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

Contained

Mother always insists on tucking the pleats of the saree "just" below the navel. That's how it ought to be worn, she says. I don't like doing that. It shows off my birth mark. A broken cloud. Uncontained.

She pleats further up on my chest and I'm lost in my mother's quest for beauty.

Each time, mother sarees me up she promises herself to feed me more and more so that I flesh out more and more and the world would begin to look more and more amazing to my tired, tired mother.

Each time she sarees me up, she thinks of a happy marriage. She thinks of yellow knots.

Each time she sarees me up, I too think of knots. I too, think of claustrophobia.

Each time she sarees me up and fixes my hair, she transforms me.

I become my mother.


Now Playing:: Tumhen ho na ho......Runa Laila

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

Lament ll

Pity, I have come to believe is the greatest aphrodisiac of all.

Lament

The stories were all dead by the time the rains came down. It was brutal just like that. One of them, however, was left with one dying alphabet. I thought it would resurrect itself with the rains but the death was instantaneous.

People ask me what I do with all the time that I have. I say "nothing". They probe deeper.

The truth is, I've lost all track of time. With the clocks crushed, what has set in, is a lightness of being. I've even come to enjoy the glances of disgust that people have come to throw my way. Everything sweeps over and I'm reminded of Kamala Das asking Merrily to imagine herself as the earth "and there are streams running over you."

I never had this peace before. The peace that comes when you let the mind wander. But the wanderings have changed, too.

I no longer dream of the tall casuarinas, or the naked summers, or conversations of deceased lifetimes.

These days when my mind wanders, it so often lingers around the roar of the sea in Thumba, that I heard all through the day sitting in the barsati while the skies of Kerala gathered themselves for the year's first monsoon.

Now Playing:: Jaane kya tune kahi..........Geeta Dutt

Letter # 1

I thought the call would last for an hour. But it didn't. You sounded jittery; maybe the rains make everything sound jittery. The clouds had huddled up for another fresh spell. The air was too dank to reek of the earth without. Perhaps duped by memory the earth seemed to barge in, defying dankness, defying welcome.

I was too resigned to talk, the distance was too much to mask. I still long for you. I can still feel the constant rush of that longing replacing all things proximate in your helpless absentia.

But aren't the absent soon forgotten? I try not to believe in that, God knows I try. But I've no control on your beliefs, your pleasured preferences, the love you spill, the intimacies you provoke. All I know is that I'm no longer free, that my mind is fettered to the absent and for the lack of a better word, committed to thoughts outside of myself.

I was wondering about the difference in our time zones. I knew I was ahead; it was left to my imagination to distribute you according to the Sun's point of view. In that brief moment you ceased to be everything that you had ever meant to me. I saw you only as a curiosity in a museum that I dare not touch. Exaggeration is perhaps an abnormality with me but antique feelings are seldom privy to the spontaneity of mundane metaphors.

You made me return to this improper element of prose. I was defenceless against poetry. It loosened my sentences while strengthening my thoughts. I don't know how long can I continue telling a private story in the banal idiom of prose whose very essence had always been poetic.

I can only hope Life interrupts again, the way it always does, for better or for worse.

Now Playing:: Toofan mail.........Lata

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)