(available at Anchor.fm, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, Breaker, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Overcast)

Hello and welcome to Episode 88 of Desi Books—news and views about desi literature from the world over. I’m your host, Jenny Bhatt. Thank you for tuning in.

Today, in the #DesiReads segment, we have Rhiya Pau reading from her poetry collection, Routes.

#DESIREADS WITH RHIYA PAU — INTRODUCTION

Rhiya Pau is a British-born poet of Indian heritage from a community that has a rich history of migration. She writes to chronicle the stories of her community and narrate the exploration of her own identity through the lenses of travel, food, ritual, and language. Rhiya was the Platinum Poetry winner of the 2021 Creative Future Writers’ Award. Published in November 2022, Routes is Rhiya’s debut collection and has already been awarded a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award. The book commemorates fifty years since Rhiya’s family and community arrived in the UK.

Routes chronicles the migratory histories of Rhiya Pau’s ancestors and community, simultaneously laying bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. As the poems included in Routes journey from Ba’s kitchen in Sonia Gardens to Independence hour in Delhi and across the pink shores of Nakuru, to Lee High Road, the collection poses one central question: what is worth holding onto?

On a personal note and in full transparency, while Rhiya and I do not know each other, her publisher had approached me last year for a book blurb. And, because I loved this collection and so much resonated with my own Gujarati diasporic and immigrant background, I was more than happy to do so. I’ll share that here:

Rhiya Pau’s collection is a feast of language and probably the first with such inventive and delightful use of Gujlish. From India’s Independence struggle to the global pandemic, Pau maps the political and emotional landscapes of her immigrant Gujarati family, bringing their many worlds to life through unforgettable sights, sounds, and sensations. With richly diverse and experimental storytelling, this collection re-imagines and re-interprets the many possibilities and meanings of identity, diaspora, belonging, and community for South Asian immigrants everywhere.

And now, here’s Rhiya Pau. A transcript of some of the excerpts is also up on the Desi Books website. And we have some lovely musical interludes accompanying the readings from a band called Third Culture Collective. Rhiya’s brother, Kavi Pau, is the vocalist,

Routes chronicles the migratory histories of Rhiya Pau’s ancestors and community, simultaneously laying bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. #DesiReads @DesiBooks

Tweet

---

#DESIREADS WITH RHIYA PAU

[Excerpted with permission from Routes by Rhiya Pau. Copyright © 2022 Rhiya Pau.]

In the Spring of 2020, the pandemic coursed through London’s care homes, taking with it some of the few surviving memories of our community’s epic tri-continental migration. Routes began as an effort to chronicle this history, documenting the joys and struggles of upheaval, rerooting, and reinvention.

The release of this collection marks fifty years since my family, and much of our community, arrived in the UK. To understand who we are and how we got here, you must first understand that our history is deeply entangled with the history of this country. For over a century, our migratory patterns have been determined by colonial pressures, namely the colonization and resource extraction of the South-Asian subcontinent, the movement of indentured laborers from India to East Africa and other colonies, the Indian Independence movement, the Partition of India as drawn up by the British, the rise of East African nationalism following independence from the British, and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda that ensued. It holds, as a result of the role Britain has played, and independent of our status as citizens, that diasporic history is British history. Our telling of it belongs in British literature, and in school curricula. We must assert this against the narrative tides.

---

Silverware

from the sun they descend:
queens  and  queens  and  queens.
this achaar, this mustard oil red lemon sunset
is an empire. our sons a flavor of royalty, planting
flags in the laundry. he wears white on white on white
in protest, I wear palaces of silver at my wrists shining wild
like the daring of my mothers, queens crossing seas, building
empires spoonful, by spoonful, by dazzling spoonful.

“… the daring of my mothers, queens crossing seas, building
empires spoonful…”
~Rhiya Pau, Routes
#DesiReads @DesiBooks

Tweet

Departure Lounge

In memory of our elders who lost their lives to Coronavirus in London’s care homes.

In those days, your loved ones could see you off from the
runways. You see them shrinking fast, holding on to
promises, suddenly indistinguishable –
to call, to write, to send money, holding on to the land
you call home while you rattle through the air in a tin plane,
hollow as the cola cans boys kick down the dirt tracks, sweat
gleaming on the black muscle of their backs.

