Excerpt: The Penguin Book of Indian Poets edited by Jeet Thayil

A selection of five poems from the anthology. This monumental undertaking, two decades in the making, brings together writers from across the world.

Do pests need rest too? (Shutterstock)

Weather Report

Dear brown ugly moth,

I don’t know whether you are a butterfly

or not.

You’ve been beside my bed since last night

like an old timey pastor

administering my last rites. I’ve had guests in my room before,

don’t get me wrong, but none made it till breakfast;

and the window has been open for a while,

besides, look outside! the whole universe is a tubelight—

Why are you still here? Look, either pay rent, or speak up:

In limitless space (Shutterstock)

She and I

We were not made to be mothers.

These ovens too hot, too cold,

Devoured, spat up something other

Than recipes promised.

We made do with scraps, left-overs,

With a bitter last morsel.

We were not made to be mothers.

We wanted a conversation

That never ends, with the ones we chose

Or who chose us, living and dead.

But safety lured us, the siren song

Unexpected, cased us in lead.

We were not made to be mothers.

Proximity cut us apart.

Now I lie in your room, this cell

In an alien land, in limitless space,

Awake half the night; now I am

Both of us — me and my mother.

-Ruth Vanita

Beyond the windows, mountains and still lake (Shutterstock)

Nudes I

Bathhouse, Hakone, Japan

Once I cross the threshold

I take off my clothes.

Mirrors in the room register my body

but for now they are superfluous;

later, when I re-enter the familiar world,

I may care how I look, my face

perfectly poised at the moment of reflection.

I follow the other women to the line of showers,

sit on a plastic stool,

slowly wash my hair with liquid soap.

My body scrubbed

I soak in the bone hot bath,

as steam from the springs unseals my pores,

peach flowers in bloom.

Beyond the windows, mountains and still lake

protect a red core of magma, resting, scalding.

All are naked here, I am

a recognizable female form

of no differentiated quality.

-Leeya Mehta

She’s never starved. (Shutterstock)

The crow considers her responsibilities

Her slant gaze

won’t miss a meal

under a roadside tree:

a plate of stitched leaves

heaped with food

by the wingless

for they are sweet.

What would they taste like?

There’s time yet.

She’s never starved.

Not one day.

All dies.

All is food.

The sky is water.

The earth is meat.

In the end,who but she will eat?

-Suhit Kelkar

Dry as the lines read by a palmist in this handscape. (Shutterstock)

In Uttar Pradesh

The landscape stretches out its hands:

one is the plain whose distances

rise like hillocks in your palm.

The other is the sky, descending

like a hand descends on an insect.

The river beds are dry as the lines

read by a palmist in this handscape.

Here, the Aryans halted

at the street corners of history.

The event is remembered in every town

or village, poor or sad,

having a whitewashed temple stand

as a scarecrow for reality.

Reality is a big, black bird.

The wells hold equal parts of soil

and water as life holds myth and truth.

The land bears cane, a little rice,

millet; but the life

is only a bowl of polished rice

for thirty thousand gods.

-Lawrence Bantleman