Nemesis

For all I know, you probably never cared much
for love in your lifetime. There's an ease with
which goodbyes roll out of your tongue, casually,
like a favorite word reared to amuse but stings
in its haunting uncertainty of a future encounter.
How often have I longed for a suggestive to break
out of your tongue and its various meanings collapsing
in everything that makes me woman. This has been
the lament. The lament of more than ninety days.
A tendency creeps in now to reduce you to little
circles of red on the calendar to mark the days
I've sat at the dining table writing about you,
to mark all the other days when I tried to
reconstruct your face in poems of odd lines,
and all those nights when I struggled to hold the
vulnerability of your voice captive in words of much
lower stature responding to the dictates of the muse
much like the young girl who keeps a track of the
womb's alchemy lest it catches her unawares
from the sidelines, like a dearest nemesis...


Now Playing:: Hum hain rahi pyaar ke......Kishore K

From the Gutters

On evenings when there's a little wind around
you drag me through vagabond streets
asking for directions to the gutters where men
sit in close circles to gather the city's filth to
hurl it out into the world above, to startle,
to revert the auld order and watch the world
drenched in its own filth. On such a day, you say,
they'll come out of the gutters and stand laughing
at the stinking faces of the high-rises while their
powerful tenants would retaliate with the burning
of flesh and tell their children that it's mere
cigarette wind that chokes the air. Once again
filth would return to the gutters and the children of
grime would continue to persist in its darkness, in
the madness of the gutters...

Homecoming

It's midnight and you're not home,
you're heading a conspiracy.
Soon there'll be a massacre which
the papers shall report
for you wouldn't tell me
fearing I might call it
one of your passing fancies
or worse
I could hold you back
with sex.

It's midnight and you're not home
and there's a message
on the phone saying,
"Ah, D. I miss you."
The sender threatens to love me more
than I love you so I
drafted a dirty letter to him
detailing how thoroughly you
would enjoy me on your return.
He puked on it
called me a crazy fucked-up girl.

It's midnight and you're not home darling
and so I must be out now
to drown the season's last massacre
in the streets
so that when you return
I would tell you that
I couldn't prevent a massacre at home
when
the termites colonised your
bookshelves completely.


Now Playing:: Ain't no sunshine.........Bill Withers

Poetry of This Kind

When will you 

learn to understand that every word is a

closure, every word a mere reminder of a 

hopeless memoir that could have been. There's

no longer a poetry of illusion, not even love's

auld poetry of assured happiness, only a certain 

a kind of poetry has hit my taste, one that I find

in dogs, one that I've found in every carnivore which

is resolved to eat out of hunger, but then eats more,

out of greed. Throw a piece of chicken to a dog and

see how it eats. Watch it tear! Watch it bite! 

Watch it chew! Nothing exists for it anymore,

not even Time. When the flesh is gone and the 

white revealed, wait as it settles down for a 

love making of a longue duree. It licks and sucks and

sucks and licks until, the white, supple with all the 

sucking splits in a single bite and the dog

in a final act of vengeance bites more ravenously

into the white, this time well assured of a salty

after-taste when it has licked the marrows off,

and in one swift sweep of the universe 

the crumbs are gone too.

Now Playing::Hum hain rahi pyaar ke........Kishore Kumar

Day Three

To see you amidst others is a torture.How 

shall I break open my mind and let you in

and make you stay for a while? Is it too

wayward, too selfish, this search for love? 

You said something in that disconnected gathering

and for the first time in the evening I became

aware, aware of your laughter, aware of the deep

knotted mound of your throat. I traced your voice.

I traced my tonic. Did you notice me at all today? 

There was a song in my mind, I was trying to 

contain hysteria. There's a hint of cigarette smoke

in my hair, and a deluge of verses in my mind, and

one winter night to ask you, 'Are we serious, then?'

Now Playing:: Piya tora kaisa abhimaan...........Hariharan

Day Two

I think of you, my gaze fixed at the bookends,
a gift from another friend, who was quick enough
to extract a promise to not let slip prose in between,
it's meant for poetry alone, he said. I've lost touch
with him, I know where he is, though. He, too, talked
about revolutions, about things that I cannot learn,
about things that I cannot, may not, and will not
remember. Why is it that you strike root in these
trivial details? What if the revolution fizzles out
in spite of you? Where shall you whet your appetite, then?
What if the revolution takes you in completely and you
disappear without a trace? Whom should I apply for
help, then? I'm worried to death. But if you come back,
we'll meet at the same place and talk. And if you don't,
I cannot and will not belong to any other.


