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A Walk with Ganesh
Obediently, I
begin, but it is a curious
way to experiment
with no design
and venture out
in thought alone.
It is my father
who has traveled to where elephants
wander, to where
they’re worked and tended.
It is my brother
who has breathed the red
dust of
Bangalore, who was told
by a Bombay cab
driver,
“Ganesh was just
in my car!”
At home I know
just what I read—
that he broke off
a bit of his tusk
to take
dictation, to copy
down at divine
speed
the inspired,
sculpted rush
of Ved Vyasa’s
verse
creating the
Mahabharata.
Oh, to compose as swiftly
as a god can write!
Oh, to out sing one’s breath!
Obediently, I
begin a journey
measured in mouse
steps—
a journey
inside—to that seam
between animal
and god, those stitches
holding our
incongruousness together.
A seam like the
one his mother’s
husband made with
a sword:
Shiva, angered,
striking
off the head of
this unknown lad
who blocked the
door to the bath,
the boy Pavarti
made
from the sluff of
her body herself
to guard her
door, her honor.
Remorseful, Shiva
sent
his retainers to
find another.
They found an
elephant by a stream,
sacrificed the
young bull—
it’s blood flowed
down to the water,
dyeing the fair
stream—
and they carried
back its proud
head of tusks and
trunk,
which Shiva
joined to the lifeless
body of the boy,
reviving
him, making him
god of beginnings,
Ganesh, remover
of obstacles,
Ganesh of a
mother’s love.
How swiftly we pull our swords;
how often cry out in sorrow.
Obediently, I
follow Ganesh
into my head, my
memory, my past.
He knows where he
is leading, with no hesitation
takes me back to
the bare
hills of Southern
California:
their sage and
tumbleweeds,
tan grass alive
with beetles,
horned lizards,
red diamondbacks.
Vultures soaring
and seeking
over the arroyos;
the chaparral baked
in the sun’s blue
kiln;
the wind’s warm
fragrance
dryly whispering,
“Thirst.”
“Why this place?”
I ask.
“Isn’t this your
imagined golden land?
What better place
to see the story you are to sing?”
To sing?
Oh that this god would grant sweet lyrics.
On a path of
sandy loam,
quartz, fool’s
gold,
we crest a hill
of oaks
and see below us
Combat Town.
The idylls
forming in my head
of surf and sand
and love
disappear with
the smell of spent
shells and
smokeless powder.
This is the place
we played as boys,
among the
cartridges, K-ration
tins, ammo boxes,
scarred earth and
walls,
mimicking our
fathers’ skills
in killing the
enemy and saving
their own. This
is where we acted the lucky
hero whose M-16
clip never
empties, who captures
the flag and
comes back
home unscathed,
victorious.
This was Combat
Town circa
1963
arranged as a
Vietnamese hamlet
with sweeping
roof lines,
open air market,
even a pagoda,
which is where Ganesh heads,
a pagoda without
sutras, built
not to house a
holy scripture
but for training
in combat tactics,
hollow like all
the buildings in this town.
On the ground
floor Ganesh
sits his great
body
into position,
folded supplely
for meditation,
his elephant head
echoed in the
carvings on the pillars
of animals of
power—elephants
and
tigers—verisimilitudes
the Architect had
insisted on.
What powerful tremors,
what earthshaking silence
flows from the meditation of an
enlightened one.
I look out the
empty windows
of the
bullet-pocked pagoda
and see Combat
Town
fill with young
recruits
fumbling with
their rifles, confused
on how to move,
how to follow orders
that their drill
instructors shout,
blushing when the
war game
officer marks
their helmet:
“You’re wounded.
You’re dead. You’re hopeless.”
And time
accelerates around Ganesh:
the recruits run
through their drills,
day upon day
losing
their
awkwardness, reflectiveness, weakness,
becoming
stronger, fiercer, obedient,
ready to aim and
fire.
The anger,
fatigue, and repetition
carve a soldier’s
instincts
into their
psyche, setting the triggers
that when needed
will help them kill
and survive, save
their buddy,
bring their unit
honor.
Then the rounds’
sound changes
to live firing.
It’s Vietnam
before me and
those same recruits are blooded warriors
now moving
through a hamlet safely
separated, poking
the dead,
silencing any hut
that returns
fire, questioning
the headman
in pidgin about
when the V.C.
came and where
they ran to, believing
only half of what
he says or what they see.
And when their
patrol moves on, the local
Viet Cong
lieutenant
climbs out of a
tunnel
below the
headman’s home
with the men and
women from his squad
he’s saved and
they slip away.
The Marine patrol
comes
back through the
hamlet in another week.
The corporal on
point spots
the mine, signals
a halt.
The men crouch
anxiously.
With no explosion
to begin their ambush
the hidden Viet
Cong
start firing
separately,
yet are killed quickly by multiple
streams of
automatic fire.
One of their
rounds, though, tears
off the
corporal’s jaw—a gaping
wound where his
mouth had been.
The sergeant
pulls him to cover
by his ankle, his
broken face
dragged oozing
over the dirt.
His buddy crawls
to him and stabs
syringes of
morphine into his leg,
wraps his head
with gauze.
When they finally
secure the hamlet
they force the
villagers out of their homes
and huts and
fields, push
them out on the
road carrying chickens
and children,
leading their buffalo,
warning them not
to turn back—
“Go! Go! Don’t
look!”—
as a Thunderchief
delivers
the napalm strike
exploding
as a white
fireball
burning
everything they’ve known.
“It is a great sin,” Ganesh says,
“to ever imagine destruction as a
cleansing.”
Through the acrid
smoke I watch
the Architect
directing changes,
reshaping Combat
Town
by blueprint,
desperate
for a stratagem
that will win the war:
strategic
hamlets, truces,
carpet bombing,
mining
Haiphong Harbor,
interdiction,
Vietnamization,
invading Cambodia.
But every
advantage leads to losses
and the
helicopter evacuation of Saigon.
Combat Town
quiets down
for a season.
But then new blueprints
are drawn and the
pagoda we are in becomes
a Central
American church
and wars later is
rebuilt to be a mosque.
And the weapons
the recruits learn
become smarter
and more deadly, as do they.
And when Ganesh
rises from his meditation,
and I am ready to
leave this dream,
he chides me and
leaves me there to stay,
saying, as he
rides his mice away,
“This is your story, no?
America’s story.
A story of continuing war.”
— Kent Chadwick |
