Ahmedabad

They met over some hot,
acidic coffee and pungent
garlic bread.

Writers, poets and more poets,
eating, chatting,
reading and talking
texts.

A short story began
germinating
and will grow up
to be a novel
soon.

She spoke of relationships
and alienation,
that co-exist but last a lifetime.
He
spoke of gory impotence
that is part of a bureaucrat’s life
who lords over villages.

Then,
they who think too
of relationships
but
in a different
sort of way,
struck.

We saw it on TV.
And read it in the paper too.

A boy,
just seven,
his long story
cut short.
His skin cut through
with acid hurled
by the aliens,
fighting
scars
and the pungent
hospital smells –
the smell of dead flesh
that the living carry
and of living but
decaying layers
of those,
already dead.

July 28, 2008

TV

They put a few coats of golden paint
on the bigger clay statue
and made the smaller
metal statue look like such a dud.
That’s the power of makeup.
At least on TV.

Oct 21, 2008

Secret service archives?

I opened the page
to type a few words
and the computer said
it was a new document
that I must name
before I start writing.
I never thought I was
creating documents
that had to have names.
This is interesting
in a sinister sort of way.

October 21, 2008

The setting sun

Do twelve bizarre
thoughts
put together make a poem?
Not during normal working
hours.
No one writes during
normal working hours anyway.
That’s the time when we
gather poetry
like fairytale characters
collect
berries, flowers or mushrooms
in woven baskets
the sun setting unexpectedly –
the reversible twist in the tale --
their only big concern.

October 21, 2008

Compulsion

I am going to sit here
tonight,
all day tomorrow
and so on
searching for what I want to write
in what others have written.
Because, my pen has
run dry.

October 21, 2008

Fracture

It didn’t pain half as much
when the finger fractured
than it did when
when the ortho surgeon tried to fix it
by setting it right back
the way it was.

The child screamed, wailed
and clung to her mother
the mother shed tears silently
and held on to her husband’s sleeve.

The doctor was a nice man
but he was late already
for his lec-dem.
And, his car was
parked to the wrong side.

September 12, 2008

Another rum poem

Rumi, the great Sufi,
is in a way, three-fourths Rum
and a quarter I.

Yet, how blasphemous
would it be?
if I said
the flask of rum on my study table
doesn’t merely fulfill
the need for poetry or lovemaking
but fills in for dead parents and
friends long lost,
lost forever.

It fits in exactly
where the pursuit of happiness
and renunciation, failed.

An old wise man
whose presence
takes you on a high
can be your guru –
living, demanding, superior being.

But here, is this durban
who opens all doors
for a little bakshish,
takes you to gatherings
where everyone is just another you.

And the fleeting resonance in every
mirror
of this hall of mirrors
is your own.

Who needs gurus and godmen
Or gods
when you have schizophrenia,
a flask of rum
a table to rest these on.

A laugh marks the beginning to end
of sanity; insanity,
comes distilled,
trapped in a bottle
you can fill a few flasks with.

The only power that stands
in the way of my being a complete atheist.

August 12, 2008

Book of songs

I found a small book
at Fact ‘n’ Fiction
one day.

A book of songs.

It has songs of all kinds.
Songs that make you
laugh
but sad
at the same time.

There are songs
full of anxiety
and desire,
of freedom
and longing.

Some songs are like smells
sweet but strong.

Or like the breeze
that touches your eyes lashes gently
and blows just
before it pours madness from
Thick
grey clouds.

Some are like paintings
I can’t paint.

There are more songs than
I can talk about,
In more shades than I can see
in a lifetime,
I tell myself
as I slip the book
back
into its shelf.

A few songs is
all you need.

I hope I can keep coming
back to it.


July 19, 2008

Divorce

This business of switching sides,
of a door hanging
loosely by the hinges
most screws gone,
is intriguing.

The hinges aren’t
the way it was planned
Years ago.
But is that reason enough
to walk in and out of a door
as you please?

In a house with no windows
they couldn’t shut all doors
at all times.

You can keep a door open
and still put a sign up
that says
“Do not disturb”
at the cost of upsetting someone
even if it is your own
Self.

I would’ve called you my shadow
sweetheart
and I, yours.

But, from the time I heard
about the divorce
I have been careful
about the words
I choose.

July 19, 2008

The bar

I can sit here all night
talking about the virtues
of rum
with my friend
or his friend.

But, this woman
swimming and dancing in my glass
is bothering me.

It is not because
she is a woman
Or because it is my glass
she is dancing in.

You can go for a swim alone
and you can dance alone
but she is dancing with herself.

