Candle Wish

I want to fly
On a fair winged horse
To the depths of a blue world...

Where domiciles are eternal
On dark, dark nimbus clouds
From where they merge with
The earth, sinuous and electrified,
Drop after drop of love,
To die and live in death
The enigma of our Decembers.

I want to coup
On a fair winged horse
To the depths of a blue world...

Where intimacy is eternal
Inside puny musical conches
Carrying within them my world
Haunted, Complacent, Invincible,
With its many secret arras
Where my letters lie waiting
The throb and aura of your fire.

Love, In an Hour

Walk...walk walk and walk.....it is at sixteen that I discovered the pleasure of walks, the joy of rambling through nowheres and everywheres, in morning drizzles and evening breezes. And those talks, endless and so meaningful, talks about everything and anything, that dripped with hazy and squishy teenage philosophy. As we went along the road once, friends together, he asked me what was the most intense of all emotions, and I answered that it was love. But then time flew towards me with beastly wings and hijacked my life of sparkling tenderness, and time in this disguise that was strange to me, was so unbearable that the overarching emotion of my life for quite some time then altered into frustration. Rage, rage against the swarthy abyss into which I had stumbled,and rage against those people who relentlessly thrust me into it. I was suddenly hurled into dark, killing loneliness, and was only seldom allowed escapades into life.

Like it happened one evening, when I was part of a group that set out to visit an old age home, where I met so many people and so much agony that I stood paralyzed at how crudely hostile life could sometimes become. And then, as we tried to make their day a little better by simply talking, smiling and plucking guavas from their courtyard, I ended up talking to a grandfather who sat in one corner, with eyes that petrified me with its lack of emotion; there was no joy, no hope, not even pain. It was sheer surrender. But he talked to me, and only talked about his wife, who lived in the women's section, which was a home apart from their's. They lived in a single compound, in homes close by and yet so far from each other. The rules of the place did not allow the grandfathers and grandmothers to meet, and the limitations of the organization struck off the possibility of a grandmother and grandfather living together, even if they had been together for decades, even if it was together that they had once laughed and cried, and together that they had brought up the son who left them there.

But then there was God, and God willed that they meet. Every morning the grandfather would smile, talk, and probably there would be in his eyes twinkle, for he got to meet his love every morning for one hour, in the church. I closed my eyes and could see them, wrinkled and tired, snuggling together in the serenity of a church, not bothered about the God that stood before them, the less blessed grandfathers and grandmothers who sat beside them, or the world beyond that conveniently pretended not to see on their faces the seething desire to be there the way they are, for as long as the world remained. For once, I was happy there is God.

The Flower

The flower was a nymph-like beauty,

Red, Violent, full of love and lust.

It was born like an expectation,

Out of memory and conviction.

It had the memory of

A young man who came running,

Smelled, Kissed, then slowly

Walked back to the street.

It had the conviction that

A flower could metamorphose

Into a star, with the roots

Always wet, deep, knowing.

And so it lived and lived

Until it decided to die soft;

The petals simply fell out smiling

While petals were still revelling.


*this poem is dedicated to Aswathy and Chintan, who took great pains to explain to me why and how it is "tellingly erotic"

About Times....

The past-
Simply happened-
Ripples untangled, and refractions
Stroked my oozing dreams of skies
That changed colour, infrequently.

The present-
Came on eerie tip-toes-
Chants of doom on lips
That dripped with poisonous elixir,
Your love and mine, blackmagic.

The future-
Gliding grace and our vows-
And the camouflage of photographs
That shall endorse transformations,
But not its eclipsed dimensions.

*Butterfly Kiss...

As we went together, yet another time
On a butterfly bus, towards fire,
To visit the mirage of a dusty library
And the enigma of a temple beyond gods,
Beaming at our wings invisible, I
Turned towards you, to tell you nothing,
Because the voice around would'nt
Let you hear me, and the conversation
Somehow continued in a butterfly kiss...


*A butterfly kiss is when you flutter your eyelashes on the other person's cheek:)

Taare Zameen Par...

Most of the time, I am head over heels in love with life, all its charm and all its madness. But sometimes, Reality, is so gross that it hurls me off my comfort zone of love and safety, and then I am scared of it, when life around me repeatedly reminds me that it takes only a moment for a castle to shatter. But yesterday came a little boy, running trotting and dancing, and the tiny champ made me laugh with him and cry with him. But beyond the experience of having rambled through his world that is woven in all the colours of love, Ishaan is a reassurance. He is now a part of me because he seems to have overcome all his fears and diffidence only to tell me that the ultimate reality is not contained in all the fears that I have accumulated for myself, but in innocence of which there is never going to be a dearth. Ishaan's smile is the twinkle of the stars who have descended on earth to reaffirm our belief in magic and miracles, and we only need to share our handful of stars, with a smile, a touch, a hug, a whisper, a word, and silence.