MUMBAI SUPERMARKET BANNER: “MY BRUSH HAS MY NAME”

Reared in the flow of endless faucets,
that captive privacy of American bathrooms,
this promotion is unrecognizable,
this for only free! engraving

of your name of the handle with purchase of toothbrush. Indian
sinks must be chaos. His must be the first: Despite
the engraver’s sharp breathing down the apprentice,
proud machine polished to a precisely white incisor, they have to

start over on four fresh brushes. Swinging door
interruptions, there’s a black-eyed clatter as the bandage-for-a-sari beggar
drops her tin cup restraining her leashed monkey’s lunge at their shared mirage of banana-laden, mutton-weighted sleep like being cut wide open,
dumped empty.

His smirk fucked up by his blushing, he remembers again he fell for that fusty
milk powder scam
even its perpetrators can’t believe
still works.
He blames those tiny-on-the-burning-sidewalk bare feet, each tiny girl’s eye’s

dab of ash,
hunger’s raw daintiness, but his real nausea churns
for the ninety nine percent he bets that well-bellied shopkeeper kept

while hissing lashing threats for them to hustle out again, streets
fly-thick with generous, ignorant, guilty whites,
as the same battered box purchased three times that week for their “sick little sister”

slopes back onto the shelf. And the price he paid, not wanting to bargain
his Karma down!

He toys
with having them engrave Osama but
settles on Dudley,
his parents’ schnauzer. Now that
was a toothbrush it made sense
to label:
One difference between dogs and humans is the flavor of their toothpaste.

ROBOTRIX

Movie theater, Puri, India

Surely the Sacred’s decay
gains a little speed,
every time they screen this obscurely dubbed Japanese
“comedy,”

its grainy, rip-off Philip K. Dick plot
robot police just
leggy and eventually defenestrated
props for rapes played

for laughs to the audience,
frottage-jostled, humid-jaundiced,
mere blocks
from Lord Jagannath temple, a site

so holy
that fearfully unbelieving addicts, masters
of making even of their jitteriness a laziness, pile
rupees high conning foreign tourists up

any old building when, as every guidebook warns,
the library rooftop owns
the only view of that spiced
chaotic throng

worth paying for
by that non-Hindu
swath of the world
banned from entry by massive red signs, so even

the Lithuanian Hare Krishna,
his officially stamped letter of permission, isn’t
welcome because his parents
ate meat and the temple priest

is a stickler and stricter
than ever, knowing such strictures can’t hold for much longer.

“NO RICKSHAWS 6 AM TO MIDNIGHT”

But Mohammed’s watch is buried behind a hut
a month’s pay away by train in Bihar
so he goes where he wants, a day just whatever
number of rounds his bare feet getting

ground Calcutta-down
to a starving mouse’s
corncobs then calloused back,
each layer darker, it takes before

he achieves a drunken fakir’s shaky levitation. Mikael
is convinced his cradle moss beard stopped growing
when he declared Stockholm too cold and quit art school.
India comes to his Gandhi glasses’

thumbprint lenses’
blond eyelashes only after
filtering through that Leica he scraped the case of
with keys to put off thieves. But even if each click

of that shutter
shot a little water
it couldn’t account for the slickness
of Mohammed’s neck,

that sweat-dripping haul from the Hotel Paragon
to a stranded-looking Episcopal church, where,
ruffled into buccaneer silk, Mikael will play an 1890’s
Englishman in the Bureau of Tribal Affairs-produced

biopic of the rebel hero Birsa Munda.
As the prison doctor, administer of poison,
he’ll pronounce the agitator dead from cholera
in lines puckered with that same disbelief

as twinges the rest of the cross-
culturally jumbled,
mass anachronism cast, plucked this morning
from hostels where cheesy Om graffiti

sweats off into chillum gibberish,
rat bets, the five hundred rupees less
a lure than the promise of something to do besides
watching another Kali goat get her head lopped off, or

shaving a ninety pound man at Mother Theresa’s with a dull razor.
Five hundred rupees, after all, just the amount that gentle French
med student pays for a jar
of diarrhea. The two hundred rupees Mikael pays

for Mohammed’s hand bell, wanting to display it with the photos,
equals so many fares that Mohammed waits for him
out front of the church eight hours,
dizzying on bidhis with a Czech musicologist

whose left eyebrow’s piercing rises like a silver,
lost bindi as he taps the red felt side of his cardboard
Napoleon hat—“Not quite right for
an English oppressor, yes?”—

before asking if Mohammed sells charas.
He frowns, but yes, knows somebody, “Later, later.”
Chai-streaked white beard scraggle,
Mohammed is plotting to sell

his spare hand bell to that muscular Australian
who’s playing a nun, her thick
dreadlocks bunched in wooden rings. Next week Mikael will join
Mohammed’s biannual trip home to eight children

and a mute wife
who won’t cover the rice.
She’ll squat
with the only rag in sight

to sop the vomit
from the hut’s dirt floor, where she’ll point
when Mikael asks for a bucket to get sick
again, giving that same shrug as to answer, “Where did your son

go with my camera?” In his fever—
perfect circle—the flies will sing
Träd Gräs och Stenar. The Czech
chuckles at the odd trot of a dog

passing the church until he notices she carries
a dead pup in her mouth. Her wobble
imagines
that trajectory of the arrow

the smirking American playing the jaded Reverend Hoffman,
cracking LSD jokes, holds up in the pulpit, prop symbol
of the uprising, its gleaming fierceness
tinfoil; its shaft of creased cardboard and cellophane tape

at cranky odds with the aerodynamics of
revolutionary justice.
A year later during the floods Mohammed’s youngest son
sneaking off to rebury the watch and the camera

on higher ground, will stumble onto a coiled krait.
And Mikael, not yet fully recovered,
still traveling,
documenting Chechyan refugees, will shake

his head at the computer, at his Google search of “Abua Birsa,”
at the fact Prime Minister Vajpayee attended the premier
to pay homage to the “this grand, humble predecessor of Gandhi’s,”
and, dozing, launch a dozen slowly tumbling sun towards Karachi.