Excerpt: THERE IS NO GOOD TIME FOR BAD NEWS by Aruni Kashyap
Photo: Aruni Kashyap
Excerpts from Aruni Kashyap’s critically-acclaimed poetry collection, There Is No Good Time For Bad News (2021): ‘Women couldn’t melt you, shape you, stud you with gems / to hang from their soft earlobes; men / couldn’t wrap you in strips of newsprint, / like tobacco, light one end, take a drag,’
Published by FutureCycle Press (2021), Aruni Kashyap’s poetry collection There is No Good Time for Bad News is a winner of the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, a finalist for the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and a finalist for 2018 Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. The collection opens in a country ravaged by prolonged political conflict. Told in the voices of survivors, it introduces the reader to a wide array of characters. At once vignettes and urgent pleas, these are stories as much as they are poems. Zooming through wars, protest marches, and conflicts, they show what it means to live under the duress of prolonged violence.
Presented here are two poems from the collection.
My Grandmother Tells Me About
the Earthquake of 1950
First it was just the ants;
like water bubbles, blood
that oozes out of a wound, they
emerged from their holes carrying grains of rice.
We thought it was because
of the impatient slanting rains that must have
percolated, flooded their bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms.
But soon, even though it wasn’t the season of
fleeing birds, the birds left their nests; angry crows flew from
one tree to another, as if one of their own
had been killed. But they just cawed like frightened people:
didn’t try to claw our cheeks,
pierce our eyes, as if
they were trying to tell us the secret
knowledge of the ants, alert us as they always did
about uninvited guests. One evening,
the wild ducks, the
sparrows, the kingfishers, the woodpeckers left noisily:
empty nests with eggs, nude beehives
that hung from large branches dripping
golden honey in the sun, forming puddles below with no ants
to drown in sticky sweetness. It was
then we knew something was coming,
though we didn’t expect it would be the river,
because we’d come to this village fleeing the furies of another river
that attacked paddy fields, houses, and swept away
brothers, sisters, mothers, lovers, concubines. On the day
it came—August 15, 1950—we were planning to gather at the
school playground to sing the anthem, distribute sweets; but I fell
down while tying a bun, and I thought a dacoit had entered, pushed me,
to take away my gold necklace. I couldn’t stand up, and the rattling walls
told me to crawl out, screaming for your grandfather; the courtyard
was slimy
with thousands of earthworms germinating from the soft soil, while
water from the hot spring that had sprouted
in our courtyard burned my cheeks; one of my legs
stuck in a deep crack. When the trees shook their heads,
we didn’t know about the newborn river that had sprouted
from the chest of a nearby mountain;
we didn’t know it was one million times
stronger than a bomb called Fat Man;
we didn’t know that the creator of
Fat Man and Little Boy had looked at the test explosion
and recited a chant from the Gita:
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Even without you, every warrior in the enemy camp will cease to be.
But the ants and the birds
and the howling dogs and foxes knew,
so
they left,
so they howled,
barked.
Cover art courtesy: Aruni Kashyap
Freedom
After Paul Éluard and Birinchi Bhattacharya
Freedom, we are still waiting
to paint your name on the hand looms
that weave red flowers into cream-white silk,
on the emerald meadows sprawled
dreamily in the blue sky’s embrace.
Freedom, we are still waiting for that ship
to arrive with your name inscribed on its mast.
We still believe your name will be
painted in cheerful blue on its sails,
which will flutter in the air
like the hair of a village girl
in February—when red flowers bloom
like mischievous ideas in a child’s mind.
Freedom, we couldn’t write your name
on banana leaves with blue fountain pens,
on grains of white rice with needlepoints,
on the echo of our childhoods,
on the fine surface of rice husk,
on the transparent wings of dragonflies,
on their pink-blue-green tails.
Women couldn’t melt you, shape you, stud you with gems
to hang from their soft earlobes; men
couldn’t wrap you in strips of newsprint,
like tobacco, light one end, take a drag,
recline dreamily against tree-trunks
on summer noons. Children couldn’t
peel you like ripe mangoes. No, you couldn’t
even be the walking-stick of grey-haired ones or
a drop of water on their tongue before
the final breath.
We couldn’t usher you in.
We couldn’t make
you sit on wooden dining tables, serve you
an elaborate meal though we waited so long
with our doors ajar, clothes washed,
verandas mopped with fragrant water,
or with cow-dung blended with white soil
brought from the riverbanks.
But here, on the wide banks of the Brahmaputra,
you were defined everywhere:
on the ruddy rivers
where, instead of fishes,
chopped limbs stuck in the nets of fishermen.
Where fingers with and without nails were
scooped up by a woman who went to wash dishes
in the stream that ran beside her house.
Often freedom was written
between the legs of women
left bleeding; on the penises of men
who only spewed white froth
from their mouths, not information.
Freedom, we are still waiting
for your arrival. Until then
you will be performed
and explained, because ancient stories
tell us: Definitions have always
belonged to the definers.
***
Aruni Kashyap writes in English and his native Assamese. He is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories (2019), The House With a Thousand Stories (2013), Noikhon Etia Duroit (2020), and the poetry collection There Is No Good Time for Bad News (2021). His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, Athens, and an Editor-at-large with the Southern Review of Books. You can find him on Twitter: @AruniKashyap and Instagram: @arunikashyap.
