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1.Bombay

O city, city — city of spectacular
cripples. A legless trunk is swinging,

arms for crutches. The streets are nested
with big-eyed beautiful children.

They clutch and stretch like new-hatched beaks.
Vultures circle over the Parsee cemetery.

So many things to see — stupefied
by misery and humid heat.

Parents cut off limbs to give
their child a trade, and we are here to make

more cripples, or be made. The train's
squat-bog is showing my first scorpion.

2. Dehra Dun. Watch Your Saluting

Our CO’s handsome and a wonderful wit.
He makes us feel the army’s terrific sport.

Narayan Singh, a Garhwali,
is proud to be my bearer.

In khaki drill, with a forage cap,
he looks a soldier, which is high-caste.

Every evening a zinc bath of hot water
waits in my little room, by clean clothes.

I find I’m good at squash and relish
clean white shorts and my 1st XV school blazer.

War seems far away. I keep a map of Europe
and mark the progress of our troops advance.

One night, our CO falls asleep with a fag
and is nearly burned alive.

3. Poetry

Major Cooper’s dark, chimp-eyed, gung-ho,
bushy-moustached and a little callipygous —

with all the traces of appreciative
teachers and fond womenfolk.

When he realises I’ve an Auden in my kit-bag
He’s a trifle awed, even wary.

He writes a lot and has a poem that starts,
What glory is in sound of Kanchenjunga!

I don’t know what to say, because I like him
and he almost seems to hold me in esteem.
4. Learning Urdu

My munshi is a poet. Mousy,
plump, beaming, civilian, with a shiny-eyed

modest good opinion of himself.
I’m always floored by people who say they’re poets.

‘Being a poet’, I can see, is a state of mind.
I put it that the poet’s is a rare calling.

He tells me everyone in India’s a poet.
I sense a criticism of England,

but what does he mean? He must mean
a life lived in the light of samadhi?

Right or wrong, on the path it gives him
identity in a country’s crushing disasters.

Golgonooza, thought Blake, is built by every
poetic act. Nothing anonymous is overlooked.

Perhaps my little munshi will be glorying in those
gold and ruby streets and diamond houses.

5. Infantile Paralysis

I’m in the sick bay myself with dysentery
when Stringfellow’s brought to the next bed.

He’s studious-looking, a sixth-form swot,
with almost white hair and wire specs.

On the edge of frightened tears,
he tells me he can’t move his legs.

I’ve hardly spoken to him before, but I feel
guilty when, two days later, he’s dead.

6. McCulloch

I don’t know how he knew it was my birthday.
He bought me a box of cigars.

Not very good cigars: more like
brown paper, but it's the thought.

Dry, fibrous, brittle, a hot smoke,
they slightly burn my mouth.

Nevertheless they're a luxury,
redolent of affluence. I loll in my chair

and smoke one in front of him. I can see
from his face it’s a good performance.

I blow smoke rings. But the gift embarrasses me.
I find his friendship cloying and tend to avoid him.

When he was sick in hospital, I didn’t go.
Our platoon-commander told me how ill he was.

Now McCulloch’s dead of a bug, like Rupert Brooke,
and I, like a pie dog, have my tail between my legs.

7. Religion

Narayan Singh can infallibly tell
a converted sweeper from a real Sikh.

When we go on an exercise to the Jumna
he begs a canteen of the holy water.

We can see the sacred Himalayas, which even
Englishmen want to climb because they're there.

Mountains, however dumb, speak
spectacularly, of ice, of holy heights,

intoxicating air, and the force of
continental shifts that folded them.

I gave up God for war, but Nanda Devi
Doesn’t seem to have given up me.

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