Bovine Intervention
Satya Dash
Congratulations, my father says, the vowels conspicuous
like rose petals in warm water. The news of my promotion
hastens the sky’s blackening. A small town of mustard oiled finger
licking dinners and burpy stomachs beckons behind the wind
shield. To love food is a great way to love yourself. Yet, I’m
tired of my mouth. How all it does is churn
want. Its ceaselessness, congratulatory beyond reform.
My parents too pick me up without fail every time I land
at the Bhubaneswar airport. 17 times in the last 6 years. I count
because cumulation offers resilience that nostalgia
doesn’t. The heat of the minute hand’s madness ends every daynight
couplet in clammy slumber; the silence inside my father’s car
reinforces a ghazal’s beauty. On the way back home, I see
cattle through the window, a herd sailing across the road,
stubborn calf coaxed by the mother to move, making us wait.
In familial silence, it strikes me I had forgotten
exactly how cows look like, their hoofs pecking my eardrum in gentle
clops. Their flesh very much a national bone of contention. The dusk
sky’s amber wrung hard into the saffron of brows, smeared
on manifestos. The government doesn’t understand
Tagore, Rumi or Faiz. Not because it can’t
but because it won’t. On manifestos, the GDP
swells. Obviously, no mention is made of the formula
tweaked to achieve the desired percentage. Very similar
to the way I approached math questions in school,
noting down the answer from the book’s back section,
then working my way upwards. My father abhorred that method.
But today he jokes, if everybody becomes a poet
who will do the actual work? My fists close involuntarily
in the tautness of rush, tempted to power through moving
glass, my hand regurgitating faculties of anger like a cow’s
fascinating stomach. For days, the odder side of my brain mulling—
if men were to bleed monthly, would the world be redder, a more
epilogued organism? Men in the long history of the town I came from,
where this car was headed now, thrashing legs on thick mattressed
beds, news of their mysterious wrath spreading in hushed
whispers. My father, once proud of his, now worn down
by age. My mother says he finds it impossible to weep. Even
when he wants to. It’s funny how contraction bares new
ground. Emergent lime. Sweet swallowing of flame.
For instance, father following up his good night
incredulously with I’m proud of you. While my simmering
brown corpse on the drawing room couch
feigns unbearably the anesthesia of slumber.
Satya DashWaxwing, Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, The Boiler, The Florida Review, Prelude, The Cortland Review and The Journal among others. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043