They carved a stair of basalt trapps and read it like a book;
Flat-topped steps that nursed the weather’s old footnotes.
Marbled cliffs spewed the Narmada into prehistoric rivulets;
And fossils slumbered like postcards pinned to a submerged atlas.
A glossopteris pressed its sprig to the lips of time,
Black soil arrived like a refrain on tongues made of lava,
And regur; and the sowing of cotton in a cultural economy
Of mantle plumes, that once stitched continent to continent.
Men with testaments and hammers and maps walked the hill-lanes,
Counting tribes as contours, sorting bones and languages.
The Gods forgot how to speak. Their land and devotees,
Found naked, were frogmarched to wear new ordnance maps.
The terrain was brandished as a magnet that pulled paddy from the sea.
Crabs, centipedes, locusts, and lotuses were named all over again.
In the pits where flint was chipped, a workshop argued with history;
In the grooves of ravines, an empire’s milestones were erected.
At Sitabuldi, the missionary counted rocks and prayers,
And proofs that life began here, “it was here, in this cavern,”
Where geologists dreamed of lacustrine hideouts for hunted
Muggers, and rivers, on the run, before both were turned into stone.
The trapp-country breathed aloud: water, peat, charcoal, fire;
Its rhythms spawned the rumor of a southwards drift; and of Gonds,
Whose bodies grew out of mud and forest and clay, and
The African ocean; whose songs etched the Narmada’s ripples.
The forest was burned; villages pacified; myths taken in hand;
The laterite remembered cotton and blood; rivers remembered
Giant stones under the world, the slow drumming of driftwood,
And the rustle of leaf-languages at the funeral of vanished identities.
The fern-fronded fissures of Gondwana’s cracked cradles,
Where hollowed barrels of deep-earth wood’s fire raged in flumes,
Eucalypt elders groaned and gurgled; archaeologists revised cosmology,
Knocking each necrotic knot, wooden wails wove Deccan’s woozy whirl.
Inelastic ribs of dinosaurs refused to become silt, as the dry thunder
Thrummed over toothless tors—now extinct from exotic dehydration.
The brown hooded cicadas held their breath on blistering noondays,
And veinless microbes clapped like truant palms in the unseen wind.
Read the land closely—it writes back in a thousand dismembered reeds;
Read it like that lean-necked eagle snoozing against the moaning cliffs;
Like invisible anthems hanging as torn vests on potbellied cannons;
Like a continent whose frozen sap shivers as it chafes a volcano’s notch.
Photograph Courtesy: Mark Witton/The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
Arup K. Chatterjee 