The Wind

The wind blew in our direction, shadows played

It is the eyes that lacked the answers, in the contrast

At the eye of it all I knew my borders when the sun blazed

The morning sun went quickly, the noon would soon come

There was wind in the hair, my thoughts fell into the skin

When everything happened nothing actually occurred.

Up there the cosmic egg flickered beyond the trees

The blue emitted golden rays in the silky clouds there

As if I could collect all that in my past canvas bags.

Yesterday morning a little bird shrieked on the wire

My garden was full of them and under them, below the wires

Meanwhile the loops continued endlessly in my mind

While the summer season seemed to be undecided

When the monsoon would begin in the salt water and hills

And journey across the mountains and windy coconuts.

My words are silly giggling girls playing in the moon

Together they do not sing but hum like the pipal leaves

When the wind comes from across the the distant hills.

Transience

At the vaulting dome waves refused to travel
Unless on a few pieces of silver and a name.
The flying metallic bird will take two full hours
These angels in turquoise will feed our appetites.
There is fear lurking in our minds behind bravado.
We try to shut out noises of after-death and failure
We blame ourselves for all our stupid failures
As though they really mattered to us and the dead.
We then read patterns in the greyed whys of decay.
As though the whole thing is a science of death
And we have nearly mastered the art of dying,
Of succumbing to the need to maintain transience.
We smugly wear the polyester film of transience about us
We read poetry in the trivial tragedies of their tatters.

The sea

You were talking about walking, barefoot,
Into the sea, with orange fires between eyes
She was last seen behind the customs warehouse
Chanting skeptical mantras with a lisp
Lips trembling with fearful doubts
The shadows there gobbled her up
Actually the sea only gobbles up shadows.
As had happened with that man
Who returned bloated at high tide
You see we have never worshipped
These small Goddesses who become angry
There a bald man walked into the sea
The sea of emptiness beyond the window
Wanting to get back to the mother fast
Inside, a greedy woman , a son in fog
At the end of the street they all disappear
Where there is a blind turn, a dead-end.

God’s mountains

Invisible are their powers, unfelt and secure
The mountains lay there brown and puffing
In the mid-noon sun among yellow-dropped leaves
The scrolls on their walls dated back to eons
Brown-skinned ancestors shrieked, ghosts,
Their smelly wings flapped in cave-silences
Several worn-out paths winded to forgot ruins
There they stopped midway vanishing in bushes
The temple bells were heard under the banyan tree
The tree spread its hair reaching the steep slopes
It was the clouds that brought the brown haze
The sky ended up in blue torpor in penciled hills
There in the wilderness shrieked British ghosts
Collectors who had rested in lonely stone buildings
Pondering deeply on history’s ghosts lying supine
On broken temple foundations with missing walls
There in a stony niche slept God with his eyes closed
A lotus emerged from his navel, mysterious and born
In fact the whole of the world burst out from there.

Images in poetry

This wordy struggle went on for too long
It is airy words which chased beauty-thoughts
While several filigreed images filtered light
At the back, a flung radio played on the roof
While Bukowski watched the sun shine
On the woman’s behind up in the air,
In the garden, his folded figure on the window.
A little heaving bird on the electric wires
Played high drama in shrill baritone, you see,
A real thing, not an insubstantial phenomenon.
Poetry came and went with wind and rain
Premature and dusty on fragrant creepers
Their flowers became stars on moonless nights.

(Reference here is to the poem “A radio with guts by Charles Bukowski)

The sea

Thought heralded a boatful of laughter
Checkered, courageous, fishermanly
In spray-powdered, sprinkle-diffused
Froth seething with salt and blue
As though the sea horizon heaved
In musically multi-colored sound
Steeped in dead-dry- fish smell.
A boy walked away from the sea-sun
And idly prancing about crows.
Vasco Da Gama’s stone tablet stood
In history’s powdered rock and sand
And broken -colored boat masts.
At the corner glistened wet sand
In tree shadows falling in sea
Their dark hair hiding red agenda.
These white buildings sat idly
In history’s tiled canopies witnessing
Communism’s capitalist fortunes.
The French windows hid much beauty
In the shadows of mosquito nets
While hot pepper creepers snaked
All the way up the statuesque teaks.
In the slush coconuts proudly stood
Spreading dark hair in the night.
Here, rain happened quickly
Rocking moist coconut fronds
Hiding still, hairless sea-eagles.

