The Excelano Project Official Blog » Sruthi Sadhujan (Alumnus)

Soul Underfoot

Sruthi Sadhujan (Alumnus) — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:05:42 +0000

Some days… I smell of loneliness and escape,
of the uncomfortable intimacy of economy-class seats.
On these days, I scrub to take off that layer of dead skin,
hoping that if I rub hard enough, I can find traces of that person
that I once discarded from 30,000 feet high into the gulf of good intentions.
But sitting in an ocean of brown faces, all keen-eyed yet timid,
I felt the familiar restlessness of a 15-hour trans-everything flight,
the first voyage over, where every miles feels heavy under your eyelids,
as you try to put it all behind you.
They spoke of kathakali and crowded bus stands,
with passengers stacked like matchboxes,
sparking with urgency and escape.
One man told a story of a village of untouchables,
of a dog that wandered off
and impregnated another from an upper-caste family.
They torched that village,
raped and killed the first woman they could get their righteous hands on.
An eye for an eye, a dog for a rotten bitch,
these are the stories that move them,
these are the stories that appear in international newspapers,
but for all their notoriety and fame,
they’re standing neck-deep in stagnating water,
where the smallest ripple would drown them.
Because backward castes are equivalent to the very shit they scavenge through.
I looked over at the man, speaking with earnest and a quite rage.
Your eyes are hungering for moonlight,
and my heart cracked through the spaces of my split lips like parched earth,
ashamed to say that sometimes I dream of this place with pride.
I come from that far off land where mixed caste fetuses
are crushed one by one under the four legs of a bed frame.
Women are told to hold back their smiles,
because no one wants a rabid bitch to bear her teeth.
I know that you’re struggling, unable to reconcile the curious yearning in your chest
for the land that spat on your face because of the sound of your last name.
I belong to you,
I belong to a first son and his first child
with a mouth too big for much too small wallet.
to rice paddies floating with drowned lungs,
plastic bottles, and water-stained pleas,
I belong to a billion explosions of color between brown and ivory
I belong to the monsoons, to the color of my skin,
to women strung with jasmine garlands,
I belong to jai hind.
To communist graffiti on the walls of train stations
And groping blind beggars scraping like scalpels against the asphalt,
as if his knees were more courageous than he was.
I belong to him
To Kerala, Tamil Nadu…
And yet it seems that I will never belong but still…
I dream of you like the space between the fish and moon,
I belong to the place where they breathed, dreams expanding like balloons,
to the sun dying in the east.
I belong to a few, to a billion, I belong to you.

Intelligent Design

Sruthi Sadhujan (Alumnus) — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:52:23 +0000

One night, God had a dream.
In his dream he created a man.
Soon after, he created the sun,
And Man, just days old, with a sigh that could not be distinguished from a scream,
almost died from the beauty (that shattered his eyes,)
And one day man saw himself reflected in a pool of water,
And in his eyes, he saw astronomy,
he saw whole universes and cosmos tumbling and wheeling over each other
Every fleck of his iris became Cassiopeia and Orion,
and the stark glare of mars was chained into submission.
And as the stars thawed in his eyes and overhead,
Man cried, he inundated his ego,
Thinking that maybe he was the universe in compact.

And so he took the first bite of his apple of doom,
From the apple of his eyes, he ate fully
and from the grail of his tears, he drank deeply, replenished,
He wiped the corners of his mouth, and made himself into a deity.

Man flirted with gravitational pull and grew seraphic wings out of wax,
Waxed his vanity and left it in the trophy case,
As he flew off and attempted to play tag with the sun.
Man sat on Olympus with cheeks swollen from his Herculean ego,
when oxygen deficiency started to take over him,
And he thought to himself,
like Michelangelo had touched the divine on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel,
Maybe he too could dream beings into existence.
And so each night he slept, and each night he dreamt.

