The Colony

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What looked like a scalable low mountain, she said, perfect for
goring with a flag or surveying the native infantry’s encampments,
proved to be an anthill, of an as-yet-undocumented species, not the
black ant, not the red ant, but the brown Deccan ant, impossibly
prolific and dangerous to disturb: The first explorer to set foot
on that mountain found his body changing color in agony as the
mountain encroached along his body, grains of dirt sprouting legs
and stingers and charging over his knees, his crotch, his navel, his
neck, until he turned to his coolies and cried Bachao, bachao, which
means Save me, save me, this saving being what the missionaries
who arrived with him had promised to do to the coolies: the same
coolies who, born the color of those ants, turned away and began
dividing the sahib’s supplies and equipment among themselves,
fairly and quietly, making sure to toss an offering of toffee to the
ants, who melted it into their busy mass, where the sahib’s torso
and pith helmet retained only approximate contours, like some
hominid fossil from before recorded history, trampled faceless by
generations of rain

Amit Majmudar

Majmudar is the author of the poetry collections What He Did in Solitary (2020); Dothead (2016); Heaven and Earth (2011), which poet A.E. Stallings chose for a Donald Justice Poetry Prize; and 0˚, 0˚ (2009), which was a finalist for a Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award. Majmudar has also published the novels Sitayana (2019), Partitions (2011), and The Abundance (2013). In 2018, he published Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary.

Majmudar’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, including Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–2012 (2013, edited by Robert Pinsky) and The Norton Introduction to Literature (2012, 11th edition, edited by Kelly J. Mays). He has also contributed essays to the Kenyon Review blog, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books.

He lives in Dublin, Ohio, where he served as Ohio’s first poet laureate. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist.

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