A Bouquet of Lotuses For Your Birthday
a gift in the shape of a poem in the shape of a list that doubles as an essay on giving & loving when you have almost nothing
A Bouquet of Lotuses for Your Birthday
Lotus feet, lotus hands, lotus eyes, lotus rage.
The Kosi embankment’s failure was first blamed, in 1968, on rats and foxes.
Imagine the river is a tongue.
The upper lip basins from southern Tibet and eastern Nepal. The lower lip glaciates to the Ganga, singing to the Himalayan snow leopards and wild yaks.
Why politicians do not care for rivers I do not know.
To ascribe holiness to a body of water and then to defile the water’s body.
This is our world, beloved. The world you and I share with our daughter.
But the rain, you say. The rain and moonlight freckling the rivers. How she counts seventeen stars! How she gobbles lotus seeds jewelled with pink salt!
I want to stay here forever. You there, her there. I — a blue stream cascading, crescendoing, eroding, rebirthing between your two bodies, one child, one man, a family of baby steps.
The first time I heard of a lotus was long before the first time I ever saw one, weeks after I had searched for lotuses in the Auckland Botanical Gardens.
I was supposed to be selling the Bhagavad-gita in the strip malls that day.
But after reading so much about lotus this and lotus that and feeling irrevocably melancholic, I just wanted to see the damn flower in real life, you know?
I did not find it that day.
An alluvial fan, one of the largest in the whole wide world, billows from the Kosi escarpments where, on August 18, 2008 — the same day that a suicide bomber drove a car into an Algerian military school killing 43 people and hurting 45, the same day Belarusian weightlifter Andrei Aramnau broke three world records, exactly a month (depending on whom you ask) before the 2008 stock market crash, and exactly (if you ask my mother) two years before my brother was born — heavy monsoon rains submerged all the fields. Countless villages flooded. Many months later, they counted 434 dead bodies but it is difficult to count bones under water.
But I am not warning you about the evils of water on your birthday.
You who love water.
You who drink your water at 69 degrees fahrenheit with a splash of lemon, honey and slivered ginger.
You who wish to be water.
You because of whom — if we left the other — there’d be no way I could live in Norway or England because of all the rain.
No, I am not telling you a crying story. I’m telling you how the farmers of Dhanauri Village got rich off lotuses by harnessing the floodwaters.
The same floodwaters that carried ashes became flower beds.
The man who broke this news bears your name. First and last.
Imagine, Karan, fields of stagnant floodwater simmering with nelumbo.
And then the rhizomes gather like hair or fins. The garter-green stems flare brilliant beneath this water of death. The swollen flowerbuds pink, yellow, white, and — rarer than rainbow eucalyptus or the peacock spider or the glowing forests of Japan — blue.
Blue lotuses are said to bring children, dreamless sleep, wisdom, a sun-in-your-face-under-snowfall happiness, mad euphoria, religious fervor, cancer cures. They heal the heart, the gut, the genitals, blood.
Musk and blue lotus stamen — the Vedas say this is how Krishna smells.
The Lord who is a Lotus. From his navel, a lotus stem umbilicals into a lotus whorl, upon which Brahma alights.
Utterly lost, alone and confused he turns in all the directions.
He finds nothing, but sprouts three additional heads, one for each direction, to long, to lose, to look.
Devastated by a universal flood, his lotus home swaying amid the catapult of elements, he begs. He bashes his heads on the lotus carpel. Weeps, though his million tears from his four heads are flooding further the earthless world. Finding a perforated void in the lotus heart, he dives into its body, swimming downstem to reach his origin. He swims for centuries though centuries do not yet exist. Time is not yet born. We are still daydreams glimmering over Vishnu’s eyelashes.
Defeated, he swims back. Little fish, Brahma, little lord of the Lordless void.
What is one to do, beloved?
What is anyone to do with a broken world, a broken body, when there is no one left to bind or, if nothing else, to break further with?
And then he heard two syllables.
All the poems we want to whisper to each other, all the slogans of revolution, all our lonely prayers summed up in two syllables.
Your name has two syllables.
tapa
Heat. A child, I lived always with sunlight and water — sweat on skin. Once, running across the road in burning May, I was struck by a motorcycle. Not in the way you might be struck by a poem watching a little girl smell a flower but perhaps exactly in that way. I bled for hours. The blood felt cold though it was meant to be hot.
Penance. I’m not sure if not eating grains for a year, not fucking for four, and barely sleeping is penance but if it is I performed it and at the end all I wanted was something like the All Encompassing Blackness to consume me. No wonder no flower is black.
Oppression. Not so much by figures of beauty, but I am oppressed often by the thought that I might get exactly what I deserve and that is always a cause for concern.
To burn in self-inflicted suffering.
To reach the lotus in a cesspool. To reach the Lord in our solitude. To reach love though love be an icicle piercing the heart.
The Rig Veda glorified our four-headed Brahma, the creator with a lifetime of 311040 billion human years.
Oh, but a few lightning flashes. A candle left to melt in a cow skull. The Koh-i-Noor glittering beneath a confetti of blood on an empty throne.
In other words, nothing.
Almost.
Imagine a field of blue lotuses again. Hush, my penchant for trauma, for gore. Before Anasuya was born, I imagined a bulldozer crushing me. The Holdenian teenager I was, I did not mind. Now, so often — on streets, in trains, by rivers — I am so afraid, jittering, hawk-eyed to ensure she does not fall into a snakepit nestled above a volcano curdling and churning with dragon detritus.
Oh, where would we find it? Mothers find fear everywhere.
On your birthday, I am imagining how a hundred deaths could have happened. A hundred ways we could have never met. A hundred years of shit and bones in a pond overtaken by an algal bloom — lotusless, zeroed with the cancelled memory of the past perfect.
Please, help me yield. Plow my skin, dive into my veins, measure the pieces left behind by everyone that left, and tell me how the moon looks so pure despite all the eyes that envy it. That the Lord offers the first sip of holy water to the devil. That the massacre of one land is a lotus mine for another. That honeybees will find molecules of nectar in crumpled flowers. That we are her parents but she always shushes us to sleep. That the lotus rich farmers gave much of their wealth to help the flooded homeless. That this world of ours is burning, but you have brought a mouthful of cold water and are waiting to kiss me.
Originally published in Tolka Journal
Gorgeous
“nothing”-- such an abstract word, yet so unequivocally rich and beautiful is this poem and your love. I have had the honor to read this gorgeous poem before in BEST NEW POETS,2024 Anthology. I could read it a thousand times and never tire of it. Thank you, Shannan