Perhaps it was music that came first, for me, as a child. Among my earliest memories is the sound of the music that my parents played on their Garrard turntable, their 45 rpms and LPs — Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’, Vilayat Khan-saheb’s raag Yaman, Emilio Pericoli singing ‘Al Di La’, Khachaturian’s ‘Spartacus’, Bismillah Khan-saheb’s raag Durga, Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan in concert. So cadence, tempo, flow, atmosphere, and colour came first, even before they were elaborated, for me, into any specific art.

As I said to the poet and editor Sarabjeet Garcha in a recent conversation, “My relationship to the arts has always been starfish-like, leaping out in different directions from a single starting point — music, architecture, literature, and the visual arts. However different my engagement with each of these practices may seem — in

the visual arts, I draw on the productive paradox between abstraction and materiality; in poetry, I work with the interweaving of text and musicality — what holds it all together is my curiosity about, and my commitment to, the lived experience of confluence, the coming together of dissimilar impulses or energies, and the way in

which they produce something unexpected, unpredictable, vibrant, and expansive.

Watch the earth contract

                 to this groove in the blue rock

                 from which water hurtles and air spins out

without curb or bridle

A groove that a twisted rod made

                when a prophet struck

                instead of speaking

as if the rock would not answer

He carried that groove

                  unhealed

                  to the last mountain he would climb

to kneel at the peak

clutching at that earth

                while his gaze plunged

                down steep slopes

to the promised land

Why didn’t they paint his face

         the same pale ivory they used for the faces

and his robes the same red ochre they used

            for the robes of his companions?

He stands at the end of the row

      the seventh monk

a whispered outline

   at the bruised edge of the panel

dissolving into air

You waited all night for the eclipse.

A panther loped down to the lake

and swallowed the moon.

Another night you thought the wind

had called for truce. The moon

never crossed the laterite border.

A third night, searching in this field

where the sky had rained stars, 

you found the moon

buried in a furrow that a yoked bull

had measured in loops from left

to right to left, turning

and returning. Speak, lunatic angel,

which was the right way?

Was I implement or impediment?

All night the eclipse waited for you.

Those who ran to hide were stoned

           and chased from their fields

The juniper was fragrant the vinegar how strong

but summer burned its way through the bricks 

and the plague bell kept tolling

           the drunks were neighing but no door opened

Every roof was heavy with crows

          Calling for a rain of fire the sturdier peasants sang

above the swaying crowd above its dense nose-lock of sweat

When their backs bent at last and their voices fell

                   a monk cowled in fury

           whipped their song with a carrying drone

River of souls surging to the hell he painted

          their bodies left nailed to the doors of heaven

Ash-heaps the houses past which their song rose again

and no one to wipe the blood from every word