The Forest

The Forest

I never told you what it means to be 

a child of this concrete bedlam 

waking up one day to the pitter patter of a rain

socks wet still , Adagio on the radio

and Suma on the telephone anxious with the

olfactory surety of the rain smelling like chemicals 

half asleep, half awake I shiver without a fever

dreaming of a rage buried in the body

everything is a hollow performance 

from sex to sympathy

it’s not you they say, the world feels this way

of course there’s a loud throbbing in the head

saying Walden, Walden , take me to Walden

as the creepers and climbers 

reclaim the sky scrapers

high graphics, 1080p 

the forest here ( what’s left of it) doesn’t weep or whine

it sings off tune- like a bitter soprano 
stunted, overwhelmed, shades of a boiling spectrum

this world will surely end in fire

and they are playing Nocturnes, in the morning ?
stupid I thought, but sunlight never reaches the abyss.

arborescent

at the end of his life

my father became an arborescent
sapiens ;

like growths that grow on old things-

he grew a little, defying gravity and

other winds

memory takes me to a Tripuri Temple-

( a century old turtle, his reptilian eyes

and his mossy shell the evidence of 

a time gone by-

I fed him with my own hand, still

afraid at the lack of his 

human intelligence )

or to a time when Sinbad’s whale

( grew an island on his back in

that Arabian story- 

who still hibernates in a shallow sea

somewhere in that draped imagination ) 

everyone who is wise must be like a tree,
Aunt Yashodhara who has an ancient history
of loving otherworldly men often said so

( and calm is their presence -

 their actions like branches

shooting for the abiding skies above
holding everything, from paper kites to songbirds

and yellow leaves of Autumn)

do you remember the beginning of 

the Cambrian 

when life must have exploded within 

the early oceanic amphitheatres-

such grand experiments beneath 

the leagues of unforgiving oceans,

and in that darkness

away from the faint sun 

still lived things- albeit locked in the
machinations of this life 

Like my father at old age. 

Recalcitrant Mornings

"Recalcitrant Mornings."

Food in the jar, meatloafs with rigor mortis-
assurances that I never went hungry.
By the stove, two plates hug - cooked delicacies -i woke up to an empty bed, no warm bodies-
the reveries were last night, find me in
her father's place- far away into the muffled west;
Uncooperative dogmas, she consumes me.

Long ago, the dreams were bitter and mornings
were for racounter business- alpha, omega,
and a spoonful of helical afterthought:
Who would have thought I could care less?

Prayers

How lovely it is to be in my little provincial town
No worries, rigmaroles, no politburo meetings

To seek the autumn sun, slowly fading into winter
To smell the fallen flowers in their radiant miasma

How often do I seek words in places like this-
Ghazal words, a failed life behind, Ghazal dreams
In Ajmer the blue train enters the station-
Two days in the sleeper class, no sleep-
I dream of you.

You are still beautiful; old age didn’t cripple you
Like Durga itself, you stay a while, you fake a smile

In this abandoned museum of dreams and bamboo;
The caregivers are lifers, they don’t speak my language-

I wake up in an empty town ravaged by the plague.

How lovely it is to die where you were twice born. 

Space is a cold place.

In a dishevelled room somewhere the serpent king bemoans the silence of the warm afternoon. 

The crows are angry at the falcon who never leaves leftovers of their hunt, they chase her, all of them, only to fly so high in the stratosphere that their wings freeze and they fall like bombs in an air raid. 

One day he will understand what these silent afternoons meant, now he is only  too young, mindful in the melancholy that expectations bring. He pulls up his buttons and turns a pillow, shuts out that daylight, turns his head over and remembers that he must wait till the night comes on. 

Space is a cold place full of possibilities. So am I.

Nocturnes

I

If you have ever been on an island

that had a volcano, spewing up 

noxious gases, I am sure you would

know what it means to grow up in

my kind of a family, except its not true.

I was born in Old Atlantis, or that's what I was told,

before it went down to the sea. Whose blood did they

spill? All the lonely animals in the abattoir-

whose birth and death were forecasted,

whose existence was a daily act of violence-

in whose name we drifted melancholy prayers.

To the wind and to the sea we are all equal.

II

Where I grew up, there were mayflowers, 

and meandering rivers.  

I sometimes wonder if you and I would make an island,

one where we would raise grey wolves and teach them

to eat the living beasts out of people; where a volcano

would lie dormant and Prometheus would hide his fire; 

we would sleep beneath  starry skies, and the tropical 

palms will reflect moonlight far into the

 window of an apollo astronaut-

we would know that this life that we share is 

not an ounce of rice, bread and wine-

but all the things that we are too little to comprehend. 

There would be no war here, no justice, 

no heroes or villains, we would just be, won't we? 

Two mandolin bound

dreamers painting hieroglyphics 

for the new world. 

The Distance between Delhi and Kolkata

The distance between Delhi and Kolkata, Falguni writes, is not elastic and you can feel the utter helplessness and homesickness around this time, that always creeps up and grabs the Bengalis hard. CR park cannot fulfill the aspirations of an entire race seeking salvation in duplicity of it's favorite festival. Although, it's a two hour aeroplane journey or an 18 hour long train journey, the Bongs still whine a lot, it's something about their weather. Parminder who cycled all the way from Multan to Delhi did witness radical changes every 5 hours, he wonders if he would see the same from Bengal to Delhi- he would know when the humid marshlands will give up to the ancient plains of Magadha, to the entire old world where people have grown like vermin, because life was too easy- because "ish Desh mein Ganga behti Hain". 

The distance between two cities is never much, by air, by rail, and yet these people are complaining, says Falguni, who took the Sher Shah route herself; and then her life changed. Like Parminder when she decided to cycle all the way from Kolkata to Delhi, she realized how far she was away from home. If one day, all the planes were grounded and all the railway lines were usurped, she would be locked in a strange distant land far, far away from home, and that thought was reason enough to feel the way thousands around her felt- helpless and homeless, a broken being yearning to return to places that were inside them when they were young, places that were them long before they became themselves- places with lush green fields, and rivers and fishes, where you could sweat and swim, where there are forgiving thunderstorms, the blackness of the sky and around this time the greatest festival of all - you know.