My Sunset Marriage – Merchant Hoshang

Description

I was the sea-driven one

Who landing built a sun-temple

Laughed at a cunt-king’s milk-teeth

Went about my sunset marriage

Casting my dead skyward

Everyone tumbles through these pages: parent and prostitute, lover and charlatan, Jew and Turk, madman and saint, fornicator and abstainer, the geisha and the devdasi as well as the Mumbai starlet. Here’s God’s plenty. Devoured by a voracious appetite, spewed out as poems by a compulsive energy.

This is modernism with its pants down, uncle Ezra lending arse at Wayside Inn, Kala Ghoda, Bombay; this is Bombay pretending to be Paris, paan-stained and all. This is convent English giving Mumbai Marathi a well-deserved kick in the pants; this is the Parsi Queen desperately mimicking Sultan Padamsee if not Jean Genet!