A deer park, a duck lake, a fort—
“It’s colder here, isn’t it?”—
“Yes; we’ll walk fast, ok?”
Distress clouds your eyes:
“You should’ve got your coat.”
“It was sunny when we came out.”
“Still!”
(Ma chère, what’s gone through the sieve…
what’s stuck in the net, we receive
like cactus flowers in a drought.)
“It’s still October,” says our friend.
She’ll be only too glad to take an auto.
We press on to the lake.
The fort was restored to defend
the water from the Mongol hordes.
These Khilji-Tughlaq ruins now boast
of peacocks, lovers and ghosts;
no one remembers Taimur’s sword.
The dusk is smoggy, the village is lit-up.
We hear jazz, Sufi,
and debate on rum or coffee.
“To not drink would be sacrilege!”
We each order one-and-a-half
measures of rum: the cold retreats.
Good I didn’t get the coat, it cheats
me of the warmth of friends.
—“Or rum?”
—And we laugh.
F
Fiercely Tender: The Simple Complex World of Michael Ondaatje’s Novels
Shortly afterwards in that novel we encounter a celebration of the body, grime and all, unimpeded by this abstraction called mind. While writing the body might seem not altogether unusual, my point is that you cannot simply assume its naturalness. Language, even fictional language, is so much of a mentally...