No welcome party at Heathrow, only long looks
at your tea-stained skin, arm hairs raised, nine yards
not enough to keep your body from shaking. Holding on to a
suitcase of wool and murtis, incense and coconut shell, red
tilak to anoint your new home. Outside, the air is cold and dry
and you think to yourself: How can this be 
the same star-studded night that blinds the Serengeti?

Through the seventies, planes flock from Bwindi
and the Masai Mara, migrating bloodlines of Saurashtra,
reconvene in London. Depart: bilingual with clammy palms
and first-flier nerves. Arrive: tongue-tied, mouths filled with
broken glass, shards of English. No welcome party
at Heathrow. But you feed them rotli-shak, let them stay,
two-by-two in your one bed on Greenford High Road,
sprawled on plastic sofas, battling the heavy headedness
that comes only from taking leaps so big they cross oceans.

You will share a home with them again in your eighties,
and in that home, where they serve rotli-shak, open
the morning with incense and bhajan, a generation is fed and
washed by the same hands, a chorus of stories tells
a history of the gold they buried in Jinja, ruthless dictators,
fickle empire, first flier nerves, brown woolen jumpers
of immigrant Britain. In days, eight decades are quietly
erased, breathless voices grieving for those days, when
your loved ones could see you off from the runways.

When my Ba and Bapuji moved to the UK in the seventies, they never suspected that their grandchildren would not be fluent in their mother tongue – that instead, we’d hold clunky, grammar-backward sentences like marbles in our mouths. Words are the smallest unit of discourse and imagination, and without a breadth or precision of vocabulary, we have been left with a tepid understanding of one another. Across the South Asian diaspora, I find our intergenerational relationships malnourished in this absence of language. Although we cannot name the loss, we do our best to fill it with rituals of cut fruit, oily earth-fragrant head massages, summer riches of puri and pulped saffron mangoes, and the enthralling melodies of qawwali and kirtan.

All this is to confess that, although as a child I was well-steeped in culture, I learned much of my history in translation. Bapuji was a mighty man, a freedom fighter in the Independence movement, and yet I frequented India most often through the white man’s gaze, watching Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Mahatma Gandhi, reading Kipling and Theroux, studying the British Raj from white-washed curricula and even experiencing my first backpacking trip through the country with two white male university friends.

“No welcome party at Heathrow, only long looks
at your tea-stained skin, arm hairs raised, nine yards
not enough to keep your body from shaking.”
~Rhiya Pau, Routes
#DesiReads @DesiBooks

Tweet

Bandhani

When I was small, I spoke two languages. At
school: proper English, pruned and prim, tip of
the tongue taps roof of the mouth,
delicate lips, like lace frilling rims of my white

cotton socks. At home, a heady brew:
Gujarati Hindi
Swahili swim in my mouth, tie-dye my
tongue
with words like bandhani. Now I am grown,

I have enough vocabulary to talk about eggs:
boiled scrambled fried.
And enough vocabulary to talk about mangos:
Alphonso Badami Kesar.

But tell me: how do you say mithai in English
without the letter ठ, without pushing your tongue off
the shores, without consonants hustling
in the orchestra bazaar of your mouth?

How do you say mithai in English
without tasting the orange of saffron thread,
without knowing the sweetness of fennel seed,
or the warmth locked in wombs of cardamom pods?

The tongues of my childhood are smudgy,
traceable,
untranslatable.

“At home, a heady brew:
Gujarati Hindi
Swahili swim in my mouth, tie-dye my
tongue
with words like bandhani.”
~Rhiya Pau, Routes
#DesiReads @DesiBooks

Tweet

Enough

My grandmother houses gods in her closet among
tower blocks of cereal boxes and canned chickpeas
so we may always know enough.

She stews landscapes with the windows closed, wills the
extractor fan to take her home. Generations drift,
climbing ladders that raise you as an only child.

Language limps ashamed in the mouth, we fill silence
with sakar and gleaming jewels of pomegranate. Love is
a miner’s purple hands for we have lost the words

for indigo and magenta – lust and rage are faded characters. At
the margins I find her, at the Post Office queuing for stamps,
returning lyrics to the radio,

songs of abundance heard on the static, some place even
she has forgotten. Lord, how do I cross this abyss?
We did not brave the seas, sever the limb of belonging for this.

