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.

Notes from the Tide Country

NOTES FROM THE 

Tide Country

There’s a mangrove tree in my backyard
and like it’s roots, I too spasm out of
this muddy earth- this is my country
my own silted land where your words
will remain eternal (and your love too ),

as the rivers shift, and the seas rise- 

you will still find me here manning that little tree, 

hunched beneath the shades of 

a mud-thatched universe.

I wonder what Gopal was wearing that
day, when he went inside the forest,
names of gods in his lips, skies asunder,
was there a storm in the high seas?
That night Seuli went mad in grief,
the wind changed directions and
everyone on this bank shuddered 

hearing the howl of the beastly gods. 

Early morning next day, prayers were sung

for the departed; I wonder what Gopal
was wearing the day he got lost inside
the forest, only to return three days later,
bare-clothed, emaciated- a five and a half feet
mud figure- the gods had spared him;
they took Seuli to Calcutta and admitted
her in an institution for the broken-hearted;

in the tide country, lovers often get trapped 

inside their own grief vortex- never to move on,
intertwined lives, all for love.

All for love.

For love, Gopal doesn’t speak to me,
it’s his son who does the talking,
‘He doesn’t speak since that day’
a speck of black cloud hangs above our boat,
in some distant imagined darkness, a tiger
swims from one island to another-
in search of a mate- love-struck, lonely,
ravenous with its animal desire
yet stunning in its animal grace
the story of  all the lovers in the world
- rolled into one gentle beast. 

Isn’t it so?

There’s a mangrove tree in my backyard, and

years ago, when the tide had threatened my

home, my life, my love, something came over
me, a dream or  a god you may say, and
he asked me to worship the tree,
‘ Do you see that patch of tree there over the bank?’
I planted them all and the gods smiled at me. 

You lie there in the bow of your boat, painting the
moon. The silence is comforting, far away from the
city and its hulabula, your pulse slows down,

 the GPS lets you know your bearings,
most of the time. When the world was
water many lives ago, you were home at sea. 
You check your phone  sometimes with a smile;
 and there’s a faint signal and sometimes you tell your
stories into the night and the forests witness it all;
the tides let you know that there’s beauty in this monotony,
and in reassurances and simple things;

armed with all this knowledge you store
them for the years ahead; your eyes glitter with
all the dreams you have dreamt everyday,
the sea breeze salts your skin, and you ask
yourself many things- 

who put the moon inside your head? 

When the world was water,
you were home at sea.

And when you will make your
own world- with  a recipe of swollen
rivers, tides, lovers, beasts, gods, and
all the beautiful things you have ever
known- I wonder who you
would turn to.

Indian Circus and The Government

Many years ago, George Orwell wrote,
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
Most government in power tries to alter history. But no one surpasses the yen and enthusiasm of the present government. In Amartya Sen's book, Argumentative Indian, I had come across an essay where he points out how some artefacts were placed in certain places to Hindu-ize ancient Indian historical places (this was done during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's term and it had later been disproved). Also, this was before the use of rampant social media when the checks and balances were manageable. This morning I was reading about the history of the Indian Circus, and I came across the names of various fledgling circus back during the colonial days- most rising out of Kerala (if I were a Hindutva historian I would lose my shit) which was the cradle of Indian Circus. Altering names and history is something that you can trust your governments with impunity.Here are some of the names, that need immediate government intervention, as attempted by a right winger friend of mine:

Whiteway Circus ~ fair and lovely circus

The Great Lion Circus ~ the gau rakshak circus

The Fairy Circus ~ apsara cricus

The Oriental Circus ~ Bharat Mata ki Jai circus

Ramayana Circus ~ how dare someone use Ramayana and Circus in the same hemisphere; omitted!