Written piece
Bombay Palimpsest
Mrinalini Harchandrai
India
About this piece
A native resident’s soaring coo-ooing call is like a time thread through the big and small events - from the colonial to the cultural mixture, the tragedies to the transactions, the hopes and the spiritual seeking - in the histories and making/remaking of a coastal metropolis.
BOMBAY PALIMPSEST
The stone age courtship song
of a koel began again
native inhabitant of the centuries
at my window marking territory
and stitching together with gossamer koo-ooo
threads these tropical islands
rustling around like humped whales
making mangrove sounds in water
while mainland wanderers clambered on
carving the religion of dynasties
into caves, plucking fish
and medicinal herbs
and welcomed sails filled with a nose
for spices to sow forts and churches
in coconut groves
The cuckoo bird signed a treaty
with the dowry of a monsoon
that came in like suzerainty
and reshaped the islands
into one large well
where fat drops of cotton
were hauled out of seawater
Languages flew overhead
like birds crisscrossing trade
winds dropping concrete
new ideas over the basalt
the cuckoo makes a home
on borrowed terrain laying
the eggs of large revolts
and independence is a nest
spun in the twig language
of wheels and courthouses
fill with names on papers
those files grown from making
matchbox squares in marshland
the koel traces ancestral songs
in those dusty chambers
filled with formulas for land surveys
and judgements of blood feuds
now stitched together with pincodes
and even today when asked its name
the city holds out an atlas of time
connecting earth to sky
making meanings out of a goddess
and a good bay and variations
on a stock theme of exchange
a repeated-use canvas of us
temporary birds
cuckoo proportions.