1.

The epic begins in small proportions but quickly escalates. All this is written with witness--time pretends to reside over this, or our narrator, Vyasa, says he does. Nearing the end of the world, we are looking at an upcoming conflagration that may arrive as a computer virus. Please excuse my gratuitous anachronism. As in Hinduism, when the eight planets align, the apocalypse is said to arrive but doesn't. Someone purposefully avoids me because of the intelligent company I keep, or Barbarella is the greatest movie ever made. The leading antagonist in the story is Duryodhana, who is envious of Krishna's kinship to his cousins. Most of us can sympathize with blood relations. My brother, Sami, is looking for a high-paying job in the computer industry and my cousins are in medical school. Am I concerned that I will be rich? No. Someone's child, unborn, is already burping the alphabet. These are auspicious times--the Pandavas and the Kauravas and their epic pettiness will destroy our Bharat petticoats. All this is new to me and all this has occurred before in 88,000 lines of metered verse. Brahmin lineages continue as reminders of the reincarnative possibilities while saris are the Indian way of preserving a curvaceous figure. Our instinctual language, Sanskrit, though dead, will go on. We Indians are old souls. I am a journalist.


Summi Kaipa is the editor of Interlope, a journal of innovative Asian American poetics. Kaipa's critical and creative work has appeared in the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, Rain Taxi, In These Times, Fourteen Hills, Tinfish, and Kenning. She currently resides in San Francisco where she freelances.