Now Playing:: Aakhon se jo utri hai.....Asha

Of Mothers and Cats

That must be a demon daughter who
Dreams of her mother being dead.
Only saints take truncheons to dreams.
But the dream doesn’t end there.
The haunting memory of that dream catches
Up with her waking life and kills her slowly,
Heartbeat by heartbeat.
Shouting and screaming at the frayed
Perversity of her dreams doesn’t help
The demon daughter. In an agony of emotion
She turns to religion; she prays.
As regions of life explode in her dreams again,
She sees her mother as a giant cat
Holding the demon daughter by the scruff of the neck
And walking on water—gently, regally.
She dreams of the cat’s nine lives
But she also dreams of the Styx in spate…



Now Playing:: Ishaqzaade (Title Track)

Framed

Your photographs have come alive again,
They’re the only things that bind me to you now.
Did I tell you, I’ve made friends with the kinists
And the anthropologists? They despise my poetry
But they like the spare prose that I write for them.
I like this picture where you are with the tribals
And gently smiling into the camera…why do you
Revel in antiquity so much? One of the kinists talks
About the land that you’ve left for. Did I tell you,
I’ve charmed him and that he seems to be smitten?
Every night I urge him to talk about the land that
Seduced you more than I…every night the bewitching
Image of your gaunt figure treading those sunless jungles,
Looking for links, for lost worlds, for lost bloodstreams,
Feebly rises out from your photographs and makes me
Long for the comforting beat of your heart,
But there’s nothing there, just the dull cry of the
Insects that surround you now… Someday, I shall
Pick up the trails that you left behind and
Find out for myself what truth did antiquity conceal?


Now Playing::Phoolon ke rang se.........Kishore

Mutated

The changes are apparent now;
Changes that you wrought,
Your interferences,
Everything.
I no longer fret
When you ask me to strip
I strip, strip, strip
My tongue has licked bark,
My hands reek of
Cartography,
Whose bony ancestors
Have sprung open
In the soft pulp of your life.
I am contented
I have learnt to recognize,
Recognize love,
For it has taught me two things:
Never to believe in it
And forgiving often,
I have changed much
How could I not love you then?
Love you
More fiercely,
More fearlessly.


Now Playing::Jajabara.........Akhaya Mohanty

Substitutes

There is not a scrap of verse left in me now,
What is left is the mere smell of the older ones
That linger at my bedside
Rudely knocking off the lights
And demanding, why haven't I burned them, yet?
I shall not consider burning,
I shall consider drowning,
I tell myself and turn away...
A faint smell of a new verse drifts
In the air but that, too fades away
With nary a word,
I turn again to the older ones
Despite their disgust and ask them
To contain my ugliness in their
Soft little bellies for one more night
For the morning, I believe, shall bring
Promises of naked sunshine...


Now Playing::Veena (instrumental)

You and Sanity

I know why you took me to the caves today
And talked of water and I know why you said,
“I don’t want you to be Caddy.”

Every stone had burst into a thousand mirages
Then, and history gushed out of the guide’s mouth,
Echoing secret tunnels, wars, and faceless soldiers.

Someone asked for more water and we moved
Into cooler pockets. Let’s leave the crowd, you said,
And dragged me towards resonating pits of stone.

There was a deity in one of them, its priest a frail
Auld man, who sprinkled holy water on you, and
Called you ‘son’ and you obliged him with a photograph.

It’s dark now, much darker than the caves we were in,
I shall remember nothing of this in the morning, not even
The murky sweat stains of your hands on my jute bag,

All I remember now is the pale sound of water purling
Beneath those stones, which you say I might hear if I
Ever believed in a world outside sanity.


Now Playing:: Naam ghum jayega.........Kinara

A Midnight Poem

I need some comforting
tonight,
The world has been
harsh,
It has stripped me
thus,
I have been running
around,
Trying to save
face,
Let me spend a night
here,
There are forgotten
promises,
Let me take them
back,
And blur them with my
embarrassments,
Adore me once again,
darling,
You shall lose
nothing,

Barter a night,
I'll give you
My farewell in
Charity.

