announce to tourists…During the medieval period
virgins were sacrificed here.
His bright face mirrors our Orientalist tans.
You’re lying, I say. Save it
for somebody pale. He smiles, passes
me a bidi. I’m bleeding, but lie
so I can go inside
and see that burnt, charred
piece of the Goddess that fell off
right here.
We climb up another one hundred
and eight stairs. At the top, I try
not to listen to anyone.
An entire Himalayan Valley. Chiseled.
Every mountain—peak to base—
a living verdant staircase
for the Goddess to walk down:
Sri Bhuvaneshwari.
At night, our caravan winds back
over gravel and clay.
Ten headlamps grope the mountain
walls of the green-black valley. The road
is only as wide as one small car.
Hours of dog elbows, switchbacks, half roads.
Slowly after a turn, the driver takes his foot
off the gas, downshifts, coasts.
Black. Warm. Breath. Snorting.
Our car rubs against one chewing grass off the face
of a cliff. Then another, taller
than our car. Then hundreds
block the road. Thick cylindrical horns scrape
the driver’s window, eyes so white, black
pupils gleam, peering into our cab, grunting
and drooling onto the window.
Now the whole car, surrounded. Warm black bodies
covered in fur. Near their dusty hooves, children
sit on the ground, nested in laps, quiet and smiling.
Everyone embroidered with color:
silvers, metallic ochres, kohls, golds, reds, bold
blacks, all of it—and a green so green
I realize it’s a hue
I have never seen.
A whole nomadic clan, traveling
with hundreds of waterbuffalo. At least
sixty human beings. There are so many
buffalo, our cars cannot move. And they can’t move
the herd because a few feet ahead
a She-Buffalo is giving birth.
We get out.
And wait.
Out of habit, the students pull out their American sympathy,
but then, the driver says all the women sitting there
on the ground, dusty, with children in their laps, dangling
their ankles over the mountain, adorned,
all wear enough gold, own enough
buffalo to buy your whole house—cash.
The night holds. Life is giving birth
in the middle of a warm, dark road.
Everyone in our party waits, smiling and gesturing
with the whole clan, surrounded by snoring
black bodies taller than our chins. We squat
beside their lanterns, stand inside our headlight.
The driver, who grew up in this valley,
speaks two dialects, four national languages, plus English,
but cannot understand a single word anyone says.
Solid gold bangles thick as bagels,
diamonds so large and rough they look
like large cubes of clear glass. The women stare through their bright
syllables. Then one lifts her hand, points at one of us—says
something—and they all laugh.
The calf is born dead. A folded and wet black nothing.
It falls out of its mother—still—onto the ground.
We watch it in the headlamps. Empty fur sack.
A broken umbrella made of blood and bone.
The mother tries to run. Several men hold her, throw
broad coils of ropes around her hooves; two men, barefoot
in dhotis, grab her on each side by her horns. And wait.
They wait through her heaving. They sing
to her, they coo. Men who are midwives. Through
four translations, they say it is her first time.
She must turn around and see
what has happened to her or she will go mad.
We wait with the whole tribe, wait with the whole night,
wait for her to stop bucking. Her hip bones are as tall
as my eyes, her neck is a massive drum.
They do not force her, but they will not let her run.
She is pinned to the mountain, with her tail pointing down
towards her dead newborn. There are four hands
on her wide horns; four more hold the ropes
that surround her haunches.
Finally, after half an hour of bucking
and grunting, she drops her eyes and gives.
She lowers her face into it—into the black
slick dead thing folded on the ground—
and sniffs. Nudges the body. Snorts.
Then they let her go. She runs off, back
into the snoring herd.
Disappears.
One day, ten years later—one fine odd day—suddenly
I will remember all of this. That night, that dark
narrow road will come back, like a small sleepy child,
sit gently inside my lap and look up into me.
Kohl and camphor around all the babies’ eyes
to keep evil away; that exquisite smell of men
and sweat and dust; the unanticipated calm
of standing within
an enormous herd of sleeping waterbuffalo, listening.
To spend your entire life—out of doors—walking the world
with your whole family and neighborhood. To stay
together, to leave together. What a blessing, I think,
and then, What a curse!
My newborn is asleep in a red wagon
that says Radio Flyer. I have packed
a large suitcase and one box.
The World wants to know
what I am made of. I am trying
to find a way
to answer Her
(What language
does the World speak?
Which dialect? Perhaps
our bodies are a type of Her alphabet).
I place our things by the door. And wait.
Standing. Eyes closed. Looking. I want to
remember the carved angels flying over the tall bay
windows; the front door’s twelve perfect squares
of beveled glass; the cloud-high ceilings;
the baby’s stuffed monkey; the tribal rugs; and the photograph
of our tent in the desert that one bright morning, on the floor
of a canyon in Jordan. All in boxes now.
The lights are on. The house
is empty. Night comes.
I smell the giant magnolia blossoms
opening.
Once, I thought I was a person with a body,
the body of something peering
out, enchanted
and tossed.
The baby wakes. He is two
months old. I give him a piece
of my body. He fingers my necklace
strung with green glass beads.
I tie him onto my back and think
about the bright dahlias, nursed from seeds,
staging a magenta riot now, next to the rusty Victorian daybed,
where he was conceived
beneath the happy banana tree out on the back balcony.
My father’s gold earrings are welded into my ears.
All my mother’s diamonds wrapped
in tissue inside my pocket.
And then, as if
it is the most natural thing to do, I walk
toward the stairwell, and give
the World my answer.
All the way down the staircase, my hand palms
the mahogany rail, and I think Once
this beam of wood stood high
inside a great dark forest.
Thick coat. Black fur. Two russet horns
twisted to stone. One night
I was stuck on a narrow road,
panting.
I was pregnant.
I was dead.
I was a fetus.
I was just born.
(Most days
I don’t know what I am).
I am a photograph
of a saint, smiling.
For years, my whole body ran
away from me. When I flew—charred—
through the air, my ankles and toes fell off
onto the peaks of impassable mountains.
I have to go back
to that wet black thing
dead in the road. I have to turn around.
I must put my face in it.
It is my first time.
I would not have it any other way.
I am a valley of repeating
verdant balconies.
Poem: https://winningwriters.com/resources/on-the-road-to-sri-bhuvaneshwari
Image: “Funkalicious fruit field” by Wangechi Mutu (2007). Ink, paint, mixed media, plastic pearls, collage on Mylar
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