India Day Parade on Madison Avenue

Amitava Kumar
Aug 4, 1998
India is 50! (Where’s my Nehru jacket?) --Op-ed in NY Time

I.

You, however,

Soraiya Hasan Ali from , whom I've just met,

you are not wearing any jackets today.

You've cast your dupatta aside and come out

wearing an ivory-hued kameez with the tiniest

mirrors that make your shape look thirsty like water.

The parade is not going to pass for another hour.

Passing my finger down the pale brown line in the middle,

in a South Indian restaurant two blocks away,

I pretend to read your palm.

The restaurant owner has stuck a sign "Giuliani for Mayor"

beside his ornate blue clay cow.

You wait here with a Hindu

communist for the Day parade.

I'm having trouble reading these lines

in your palm without drawing your hand closer to my heart.

It's been two days since I met you.

The world that was there before seems so old now.

Two days ago,

the New York Times found out

that more and more Indians and Pakistanis

"live peaceably together" in Queens.

It seems was in the air, for even the right-wing

A.M. Rosenthal wrote a column entitled", Mon Amour."

Soraiya Hasan Ali, I am writing this poem for you

because your laughter

was not invented by the man from the New York Times.

And because the failure of your poet --

kuch ishq kiya, kuch kaam kiya

"I loved a little, I labored a little"--

unable either to labor or alone,

leaving both incomplete in despair,

shares none of the seriousness, worn as a mask,

by Harrison Ford a.k.a. Indiana Jones.

And, in the end,

because even where mines and tall sentry-posts

divide my country from yours

the wind carries words

of a common , like dried

petals, across the lines of barbed wire.

It is their lightness

that rests in your touch.

The same words

fragrant with the smell of our belonging,

the smell of the same earth, the same trees,

the same seasons of our knowing,

I discover as difference in the slow spiral of your ear

and, turning, in your naked glance.

II.

In this month of the summer, during evenings

when lights come on after rain showers, there are new words

being born on the streets of our cities.

Tell me about us. Will our meaning change

because those words will remain foreign to our memory?

Each time I drew breath today

I took your name but not once

the name of the new bomb called bidesia

that has come recently to my town from Calcutta.

There were ads for pressure-cookers when I left

asking you how much you loved your wife.

In all these days, unknown to me and to you,

in so many different ways

new ads must be people how to .

Standing on the roof of your home,

looking at the Empire State Building

lit up with the saffron, green, and white

of the Indian flag, you tell me of your

for a woman during your undergraduate years.

On the streets of ,

have they found a name

for lesbians--a name that you'd like?

I have lost . You have lost .

We are now of General Electric.

In this country, there are no new words for exile.

And if you have nothing to sell,

you have nothing to say

that this, or that, is indeed you.

But I still want my words. I still want

to give back to you in the silence

that follows our -making

the words I have gathered

from a part of your body that is dark

like monsoon clouds in July.

The heavy words, like gold coins,

that I can bite with my teeth,

the familiar ones that the vegetable-seller

returns to me like small change.

Words, numerous and glittering, drawn like

shiny fish in nets by men with darkened skins.

Words that swing like the new

ball on the pitch surrounded by the hills of Peshawar.

Those words that the burn in their fires

to keep hearts from shutting with malice.

Words that repeat themselves like the

in the wheel of the postman's bicycle.

Words that are secret, holding close a hidden .

If there are no words like that, I want those essential few

that will say north, that will say south.

That will say past, that will say future.

That will say poor, poor, poor, poor.

That will say fight, fight, fight, fight.

That will say , , , , .

III.

When the parade comes down Madison Avenue

it is led by a man who made his fortune playing

the part of the poor in films.

By the time the lights came on

in the , he had succeeded

as the underworld king,

ready to buy the seaside

skyscraper during whose construction

his mother had carried bricks

on her head.

If I fight as hard to be poor as did Amitabh Bachchan,

I too will own a penthouse in Manhattan.

Among the thousands that stand on both sides of the street

there are grandmothers in saris

and an old man in an achkan suit

quiet in the shadow of the Citibank office.

At the corner of 32nd St and Madison

we join the South Asian lesbians and gays.

I stand close to a man, his bright eyes

are lined coal-black and his throat stitched

with ornate silver.

On one float passing by, a man leans

toward the crowd, his voice thick

like sandpaper on the microphone.

Hindustan Ka, Nahin Kisi Ke Baap Ka.

" is 's, Not your father's."

What would this man be doing during a riot?

, on hearing his voice

for the first time, outside their bedrooms

where they were hiding with their ,

would not know that it belonged to a face

that had sold them grains and ghee for over a year.

And was now in upstate New York handling real estate.

We caught a cab and the driver said he liked parades:

next Tuesday we are going on strike,

turning Broadway into a sea of yellow cabs.

In the East Village, there are Bangladeshi

restaurants that have names like"Indian Delight."

We stepped in one

where the Sikh playing the sitar

smiled at you through our dinner, Soraiya Hasan Ali.

At the next table, an older white man

asked the Bangla waiter if there was anything special

to celebrate the Indian independence."No, sir," he apologized,

his thick glasses shining,"it is special here every day."



Amitava Kumar teaches in the English Department at the University of Florida. He is the author of No Tears for the N.R.I. (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Passport Photos (University of California Press, forthcoming). Recently, he completed a collaborative video-film, Pure Chutney (www.purechutney.com). He has also edited a volume of essays, Class Issues (New York University Press). Currently, he is a Visiting Fellow at Yale University.