Ranjit Hoskote

A Poem For Grandmother

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A Poem by Ranjit Hoskote

A door. A stair. And two steps inside that dark,

the straight-backed chair my grandmother sat in,

a lace net draped across its mahogany arm.

And on the table, a volume of stories

open at the flyleaf, its tissue quill-scarred.

The photographs seal her in a shell of relations:

the sepia corset would have her no more

than an empress delegating domestic chores;

in this room, imagine her gravely accepting

tributes of porcelain and sparkling brass

or setting tiger lilies afloat in bowls, or stocking

pots of pickled mango in the attic of summer.

But the wrong word kills, and empress is wrong,

an acrid graft on a delicate stock. Empire

was never her creed: grandmother had to learn

the principles of governance from practised hands.

She had to whet the brusque words of command

on waspish crones in the inner courtyard,

had to tame the peacocks in the garden

and dry the raisins of tact with aunts-in-law,

invalids who ruled from brass-bound chests

and serene beds of illness.

She grew up with her children, kept house

in a city of merchant ships and parade-ground strife,

made a home in the rain-gashed heart

of that world in whose lanes stowaway Chinese sang

the praises of their silk, and coolies peddled

cartloads of spices plucked for colder ports.

Like the poets of that city, she wrote in two languages,

spoke a third in polite company, the lines enjambed

over the trellises, the words trapped in porous stone.

She died giving birth to a daughter

on Armistice Day, 1931.

She grew into the earth, then, a storied fig tree

whose roots shot to heaven and branches burrowed

so deep they seeded a forest.

Giving consumed grandmother. Connected to her

by nothing more substantial than a spiralled thread

of protein, I wake some nights to find her eyes

staring at me from the mirror:

grandmother when she died, younger than I am now,

cut in half by the streetlight's glare.

Hoard your powers, she says, do not give

from the core, my son, do not give.

Giving spites the flesh, corrodes intention.

Most unreliable of barters, most memorable of sins,

giving kills. My son, do not, like Karna,

rip off the armour that is your skin.

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Poem By: Ranjit Hoskote