(A poem which happened on the Kapady beach in Kerala)

Hail

this summer is not hot,only the remembrance
the leaves are sometimes dripping with dew
by the road tall thankful trees stand
their dignity enhanced by the shrubs under dust
the city sits lazily in the afternoon
in unfinished perfection, under a coat of fine dust
in the car the poetry book crackles
under heavy ego and self glorification
Sanchi's golden brown stone dust settles
on the beauty-things of the hazy mind
here in the attic of the mysterious mind
the evil man cometh rankling, digging
the black coalmines of despair and darkness
our weapons are only a few mantras
clouded under black coaldust, saying sorry
somebody close to us is dying, surely
the clouds are ominous all the time
laden with bloodlust and bellyache
in the pit of my stomach is vomit-disgust
now the rains are here ,balls of snow
we catch them in our palms ready
only they are slipping through the spaces
we cannot hold our fingers together
and our white- clouded glory fizzles soon.

The dreams persist

In the Sunderbans* the shadows were long
And diaphanous, reaching up to the grey skies
Outside the huts the trees were crooked
And leafless, bearing the burden of our sins
Against the child’s shrieks at the phantom’s coming.
In the city, the nights are dreamt once again,
In broad daylight, among several theses;
All the while, in the backwoods, a yellowed day
Was witness to cultural history being re-enacted.
Meanwhile, there was fever rising in our blood
Strangers at midnight attacked us for our secrets
A little girl laughed at the dreams in our head,
Outside the room, from the fever of her own blood.


*( literally ,beautiful forests, the estuarine forests of Bengal, the home of the royal Bengal tiger)

Mornings

My birds are twittering constantly;
Their colors refuse to climb the sky
Amid scattered sounds and sunrays.
My mornings are many-hued skies
Rising from treetops of birdsongs.

Mother and sea

On the shore, an image of her
Shimmered, in frothy laughter.
The sea has now risen
Like her own body’s upheaval,
Then, in pure, purple pain.
The sea will calm down
When the night is born.

The call never came

Thinking nights cannot easily sleep
Full of dark secrets in the belly
That rise as smoky-eyed dreams,
When awareness takes an abrupt turn.
The tree stood mute by the temple
A man cogitated on the verandah
Another, on his knees, stared at the river
An old man squatted, his head bent,
Among turbaned men of another time,
Awaiting the call from across the river.
Actually the call has never come
It never comes in dreams and art.

Poems

Creatures of the gone world walk,
In measured meters, by dark streams
Flowing with the city’s vulgar sins.
Thinking poems are autumn-falling
In criss-cross patches of golden sun,
Actually these are pallid ghosts
Pulled out of unlit eastern skies
Laughing poems feel like poems
On the grassy mounds, children
Mimicking toothless laughter, hiding
Lots of death-fear knotted around
Approaching birthdays in jitters.
Silver manes falling on grey scarves,
They laugh their guts out, ha ha,
In the club of morning laughter
On grassy mounds in sunlit parks.
Yellowed skulls hiding in monkey-hoods
Hardly hear the world’s laughter.

Responsibility

We have thought deeply;
Our responsibility ends
When we leave this place;
It will be such a relief.
We click our tongues;
We wear our oldness
On our hanging selves.
The symmetry remains
Wholly outside our grasp,
Whatever we do still.
Beams of yellow light
Flood our parks, our eyes.
Those pixels are getting lost,
From our translucent skies
When we lie under the sky
Squiggly worms no longer
Swim behind closed eyelids.

