The Octagonal Tower, a poem by Sandeep Parmar

The Octagonal Tower is a poem in three numbered sections by Sandeep Parmar. The page prints it under an epigraph from Anne Michaels, which calls history a love that reaches people by way of death and names grief as its discipline.

Section one opens with sealed doors and a rage that has no name, then describes a drive through a sunken valley that is always the hour of the dead. The speaker addresses a driver whose hands are pushed through the wheel as though through a shackle, and who goes through yucca, eucalyptus and bougainvillea. The speaker translates a favourite song in the mind: this song, no one will sing, and it will die tomorrow with the singer. The section then goes back to an October night in 1975, when a sudden rain turns the earth to mud. A word more exact than mud names the sound of a foot being pulled from it, which the poem calls an awful suck of uprooting and a fear of standing so long that one sinks for ever.

Section two is about the Taj Mahal rising above the Jammuna. It says holidays are uncertain times, mentions the hands cut from the builders' arms and the funeral of Mumtaz, veiled by her white carved lid. It then turns to someone whose birth date nobody knows, who at five asked where a mother was, and later found a photograph of a woman freshly dead.

Section three returns to the road and the grip on the wheel. It tells how Shah Jehan, held in a tower by his son, received a gold platter bearing the head of his chosen heir, and spent eight years looking at the Taj from his window, or in a diamond set into the wall. He crossed the river once it had filled. The poem ends on a claim about love and pain: it is the memory of love that is loved, and memory that fattens on pain.

Work

The Octagonal Tower

Author

Sandeep Parmar

Poems in this selection

• The Octagonal Tower