Look, she can’t even dance!

But, she seems to enjoy
this celebration
of being alone.

I can’t swim
and I can’t dance
I can celebrate being alone.
But, not like her somehow.

We are all different, I know.
and a woman dancing
or swimming
or singing
can attract or distract.

But, this is different.

I will leave the glass here
with my drink unfinished
so she can enjoy her dance.

on the bus back home,
I will think about how
she got into my glass.

July 9, 2008

The last time

The last time around
we were together
You spoke a different language.
Things have changed now.
It is raining,
this time around.

June 27, 2008

Is it raining?

Maria,
look out of the window please,
is it raining outside?

Again?

Or is just
the old man’s roof?

Or am I dreaming
again
about one of those
things happening?

Did it rain
last night?

Or sometime
early this morning?

I thought I heard raindrops.

It was a different sound
then
than it is now.

But, that’s common isn’t it?
When it rains
how the wind blows
changes the sounds that we hear.

Does it happen to you?
Or is it just me
who hears the rain
making a different sounding love
each time it goes to the mud?

Is there mud on the ground outside?
Or is it paved now?
Maria, will you please look outside
and tell me?

June 21, 2008

Mountains and the spirit

Coming back from the mountains
and going back -
out on the city’s roads
driving all by yourself
is like recovering from a fever.
It feels like you are done
and you have had a good rest
lying in bed, sleeping
and dreaming
for all those days:
Long hours of sleep, cold sweats, nausea.

But, its worse when you get back.
Every few steps you take,
you feel tired and queasy.
Though, it isn’t the reverse
of sleeping with a fever.

It’s quite the same.
You break into a cold sweat
or sleep deep enough to meet
strange beings in a nightmare.

Imagine dying in the mountains!
Just falling off a cliff
or drowning in a river
running so fast
that you never know
what killed you,
-- the water or the current?

But then there is rum
that lets you choose your death
and there are those on the way to death times
that feel worse than death,
at least till you are alive.

June 17, 2008

My rivers

What is it about
early rains, seeping walls,
choked drains
or apologetic drizzles
that leave mud
between your fingers and under your soles,
that is so much more convincing
than angry, boisterous rivers?

I meet a river every year.
Sometimes, every few months,
for work.
There are some that kill,
others that are dying
and some others that just flow
or as seasons change,
stop flowing.

I know a lake that is an extension
of a river.
The rocks and the logs in the river
and the birds in the lake,
The weeds, the snakes they all are real.
But a river, is still a good place to have
a beer by.

June 17, 2008

Partition II

For every single step he took,
his feet weren’t sure
they had found the road
under the snow.

But, the postman managed
to deliver
day after day
every working day

So, one day, his son
could return
to the city by the village
and teach scholars
what it means to be a refugee’s son.

June 7, 2008

Revolution

If I gloss through
the pages,
in my mind,
of the diary
I never wrote
and notes I never
took,
I can join
the dots
and show you
a picture.

Don’t ever
get drunk
again
and
shout at me.
I don’t care what
the big picture is.

I have my own
coordinates.
and I make my own
pictures.

I am no Einstein,
Gandhi
or Russel
But I have been
working,
with just being what I am,
on truth and relativity.
And it all fits in very well when
I look at you.

It fits equally well
when I don’t look at you.
So you must understand
you are not relevant.

Please leave.
And, shut the door
when you go.

Those dogs outside
and the fireflies
are just as avoidable as you are.


March 11, 2008

Reason

It is not easy
to finish things off
in a few words.
or a picture.

Images
or words
aren’t always enough.
You need breath
or water,
maybe colours
or soil.
A woman’s womb sometimes.

The way we see light and
the way it is
can be so different,

like the impressions we carry
about life
or they way we express
them,
from the way
Nature does.

March 11, 2008

Spring II

No wonder,
looking at the leaves,
reminds me of a box of crayons.

It is spring.

The chilly saplings
in the pot
may never yield anything
more than green leaves
or white flowers
that whither sooner than
they appear.
But,
it is spring.

Growing up in the city
can take its toll
but manicured gardens get spring too.
Besides,
It is the air
laden with hope,
misery,
Smog,
pollen
and above all
the smell of spring.

There is a strange stench in the air -
of change
that cancer brings —
Irreversible change.

When multiplication
doesn’t mean life anymore.

For the sprouts
there is also
Fresh breath
and through it
Fragrance.

For a part of us
and some of us,
It is still spring.

March 11, 2008

Spring

What is it about the colour
yellow
Or red
That is so attractive?

March 11, 2008