To whom can I confess: I am grateful but this is not enough.
Bring me the raags. Bring me the mirrored, midnight ghoomar.
Bring me qawwali under the heat of the marigold sun.

Bapuji was born in Kenya but moved to India in the 1940s to become a freedom fighter in the Independence movement. He spent time living at Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, where he trained as a social worker and traveled across the country participating in protests and sit-ins which often turned violent – he was lathi-charged by British soldiers on multiple occasions and in one incident he was shot in the leg. In the 1970s, Bapuji moved our family to the UK, where he dedicated his remaining years to community service and in the 1990s was awarded Membership of the British Empire (MBE) by the Queen, an accolade of which he was exceptionally proud. His is just one story in a generation of British Asians who lived through British India, Independence, and Partition and still celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee.

Conversations with our elders suggest that they do not find these realities conflicting – they have compartmentalized fragments of their identities in order to survive. For me, writing ‘Routes’ has been a process of holding these fragments up to the light, laying them down on a page, and acknowledging the overlapping narratives and the silent spaces in between. It has been an exercise in gratitude, forgiveness, and exploration.

“To whom can I confess: I am grateful but this is not enough.
Bring me the raags. Bring me the mirrored, midnight ghoomar.
Bring me qawwali under the heat of the marigold sun.”
~Rhiya Pau, Routes
#DesiReads @DesiBooks

Tweet

On Shame:

You show me shame at the red sea, say God does not hear us
until the tides go out. For nine moons we are sacred

until you birth a daughter, then we are shame marked
with moons of kajol at our cheeks. At birth we learn

never to be a fool of beauty. From scripture we learn: pious
women are possessions to be won by valiant archers

or lost in the dice halls of Hastinapur. If even the King
of the Gods cannot comprehend consent, what hope is there

for the devils who disrobe us in the backseats of Delhi? It
seems kajol cannot save us from the evils of men

which are vast and indefensible so we learn it is best
to be modest, to be unremarkable, that silence

is safer and yet here we are, being silently groped on
the subway where slight of hand milks you

like a cow except unlike a cow, you are no longer
sacred. In Kurukshetra a woman’s rage is ending

a dynasty and this commute is slowing me down and
so I think I will try rage and a blood-red

pencil skirt and the monotony of urban backache: heels
make your legs look longer and long legs are a requirement

to board this ghastly shuttle to success and success it
seems, just might be the antidote. Except at home

I still shave the shame between my legs, still
metaphor, eat my shame at the sink, disfigured roti

of possibility. My parents almost called me Kavita,
what kind of poem could I have been?

“It is only by examining history that we can begin to answer: what is worth holding onto? What memories, what stories, what truths? When we piece these together, what is the narrative that we choose to tell?” ~Rhiya Pau, Routes #DesiReads @DesiBooks

Tweet

Our roots are both our foundations and our starting point for growth. Our routes are the journeys that follow: a set of converging, diverging, intersecting possibilities. I hope that readers use this book as a route – a starting point from which they are emboldened to express and interrogate their histories. It is only by examining history that we can begin to answer: what is worth holding onto? What memories, what stories, what truths? When we piece these together, what is the narrative that we choose to tell? To reclaim our narrative is to change the way we see ourselves, to assert our place in this society, to celebrate our victories and hold ourselves accountable to our failures, and to lay the groundwork for the roots of those still to come. To me, this is the work to be done by our community, and I hope this book can be one of many tools in this journey.

Routes chronicles the migratory histories of Rhiya Pau’s ancestors and community, simultaneously laying bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. #DesiReads @DesiBooks

Tweet

---

---

You’ve been listening to episode 88 of Desi Books—news and views about desi literature from the world over. I’m your host, Jenny Bhatt. Thank you for tuning in. Today, in the #DesiReads segment, we had Rhiya Pau reading from her poetry collection, Routes.

Episode 89 will be up shortly. Follow on Twitter @desibooks, Instagram @desi.books, Facebook @desibooksfb. Tag the accounts if you have requests or suggestions. Please go to the website, desibooks.co, if you’d like to sign up for the free, weekly newsletter. And please share this via social media to support the poet and help raise the tide of South Asian literature. Thank you.

Stay healthy, keep reading, and write well.