Possession

The Goddess spoke, fiercely,
Through white anger’s mists;
The body shouted thick-throated
A lower order goddess, surely,
Cannot be all that demanding
Crying for well-fattened cocks.
Fear becomes the key translating
To waves of body movements.
A matter of thinned blood supply
Or a fleeting hardening of vessels,
She lay there sprawled, wailing.
Anger burst out of the bounds
She had crossed all body-barriers
Just when sanity finally returned.
A mere transient ischemic attack
Or a turmeric- yellowed Goddess
Extending dominion over disbelief?

Struggle

There was fear all over;
Things happened very fast.
The body quickly gave way;
The sanitized walls closed in.
The lone crab struggled
In a puddle of scalding water
There were voices around
All happened in a split-second
When someone shouted
Pull him out, for God’s sake;
This is a mere dream.

Leaves

Here, the man went inward and wise,
Reluctant teacher, about to enter light
The leaves about him had a faint aura
Not a pall of dust but of wisdom’s light,
The why of all including our nothing-
We who had liquid origins and trauma.
He had an answer to all our questions
But no questions to our lucent answers
His ears were long and unhearing
As were his eyes small and crinkly.
It was not he who patted his tummy
And laughed to the vulgar crowds loud
Just a yellow figurine on dusty shelves.
Did you say he had frozen in bronze
With an enormous stomach side-splitting?
Actually our fears froze behind his ears
I can hear their crunch in these leaves.

Existence

Here a talking man is sleeping,
His arms akimbo, feet in the air.
Then were wild gesticulations,
Sweat on brow, fire in the eyes
Now vacant and unconnected.
He no longer exists in space
But he had happened in time
Whatever begins shall remain.

A photographer’s quest

The city lay crumpled in a quiet corner
The evening smelt onion-peels and roast
The sun slid below an unfinished house
The white ghosts had still time to return.
Pulse-beating hearts, thought-abhorrent,
Beat in the very depths of their rib-cages
In onrush of blood and oxygen-seekings.
At the other end of the beauty-spectrum
Several transformations worked technically
In coloured copies of quintessentialities.
A few frames mattered and horizons’ tilts
The artist looked for exactnesses of science
Capillary details appealed to beauty-logic.
You know how we seek ghosts in quiet time.
Our graphic eye sought the nature of things
In white balances and still phosphorescences.
Beauty eluded while pursuing pixel- perfection.

On return to Mumbai

The city is daylong and sea –backed
The sea-child deeply dangled his feet
Into the sea at the misty radio club
Near the cockroach-ridden sea palace
Bringing back a tide of memories
Years ago, I had bought my identity
Here, in a piece of paper, full of lies
And endless possibilities of hurt
In the fragrant harbour to come .
Now the sea is calm but afraid
I see Rukmini’s lying-in hospital
Along with the juice hair parlours.
Stock- brokers rub rotund stomachs.
Scared dons account for deaths
There ,at the junction , in a sea of cars
Stand these muddy-haired children
They have a nasty habit of poking
Their outstretched grubby hands
Directly into the holes of your eyes.

The sun-photographer

It is this luminosity, my dear,
Of the gilded leaves in the sun
The magic eye promptly catches
A silver flicker, a yellow transience.
A palliative to the chemical pain
In variously knotted entrails and
The reddish tinge in eye-whites.

Beauty-waves from Guruvaiyoor

Beauty-desire, succulent, ripened quickly;
The astute spirit-being violently reacted within.
The fevered body hated to be a whipping boy.
Arjuna’s friend had told him contrary things
Leaving us all befuddled, our minds giddy.
Nachiketa had asked death what it was and why.
Of course, knowledge was death before and after.
Now this beauty-thing, was it a physical glow
Or a spirit-layer, eternal and in the clouds.
Look at this beyond-thing, this horizonlessness.
What made us,in the tendrils of our body and mind
Where were we when the whole thing happened?
At this the Godchild seemed to smile exquisitely
His beauty-waves reached our perplexed minds
From beyond the coconuts and the tiled houses.
My own beauty- pixels vanished, wholly washed off
Their incandescence dissipated in space above
Clusters of coconuts and houses nestled in them.

