Dogged followers
The cracked smiling rock is opposite .A man sits in there on a plastic chair ,in a morning silhouette. Stillness rules except to listen intently to a hollow dog’s bark. I am on foundation 2.
The sun is bright in the trees. A dove is cooing relentlessly . This is the nesting season.
Two puppies were trying to make friends with me. One of them rose on its hind legs to sniff its wet nose on my elbow. I chee-chheed it. Otherwise it would follow me all the way to my apartment till I quickly get into the lift leaving it behind. That is the only way of shedding a dogged follower.
In the temple
The pipal gently waves its shadows. The priest gives Gods water in your cupped palm and touches your head with His feet.
Women are getting ready for practice lessons for the harvest dance. They will dance in circles beating each others sticks with rhythm.
Birthday
A little girl prances around while others play games and turn jokers .They gawk, they chat old times and watch kids blow balloons. They are waiting for dinner . Their own balloons were getting bigger .
Little Adhya had turned one year of age.
The morning after:
The morning is grey. Early , I could only think of star pointings on a prior night .Their milk spilled on skyways. Yesterday it was a banyan that made us less sad. That was morning.
In the evening we heard somebody in a far off town had crossed the road. He was crossing the river of death . In the night it was a joyous celebration of birth.
The dove in my balcony
The dove makes an occasional visitation in the balcony. It’s coos were like the days of childhood, long and thoughtful. If only it stays away from the electric fan whirring in my balcony.
The dove makes an unsuccessful attempt at nest making under my air conditioning unit.
Pigeons in the skylight
A pair of pigeons have made a home in my skylight . They were threatening to enter the kitchen but the new exhaust fan effectively prevented them.
Their romance took place over an entire week but now is their nest making. They are blocking a diagonal shaft of sunlight with the little worms of dust crawling in it .
Twigs and home
The male one seems to be bringing twigs to the skylight of the God room. For nest building. The female is morning sick. We are worried the twigs will topple over and fall on our gods.
But we will miss the golden shaft from a winter sun. And the dust swirling in it as our maid sweeps the dining hall.
We are worried for our gods who will be covered in sticks .We have decided to close the hole partly.
The banyan makes us less sad
The banyan is still and its leaf falls make soft landings on the road. In the distance dogs are barking their joint sadness .
A helicopter is coming in a crescendo of sound . It will soon disappear in the sky.
I hear a titi bird in the sky tweeting its sadness.
The banyan makes us less sad.
Titi bird
The bird would cry ” titi” in the very sky sending waves of fear down our childish bodies. Titi meant ‘take away ‘ .Take away was bird call to take away life.
It would mean our life or some one close to us. Our young cousin had died recently after this very bird’s call.
Dust in the end line
Winter breeze is pleasant ,the sun still behind clouds. A blue shack in the ground comes to view . A closer view may yield a rich picture celebrating mono -colour.
Early on ,a bored bard ,bare-headed and bearded , came to poetry from the vintage pages of memory . That time of year. Thou mayst in me behold…. Dust would come later in the endline.
We always eat dust in the endline.
Dreaming winter
Dylan’s dream of winter had been snowed under for seventy long years. Since then a half a moon was found looking in windows of poets in their winters.
On the green bench of the park we are dreaming of the snow hills of March 2016 . By then winter will have been snowed under. There will be apples in bloom and pines in needles. Perhaps there will be poplars waving to a passing breeze.
There will be apple cheeked girls and silky horses in meadows. There will be heavily furred dog coats. Russet coloured rusts on old bridges.
Here old men in their winters are agitated over a boy not hanging. He is not hanging because while he had brutalised and raped, he was still under 18.
Thoughts from the green bench and before
The patch before the green bench is less wet. I will not dig my feet deep in it. The neighbour bench is empty.
Poem was about spaces between words, how they build our nothings in a zero hood of bodies, a pie approximate in truth. How the pie is not truth but is approximate Beauty which is not the same thing as Truth. A pie chart for showing zero hood against infinity.
You talked of hooded hordes swarming a waste land. We thought about the hooded man present in Ravi Verma painting of a crow stealing a jewel of the bathing princess. Was he God? Or the death God who is our shadow?
What is the tiger doing with us in our boat? If truth is divided by zero, does it tend to infinity?
(recalling the beautiful movie “Life of a Pie”)
Death is our friend shadow
Before the father passed he would tell son not leave the pigtailed boy that always went with him wherever. That was a friendly shadow. He would go only where you went and when.
Wherever he went he chanted verses about impermanence of body. When he chanted his pigtail quivered. The friend shadow’s too.
Benched
Some times we are just “benched” as in software firms ,in between orders. A green bench is for a review and the language of our thought. We are awaiting chair.
Before the green bench is slush made by a long snake of a garden hose. I dig my footprints in it.
In the midnight it was a neighbour’s invisible house crying to be recognised for its existence. Its existence is empty air and shadows of its inmates’ shouts across the vastness of time.
Six months later it would be house again ,its history of men and their empty air restored. During the interim it will be a ghost standing on a skylike emptiness.
The house is just benched.
Snakes and carrots
New experience standing in the market with the vendors shouts over your head along with evening mosquitoes .
The carrots lie listless in the jute bag. There are no takers. There are snake gourds in the neighbour jute bags . Some of them have their necks broken to keep them contained. For no fault of them. Where they were on the farm they were hanging free ,waving to a passing breeze.
Vegetable shouts
New experience standing in the market with the vendors shouts over your head along with evening mosquitoes .
The carrots lie listless in the jute bag. There are no takers. There are snake gourds in the neighbor jute bags . Some of them have their necks broken to keep them contained. For no fault of them. Where they were on the farm they were hanging free ,waving to a passing breeze.
