A.K. ultimately

it's not the truth you know that matters - but how you put it.
(i'm going to learn japanese in dublin.
and the first thing i did when i came back - to a single lethal curse from dad after another late night this month - is read a few pages of scribbles on the fortunate notebook of a boy-man i had discussed about with some heat that very bramble-lost evening, and then pee. And just as i was about to pee down the urethra toob - i thought of oscar wilde. oscar wilde. lawd of ladles. lawd.)
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- the one thing I know now as i sit saddled with my body at home over this keyboard is that: it is time to worhsip a.k. ramanujan. come let us praise him. and this is not the way to do it. the understated south indian, self-contained, head of south indian studies, tender, vulnerable, honest (not crafty), respectful, shy, polite, glowing softly in the eyes with the earnest simpleness of life like the true southie, lovely, effeminate, deep, still, and strongly human. Please find out something more about him for yourselves. I am too overwhelmed everytime to collect myself to write anything at all about him in any sensible way. He is the man. I know that I am probably violating the rights of his estate now, but i'm risking it, because it is all I can do in the context. This is the word of ak ramanujan. His poem - 'Obituary'.
***
OBITUARY

Father, when he passed on,
left dust
on a table of papers,
left debts and daughters,
a bedwetting grandson
named by the toss
of a coin after him,

a house that leaned
slowly through our growing
years on a bent coconut
tree in the yard.
Being the burning type,
he burned properly
at the cremation

as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn't
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly
and throw as the priest
said, facing east
where three rivers met
near the railway station;
no longstanding headstone
with his full name and two dates

to hold in their parentheses
everything he didn't quite
manage to do himself,
like his caesarian birth
in a brahmin ghetto
and his death by heart-
failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me
he got two lines
in an inside column
of a Madras newspaper
sold by the kilo
exactly four weeks later
to streethawkers

who sell it in turn
to the small groceries
where I buy salt,
coriander,
and jaggery
in newspaper cones
that I usually read

for fun, and lately
in the hope of finding
these obituary lines.
And he left us
a changed mother
and more than
one annual ritual.


***