He began with a pulsing red heart,
Swimming in bright blood, pulsating like the mouth of a landed fish
Two lungs, blooming with vitality from the chest,
A mysterious liver, a hermetic pancreas,
And a constellation of arteries and veins, a universe contained in the space of a body,
All feeding the sanguine, fetal heart that was gaping like a pathetic newborn for breast milk.
Each organ spoon-fed the other, inseparable like Siamese,
Suffered claustrophobic love and separation anxiety from each other,
and a being, panting from the labor pains of simply being dreamt into existence, was born.

Drained from his efforts, man felt hollow on the side
Feeling like when had first waited for Eve in what seemed an eternity,
When God had hollowed part of him on the inside,
in taking out a rib to make him a companion.
That same feeling of emptiness took hold of him now,
As the universe around him turned in on itself,
His newly created being was blown into a million pieces of dust,
While his own fingertips were carried away on the wind,
until he could no longer touch Eve,
Who suddenly flew up in a smoke, and descended as one rib at his feet.
He stood on the barren land, sifting sand through his fingers,
Remember his origins with sudden pain
And though he sobbed at losing his companion
And though he sobbed at finally understanding the smallness of his own being,
Not even the stars had pity on him and put themselves out one by one,

Because dawn was breaking,
And God was waking from his long night of dreaming a man into existence,
And man was stretched into inexistence by the very eyelids of God,
He was hollowed by God’s waking, by more than just a rib,
But by organs and blood and entire constellations
Because for a moment, he had forgotten how to separate precipitate from solution,
arrogance from devotion.
He had forgotten how to separate divinity from humanity,

And for a moment, he had thought his footprints could to shake the ground,
uproot the Nile,
turn the world upside down,
and throttle the earth from its from its axis.
But it was all a dream, and God woke up, he had better things to do than let foolish beings run away with celestial fantasies.

Dancefloor

Sruthi Sadhujan (Alumnus) — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:49:09 +0000

A group of fools gathered around in a nightclub,
A dimly-lit, red-toned dance floor blur of moving figures,
And silent thinkers nestled in corners far away from the light.
The smoke that curled from their table-ridden cigarettes floated upwards,
And mingled like cosmopolitan debonairs near their foreheads.
They looked old…
With all that grey in their hair.
But when the music started playing,
They shook out their shoulders
And the atmosphere shuddered for a moment.
Then the bass moaned slowly towards them.
And they all leaned in a little closer.
With no introductions, the melody slipped under their fingernails
And took flight through their bones,
And suddenly everybody was throbbing against the beat,
a pulse in a giant wrist where the stage was the heart,
and the aisles were the veins,
and everyone trembled with their cigarettes
glowing like traveling constellations in the galaxies.
Unfolding like tents in the desert, the music unraveled to them,
And behind them they left all their cares,
With them, they took their heartbeats and drumbeats and impassioned feet.
It caused their eyes to tear, dismantled their fears and with the remains,
They reconstructed dreams…
Until they were miniscule and they were giant,
The music was the breadth of the universe, and it was a string of it,
It was the implosion of a white dwarf, and the collapse of genetic walls,
They were all at once human, and they were the gods.
This is what the music did to them,
Until everybody was everybody,
‘Cause everybody was on the dance floor.
The dance floor was everyone,
And the dance floor was the earth,
Sanity slowly filed out their ears in pencil straight lines
and the night air was brazenly calling them,
Until they were ready to lay themselves to sacrifice.
They wanted to peel their chests open,
Remove their hearts, and transplant this beat as their life source.
They dropped to their knees, kissed the dance floor.
Yearning like rows of shivering worshippers reaching for the high.
They touched their foreheads to the ground…and waited.
And this was how it happened:
Finally, this is how each and every soul was lifted out of its confines
and taken abreast on the wind,
This is how, like serpents shedding their worn lives,
every dancer danced straight out of his skins,
And this is how they ran clear into the arms of the next world that was patiently waiting for them,
In the final and shivering pause, someone murmured and it was done
They had bridged purgatory, the land and skies were finally one,
heaven and earth were threaded onto one string.
They took a last leap,
as feather by feather, the music carried them, the music built them wings.