Traffic farts
Night was when I came upon city’s traffic . The whole of traffic thought the other was traffic. Nobody knows where the farts originated,where they turned aggregates. Everybody would curse others in the aggregate. Traffic is aggregate you can curse under your breath. Traffic curses you from its breath. All curses are in the aggregate but they stink like traffic farts.
Traffic takes your breath away. Traffic is dead sea where everything floats and nothing sinks. Traffic is a sea of steel and paint, a dragon with a butt end of smoke. Traffic does not snort dragon fires from the front but farts dark smoke into your face.
Eloquence
The sun has yet to ripen in the tree’s hair. All is quiet except for the crunch of a walkers feet in the sand. The saree rag now hardly stirs, its baby memories now elsewhere, with its mother carrying bricks on her head probably on another construction site .
A bone dry puppy is scrounging around for food. Returning ,there was entire dog family of mother with four puppies following .The canines are an extension of the night.
The morning was about a grandiloquence, thawing a numb winter. The words were a lot of sound and their fury sounded our nights. You opened window to a dog’s bark, a lower language at midnight curve. Window is half way to the horizon.
The words ring in the hollow of our bones while winter is raging in them. Soon they will be dumb by a night.
The banyan leaf
A gentle winter breeze is closing and our shadows are long and warm by a new sun. The sun is soft on the leaves.
Time’s winged chariot is hurrying near and the coy mistress is still looking for rubies by the Indian Ganges. God knows when she will be less coy, as Andrew marvels.
The banyan leaf fall drags on the road like a winged chariot behind us. Child Vishnu is fast asleep on banyan leaf,cradled by the wind.
The banyan makes us feel less sad.
The titi bird
The sadness of titi bird is felt less when we look through the banyan leaf spaces ,where child Vishnu is sleeping ,cradled by a wind.
The banyan always makes us feel less sad.
Shanta, my cousin
My vivid memory of Shanta was a twelve year old giggling girl whose family used to visit us in Berhampur every summer. As a strapping seventeen years old pimply boy, I had this vague dream to give her a bicycle ride on my back seat but taking our relative sizes in account I could not figure out how.
After a long hiatus I would meet her in her Delhi home in 2005 or so ,with potential to turn a hoary grandma if only she could find a suitable boy for her lookalike daughter. She would,later find a handsome geek boy. With ghee shakkar in her mouth , she is now telling grandma stories with happy endings.
White shroud
Waiting for my turn in the barbers shop I sit here with a heap of newspapers .Film songs on the wall danced on funny torsos. A guy is having his head shorn and a chin with a brushwood of two days. Chin makes small talk. I have to wait for it to vacate the chair.
The barber will cover me in his white shroud. He will make me fidget like a corpse. His indecent stomach will rub my fidgeting insides. My hair is summer bush to fall off in silver clusters on the white cloth.
The barber’s fingers are dancing on the brushwood head. The head closes its eyes in pleasure. Its hair is strewn all over the marble floor like knots of darkness.
A poem a night
The weather is mild winter on its way to meet summer. Two girls are doing their clockwise rounds ,their pigtails dingdong on blouse backs. Old film songs are waking pant pockets.
This morning we read Ashbery. From all corners come distinctive offerings. From old men’s chairs, going and gone. From the mountains sitting on horizons. From the corners of balconies with their clothes dripping.
There are corners to our throats. Their poems go on . A daily poem from a night’s stack. Till none is left in the pile.
The accident of birth
A cloudy morning. A bald man was heard chanting mantras under his cold breath in the neighbour bench. I see he has now finished his prayers and left.
Morning was about a fatal accident. Like the ORR accidents where a drunk steel meets a sleeping road median. A scholar boy who took his life by an electric fan called his birth a fatal accident. He only wanted to see his stars from the Center of Sagan’s tiny dot. The stars are themselves accidents, from being bits of hot air .
His death was an accident resulting from his birth. Birth is accident from lonely nights. A fatal accident because death is its direct outcome. Lonely nights are accidents by man and woman, who themselves are born accidents .Like drunk steel and sleeping road median.
Everything is so random. Why blame a midwife who is just a proximate cause.
*Outer Ring Road in Hyderabad
Grass poems
This morning we chanced upon Frost’s grass poem. It was about his mowing. The poet is a grass cutter . There were poems of all kinds. There were grass poems.
We saw our own grass in the Himalayan slopes where woman’s grass rose so high it seemed like hill grass. Woman is green in memory like the grass on her head.
In the snow hills was white frost. In the city square there were people in long overcoats and they moved an invisible fog. They were shadows in the long sun.
* Apples are grass
This time when went to the snow hills the women had grass on their backs. The grass reached up to the sky, all the way from their boots. We were promised we would see Apple women if we came in October.
Now the apple trees are dancing stubs. They will sprout leaves and start flowering by June and there will be fruit on them by November. The women’s backs will ache under ripe red apples. Their cheeks will glow like fresh red apples. Their husbands will smell their Apple smell ,instead of grass.
* Ah ,No
On the green bench someone is already sitting .Now I am on another under the green neem tree. Kids are on their green swings discussing school politics. A man in green lungi is dancing his limbs to perfection.
Morning we thought of a stern Thomas whose Ah ,No comes every sixth line . Wind and rain come too quickly and too often.
Like hei ho in Kurt’s slipstick.
A ballad has to have a refrain and in any case happiness is episodic in character in a general drama of pain. That was what the Mayor said in his novel.
Ah, no.
* Thomas who?
Thomas Hardy , the die-hard pessimist. Not a doubting thomas but a true blooded Chritistian . A die-Hardy pessimist to whom a happiness is an episode in the general drama of pain.
The Morning is Just a Dream 