In a mysterious space
between a night-dream and a subconscious vision,
I return to the countryside of my homestead.

My phantom,
like the twirling fumes from a flaming compost,
travels through the summer-green fields,
over a rock-walled sandbank skirting a slow-flowing brook.

Here and there green and red dragonflies,
shiny as emeralds and rubies,
hover and dart and land
on blades of paddy, on daffodils and on rocks.

From the opposite side of the brook,
from somewhere beyond the steep, uphill plots of rubber trees,
a cow moos.

At a shallow, forked pool of the brook,
a half-naked, mud-brown boy floats, half-submerged,
holding down a thin bath towel,
waiting for a careless fish.

Unnoticed by the fisherboy,
I arrive at a flatland owned by my grandfather,
ripe with lines of monsoon-swayed coconut trees.
A dark-skinned coconut tree climber,
half-hidden below the underside of the long, wide fronds,
like a spider in a high cranny,
calls down to me:

“അവിടെ, അത് ആരാണ്?
അത് സാറിന്റെ കൊച്ചുമകനല്ലേ?”
(“There, who is that? Isn’t that Sir’s grandson?”)
“അതെ ഞാനാണ്,” I say. (“It is.”)

“Why, you look just like him!
How many years it’s been
since you’ve come home?”

Feeling undone
after more than a decade
uprooted from my homeland,
I bow my head
down to the dark, dead fronds laying on the tree’s mulch.

“Where were you?” he asks.
“In America.”
“What’s there?”
He hacks the stem of a bunch of three coconuts.
We watch them crash and bounce about.

“There —” I murmur,
before he interjects,
“എന്തുകൊണ്ടാണ് നിങ്ങളുടെ മുഖത്ത്
അൽപ്പം അസുഖം തോന്നുന്നത്?”
(“Why does your face look a little sick?”)
“Nothing’s there,” I lie. “Time I get going.”
“You are going home? Could you take these coconuts along?”

I grab the bunch by its stem and
start towards a small bridge
made of the boles of two old coconut trees.
The climber calls after me,
“Your grandfather always waited to see you …”
“I know,” I whisper to myself and keep walking.

I cross the bridge and walk along the bank of another brook.
Soon, from far, far away, I hear
the slow tolling of the village’s temple bells and
the pleading melody of a serpent-worship song
emanating from a pulluvan veena,
a one-stringed relative of the violin.

A drift of nostalgia passes me,
remembering my grandfather
who, every time we bade farewell,
sat in his easy chair and summoned me, saying,
“ഒരു ശർക്കര ഉമ്മ താടാ.”
“Give a jaggery kiss.”

I set the coconuts down,
sit on the bank’s grassy edge,
and cry, when,
in the next moment, I hear
the chant of a priestly voice
from beyond the tolls and the veena:

“Him who was cast down headlong in the waters,
plunged in the thick inevitable darkness.
What tree was that which stood fixed in the surrounding sea
to which the son of Tungra supplicating clung?
Like twigs, of which some winged creature may take hold,
Ye, Asvins, bore him off safely to your renown …”*

*Rig Veda 1.1.182, quoted from the Vedas, Issue 1, Draft 2, compiled by the Dharmic Scriptures Team (Nov. 24, 2002)