Uttaraa: I. Life Sentences

ABOUT THE POEM Karthika Nair’s poem, one of a series spoken by the “voiceless characters” of the Mahabharata, uses a poetic form that has its origins among the troubadours of 12th-century France, the sestina (six six-line stanzas, the last word of each line from the first stanza finding an echo in the following stanzas in strict mathematical order, and a three-line close). Uttaraa is the wife of Abhimanyu, the young warrior slain at the peak of his youth and radiance in the great war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Her utterance, at once lament and curse, evokes a future in which the cycle of violence will never be broken, since “hate, once seeped into bloodstreams,/ is an abiding love”. It is as if Uttaraa’s disillusioned gaze reaches out into time, registering proleptically the entire history of violence of South Asia. A versatile formalist, Nair here imaginatively works the viewpoint of a minor character in the epic into a vigorous, clashing and corrosive war music.

Uttaraa: I. Life Sentences

by Karthika Nair

The sky will not be sky again. It is dead

skin split open, drained of all music and blood.

Monarchs, ministers, nations, elders, fathers:

it will not be the same, the world you now own.

This I promise. You will never hear day break

into mute lucent song, never taste colour

again. Slivers of our trust will decolour

your waking hours; the screaming eyes of my dead,

all eight million, will plunder sleep; their broken

dreams — aged sixteen, lusty, loud — dance in bloodied

feet at the Council of Kings, dance ownership

of your crown. But, dharma, you state, must father

martyrs to save planets. Why then, Our Father

Who Stays Alive, why bring us new, colourful

balloons — faith, hope, freedom? Why brand us your own,

made in your image? What we are is deadly

disposable spawn, born benign (not bloodless,

imperfectly designed) then programmed to break

enemy battalions, smash unbreakable

armoured discs and self-combust for fatherly

glory. Yes, your dharma is a bloodthirsty

beast, a god decked in the primary colours

of dystopia: rusty, fetid, undead.

Rulers in righteous armour, you will not own

to filicide, nor bare the hands that disowned

your scions in their last hours. I must now break

away from your empire, shed this deadening

white guilt, end all myths on you, Founding Fathers,

and speak, speak, speak till memory brings colour

back to earth’s cheek and she rises, sparing blood

in torrents. But hate, once seeped into bloodstreams,

is an abiding love: its DNA owns —

already — our futures. Revenge will colour

tomorrow in shadows and ancient heartbreak,

the terminal kind, for mothers and fathers.

And I, for all my foresight, will count the dead

again with deadpan voice and bloodstained fingers;

will seek father figures for my sons to own,

ones who teach them to break and discolour life.