Arundhathi Subramaniam

• Poem 1: ​Home
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• Poem 2: The Monk
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Home
 
Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
never worrying
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside. 
 
A home that I can wear lightly,
where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to fill in the crevices.
 
A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting. 

The Monk
 
(who’s been in silence
sixteen years)
 
writes me a note
at a yak tea stall
 
skirted by ragged prayer flags
in a grey hiccupping wind
 
on the road to Kailash.
His face is scarp and fissure
 
and gleaming teeth.
He spends each day
 
cleaning his shrine.
‘It’s worth it,’ he laughs.
 
‘I clean the shrine,
it cleans me.’
 
He was a spare parts dealer
in a time he barely remembers
 
before he was tripped up
by something that felt
like a granite mountain in reverse,
    
the deepest pothole
he’s ever known,
 
too deep
to be called love,
 
that turned him into a spare part himself,
 
utterly dispensable,
wildly unemployed.
 
‘And if there is another lifetime
this is what I’d ask for,’ he says
 
(and now he doesn’t laugh):
 
‘Same silence. Same cleaning.’
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Described as 'one of the finest poets writing in India today' (The Hindu, 2010), Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and author. Widely translated and anthologised, her book, When God is a Traveller (2014) was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the  T.S. Eliot Prize.   Her new book of  poems, Love Without a Story, was published this year with Westland Amazon. 

As editor, her most recent book is the acclaimed Penguin anthology of Bhakti poetry, Eating God. As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha; the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life; and most recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru). 

She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others. She has written extensively on culture and spirituality, and has worked over the years as poetry editor, cultural curator and critic. 

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