Description
Teaser:
Return to Shillong in Rain
Rain pelts my Tata Sumo Travelling
On the mountain-road
– I breathe free
2
Winding walkways
And misty mountain-top:
A hundred heroines sing love songs
from a hundred Hindi movies
3
My young Assamese driver
adjusts the rear-view mirror:
Our eyes meet
– There is no more commerce between us
4
An over-wound clock
I wind down
On mountain-top
5
At Police Bazaar
We get lost
He lends me his cell-phone
his arm
But I say:
Like time and tide
wait for no man!
He melts away:
an afternoon’s rain.
(Summer 2010)
Contents:
Rain / 11
Return to Shillong in Rain / 14
‘Ram’ / 16
‘Coorg’ / 17
‘Shesher Kobita’ / 18
‘Theyyam’ / 19
Shillong English / 20
An Old Bearded Poet Walks the City / 21
Full Moon in Shillong / 23
Revolutions / 24
Love-song the Death (after Tagore) / 25
Sex in Shillong (Two Poems) / 26
In Praise of Limestone / 28
Wine Suite / 30
Sunday Best / 31
Visit to St. Edmund’s, Shillong / 33
Cupid and Psyche / 34
India / 36
Christ of Bombay / 37
Elwin Verrier’s House, Shillong / 44
Song / 45
‘Jefferson Shillo’ / 46
(for my lover from Bihar) / 47
Poem / 48
(Everything is in the eye) / 49
Hoshang Merchant is India’s pre-eminent voice of gay liberation. Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business family in Bombay, India, he graduated in 1968 with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. On his mother’s side, he descends from a line of preachers and teachers.
Hoshang holds a master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA. At Purdue University, Indiana, USA, he specialized in the renaissance and modernism. After leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, USA, and lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran, and Jerusalem, where he was exposed to various radical student movements of the Left.
He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library, Dharamshala, India, and Islam in Iran and Palestine. Since 1979, seventeen of his books of poetry have been published. He recently retired from the University of Hyderabad, India, after twenty-six years of teaching.
