The Journey Toward

The city is a grandmother: love, impropriety and aromas,

Stars dripping from the fringes of insomniac nights,

And the vertigo of unfurling stories,

that invariably lead towards her deepest chambers

where the dead awaits,

like the drifting shadows of poetry

Embalmed in the impotence of chartered silence

that is ritually sliced, in a giggle,

a smooch, and shared chocolate bars.

Rows of children in uniforms, pencils and notebooks,

Uncomprehending gazes at exquisite death and exotic verse,

The impatience of life flickering in their eyes.

The occasional benevolence of wintered sign boards

that guard six foot indulgence and cold marbled love

from being spurned into a virtual space-

that ruthlessly tags, and consequently forgets,

The poet, The murderer, The king, The victim,

And the tombs that own them.

Someday, before my undocumented self flutters,

A whiff in the air and a wafer of memory.

There is the dream of a journey,

Towards a lost city,

In the most intimate stories of which

Sleeps, my beloved poet in his tomb.

The Doll

It was as if the house was drenched in fumes. Fumes surely don’t drench, but this one had a fluid quality to it. The fumes arose from the love and the music that shrouded it from the entire world. There was so much out there, hatred, jealousy, rivalry. But none of it would enter the home, for the perfumes that pervaded it would purge it of anything that did not have a splash of love and music in it. And so they lived, the father, the mother and the daughter, safely tucked in, in the flower carpet they had weaved over themselves, through the translucence of which they saw the sky and the earth. Whatever glimpses of the sky and the earth they had were beautiful. They loved the colours, they savoured the smells, and they often smiled at each other. The father was happy, and secretly proud of this tiny handful of heaven that he had picked from the vast shores of life, braving the darkness that threatened and frightened him.

Among the little pearly treasures that flowed in one after the other, there were also little dolls, for it added to the daughter’s happiness. She loved them for they were to her the door of childhood that was eternally open. She only had to drift through its threshold to be whatever she wanted; the princess, the mother, the singer, the savior. The ecstasy of these transfigurations so enchanted her that she simply could not contain the waves of it within her self any more. She wanted to turn them all into glittering stars she could sprinkle over the entire universe. She wrote poems. With every word that bloomed from the unfamiliar chambers of her self she saw herself owning a little more of the universe. With every vision she created she could shower fragments of her self over a little more of bonhomie space and time. Thus she went, taking one tiny step after another, further and further into the world, and further and further away from her home that was drenched in love and music. Life now lay transparently before her. She reveled in the rain that washed her through and through, the sunshine that poured over her. She reveled in the red drops that dripped on from her nakedness into the wet black earth. She laughed, she cried, the precious handful of moments she had never permitted her to linger over a reason. She fell in love with silence. She was encompassed in the conch of childhood, and the inside of it was to her the essence of relentless freedom.

But eternities never last for more than a flutter of the eye. Even as she floated through the labyrinth of moonbeams that embraced her, she could not for ever thrust the memory of her father and mother into compartments of forgetfulness. They waited there, at the beginning of it all, with no place to go, now that the daughter’s estrangement had permanently shoveled them away from their home that was filled with love and music. They waited and waited, and when she could not pretend incomprehension anymore, she spent the night sleepless. She had walked in without a moment of hesitation, and now she could not discern the way out of the entanglement that was life, or was it poetry? She could not be sure. And then suddenly a very late revelation, a zephyr of calm, caressed her as she blinked at the light that she finally succeeded in discovering at the other distant end.

She sat there on the huge bed, unmoving, unthinking, for some time. Then slowly, carefully, she plucked out her heart, numb to the pain. She held it close to herself as if it were a baby. When centuries had whirled through her and she was ultimately convinced that she had existed in them all, she realized that it was almost dawn and gently set to work. She carved the heart that she held in her shivering arms into a doll, and she was smiling. The smile grew more and more iridescent with every chink that was sliced out from the throbbing red. She had carved out a beautiful doll! She got out of the bed, unlocked the door to her room, and went into the visitor’s hall. She opened the shelf, shifted the violet furred teddy bear to another corner of it, and placed her heart there instead. She lay awake for the rest of the night, and not long after the sun had risen she heard her mother call out to her father, “Look at this new doll in the shelf. Isn’t it beautiful? Wonder where she got it from though.” And they lived happily ever after.

The Fairytale

Life, with all its hues,
endowed me with all its secrets.
Years took me through forests,
sometimes green and sometimes black.
And after a decade of slumber, or reticence,
I found myself a princess in a little glass palace.
Guarded by a guild, the guile people.

Someone, I noticed, was hesitating at my threshold;
A prince with a rose. Somebody whispered that he was God.
I knew how to trust, consequently,
he was invited, surprisingly he came.
A patron conjured, 'lullaby' I mistook.
He was thrown out while I slept.
On waking I enquired, admonition followed.

Yielding, unyielding, I pushed time into a dungeon
of suppressed euphoria I shared, with Solitude,
who was also being hunted, along with me.
Together we translated our nights
into astral fragments of schizophrenic agony
that swished across the seas only to wither away,
When you claimed the flicker by my name, as you did
then own every fleeting anomaly, of time and darkness.

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.

I come from a home
That does not believe in remembrances,
And you,
From one that breathes reminiscences.

You barged into my life at a time
When I had started to think on paper;
Sprouted in me, like a moonlit dream
Of love on Manasarovar...
Sprinkling into me epiphanies of transcendence.

You took me by hand into your past,
In to a fairytale that tempted me to forget mine,
As they were attempting to transfigure my life
Into a confused whirlpool of sleazy death;
When pedagogies were urging not to speak
Unless it was a revelation,
Or blasphemy;
When I feared my sight drifting away
As voices spoke of seas as symbols,
Struggling among worlds of blindness and vision,
So that one would not clash with the other.

You arrived,
To be the insane luxury of my reason.
Thankyou, for not taking away my childhood,
And those short vacations I took into silence.