Now Playing: Dream a little dream of me.....Doris Day

Bury Your Wings

Bury your wings,
Do not water them,
They’ll sprout into
Little saplings
And will make trees
Of your false hopes.
Bury your wings, darling,
For,
Wings are ordinary things,
They do nothing,
They will only take you
From one loveless earth
To another.


Now Playing:: Neela aasmaan........Silsila

Umbilicus

It seemed as if
Everything that I had owned
Was gushing into the
Ancient whirlpool of
The navel,
When he said,
‘You’re a peculiar child’,
Not a woman,
Not even a girl,
But a child…


Now Playing:: Lean on me.....Bill Withers

Apology

No one at his club knows our secret, or so we
Would like to believe. They know me by another
Name, they know me as one who writes poems.
I flutter around wearing mother’s sarees and during
The brief time-outs when I keep to myself, men float up
And settle on either side of my couch trying to know my
Age. I smile and laugh with all the flamboyance of a flirt,
And occasionally one of them would politely ask for a
Picture, in memory of an evening spent with someone who
Writes poems. Once in a while I catch him staring at me from
A crowded corner of the hall, and then, affecting nonchalance
At the pretty sight of me clad in a saree and lost in the company
Of other men. “There is pleasure in this side of the world, too”, I
Tell him, when we later resign into the night. Raising his soft,
Liquid eyes he kisses me gently on the forehead and as I nuzzle
Closer I’m invariably reminded of another face,
Another set of arms,where I had found
A similar unsatisfying warmth…


Now Playing:: Wahin chal mere dil.......Suresh Wadkar

Remembering

It must have been a thousand years old,
That face in the humble darkness,
Which speaks of a singular legend;
Of Love's unsatisfying embrace,
Of Man's slow swim into the forbidden.


Now Playing:: Itna na mujhse tu pyaar badha......Lata & Talat

Too Early, Love

There’s a new man in town,
Who takes me on clandestine drives,
And we sin casually,
Very casually,
Because
There’s nothing much that
We can do for each other.
On dark, deserted stretches of concrete
Where his manhood oozes out
On my female stillness,
A smile breaks out in my mind
Because
Love has now become
A detached thing;
A mere force of habit,
That comes to us like madness,
Madness,
That grows and stirs, and
Then lies meekly exhausted
In casual smiles and goodbyes.

This, too, is love,
This passion in the breast,
That beats for casual affairs of the night
And makes a mockery of souls
For the rest of the day,

Yes, there’s a new man in town,
Who takes me on clandestine drives,
And makes me sin casually,
Very casually.


Now Playing::Jiya Jale........Dil Se

Yet Another

And on nights like these
When the eyes are empty of sleep,
I realize how easy it is
To fall out of love with you;
To breathe the air
Reeking of wantonness,
That lies just outside of love,
How utterly easy it is, darling
To abandon the heart,
Just for a while,
In search of a peace so adult,
And settle in another's arms
For a night,
Yet another,
And yet another...


Now Playing:: Raat hamari toh.........Parineeta

Taking Leave

I remember you telling me, ‘there’s nothing
Like the sea.’ What made you say that, I would
Never know, but don’t thrust its shapeless,
Roaring ugliness upon me…how could you endure
That wave upon wave vulgarity that it perks on
Your face so shamelessly? I’m filled with repulsion
(of late I have begun to hate everything you like),
What's this country where there's no stirring of desire?
In the sun-drenched late afternoons when i'm speaking
without any listeners, see how the sea howls unabashedly
Like the voyeur who, couldn't take his eyes off me when
The curtains fluttered in the musty sea breeze. I long to
Hear a night-bird's cry, sweet, dull, and un-muffled in
The pesky yell of the sea; have you ever seen them
Coming down from the loftiness of the coconuts and the
Casuarinas? The sea alone survives here, darling, it
Survives with its illusion of the horizon and a pale sun
Settling in its womb, it's the same as everyday. I wish
There were someone else here, not you, someone
Equally corrupt as I. Don't look for me; I'm leaving,
I'm going home...there's too much sand in my hair.


Now Playing::Teri mehfil mein.....Lata & Shamshad Begum

Between Us

It was the only unpleasantness between us;
He smelt like a man,
Like rough,
I was forever
Rank with dampness,
A mere
Locked-up smell,
Gushing with
Margins of errors,
Pining, Pining
To be, filled…


Now Playing:: Jajabara.........Akhaya Mohanty