Search All Winners

The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.

We are the nothing-to-lose ones,

the try-anything-once ones,

weed seeds inside our cells –

dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –

roots sunk in, for it is the tips

that count, reaching out to tap

new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,

the stomata, those little mouths

opening, closing, sucking in air

in the evening when we boil

wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.

Like cures like, we hear in the morning

when we brush ourselves with

vegetable fiber in the shower,

beat ourselves with our fists.

(This is no crazier than anything else.)

Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.

TOLEDO: Go ahead, then. Spell it. Music. Spell it.

LEVEE: I can spell it, nigger! M-U-S-I-K. There!

            (He reaches for the money.)

TOLEDO: Naw! Naw! Leave that money alone! You ain’t spelled it.

LEVEE: What you mean I ain’t spelled it? I said M-U-S-I-K!

TOLEDO: That ain’t how you spell it! That ain’t how you spell it! It’s M-U-S-I-C! C, nigger. Not K! M-U-S-I-C!

LEVEE: What you mean, C? Who say it’s C?

TOLEDO: Cutler. Slow Drag, Tell this fool.

            (They look at each other and then away.)

Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!

            (TOLEDO picks up the money and hands LEVEE his dollar back.)

Here’s your dollar back, Levee. I done won it, you understand. I done won the dollar. But if don’t nobody know but me, how am I gonna prove it to you?

REGGIE
Now see you gonna laugh. Cause you thank everythang I do is funny. It ain’t funny. It’s meant tah teach ya. How I speak? That’s meant tah teach you too. You get older ‘n leave this place...one thing ya gonna remember is the music of ya daddy’s voice. The memory ‘a what made ya. How ya people survived. An’ these little games we play? These little hand games? That’s your history too… ‘cause ya grandmama sat ya mama down when she was smaller ‘n you ‘n they played these games ‘n had the best time that ever was. Then, ya mama taught me ya know that? Shoot, I ain’t wanna learn no little girl games. Imma man! (Laughs.) What I look like playin’ some little girl hand game! But, then we had you. And I taught you. That’s a road map. You ever get lost, you find ya way back home (points to his chest) from them. Understand? And one way or another... I’ll come get you.

She walks all the time in the Heart Ward.

She makes no sound. She is always alone.

If she is looking in the toilet stall and you come in

she leaves. She calls you Dear.

I was thinking of giving her my flowers.

Just now she came over and said,

‘You don’t have to be writing all the time Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you have any flowers?’

She said, ‘No Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you want any flowers?’

She said, ‘No, no flowers, Dear.’

I said, ‘Don’t you want any flowers at all?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s too late for flowers Dear.’