Kosi by Sumana Roy

Kosi

Like a woman who will fold and unfold her clothes
to exaggerate the shadow of her riches,
Kosi, the river of death,
stammers at bends, making all journeys longer;
Like a lover who knows not what he loves
except the scratches of stumbles between his toes,
Kosi, water-coffin,
moves without regard for direction:

The world drowns into a whisper,
cow and grass become fodder,
mirrors freckle with obituaries,
names become numbers.
Beauty,
sediment of history’s granary,
rises like yeast, corpses moles on its face.
Legs lose themselves to proverbs:
Kosi follows, at first like a lover,
then chases like a creditor,
until language and tongue become one
– a conch shell of sighs stuck inside Mithila’s throat

In the slaughter houses of its waters,
barbed wires turn anemic,
death blunts the pointed shadows of guns,
two countries fail to identify their dead,
all men become one,
as only Kosi and the vultures know

Everyone returns
to where they thought they had left unfinished tasks –
to sunken pillows, swollen tubers, smelly toilets –
to charpoys of dailiness, all except the river.
Kosi never returns:
like death, its home is forever new.
 

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Sumana Roy’s first novel, Love in the Chicken’s Neck, was long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, 2008. She lives in the Chicken’s Neck corridor, India, from where she hears stories about Kosi’s Great Flood in neighbouring Nepal and Bihar every year. 

To read more of the Dhaba's green poetry, go here.