(Guruvaiyur is known for Krishna's temple, which attracts a large number of pilgrims)

On return from Guruvayoor temple

The ego’s fires had subsided, quietly,
Shadows and silhouettes then came in
Golden hues appeared on slept-in beds
I tried catching sprawled self-shadows
Products of yesterday’s mashed egos.
The graphic eye, silverlined and lying,
Was helpless to bolster bewitching beauty
The eagle’s cry went up to the sky
From the green sea of coconut fronds
Yesterday the Godchild smiled exquisitely
Today is another day of empty space
So much incandescent space to be filled.

A photography trip to the forests of Wyanad

First poetry had entered a dog’s life
Chasing steel shadows and gray death
The elephants were hard to come out;
They had their strong sylvan reasons.
Our timid tribal guide called out to Surya
Who had his elephant feet tied to the tree.
There was black fear in his beady eyes.
Earlier, in the morning, beauty had beckoned;
Death of a dog was but a sweat drop.
There was fuzzy rain in the bamboo grove;
Ponderous shadows cogitated on the lake;
The sun shimmered on the solitude-beach.
Poetry returned over the coconut tops.
The quintessential shadows remained.

A dogs death

He had come into us, running,
Yelling, in crescendo of pain.
Then all was peremptorily still.
The car stopped, screeching
Only to scrape bloody flesh
Off the muddy bumper; actually
He was chasing steel shadows
Which had no business there.

The train journey

There, in God’s country, the benign ruler
Had promptly burst out of the earth’s bowels
A sea of coconuts smothered, sultrily,
The most unwilling moss-painted houses
The banyan raised its feet high enough
For hundreds of creepy monsoon-creatures
The journey then began in white rain
Waiting for streaks of silver sunshine
To crawl through upright areca nut barks
As the telephone wires went up and down
A floating bird quickly froze in the sky
First the coconut fronds ran to the hills
Then the chilly plants, yet to go red in the face
Inside, they of the uncertain sex beat the wind
Out of their joined palms in forced cadence
The floor-mopping boy under our large feet
Looked with money-wetness in his eyes
The train went spluttering for lack of puffing
While gravelly stones hit its forbidden parts.

An October Morning

Here, in October, scores of dragonflies
Fly about like miniature airplanes
Speckled butterflies collide with them
Floating in the air like catamarans
The morning slowly dries wet clothes,
Dripping, they smell of blue detergent
The house there wakes up bleary-eyed
Hesitating shadows emerge from the walls
A varnished gate, the midget of a woman
On the concrete bench, in the garden
Measuring the length of her shadow
A riot of bougainvillea bursts on the rock
Like a Chinese vase with fresh geraniums
Fresh coffee drip-drops into the percolator
Filling the air with delicious aroma
Amid all the blood and gore of newsprint
Soon you drift into a crimson forgetfulness.

The Woman In The Painting

Lively watercolors
Vivid cool pastels
Become gray shadows
Eyelashes flutter languidly
In off-white background
She takes in the breath
Of saffron evenings.
The sun slowly descends.
Dots of steady-winged birds
Fly out of the canvas.
Shrill eagle-calls
Rupture the canvas
She shouts out, loud,
In not-so- audible decibels
Over the world’s cacophony
Embedded in experience
It is all the same, whatever
A rehash and a re-living
The experience stays
And the exquisiteness.

Civilizing the Bastar tribals

Long ago our courage deserted us
Thought soon froze in its tracks
Our spiked hair rose to the sky
As the cold air bit into our bones
White rain poured on thatched roofs
Forming yellow snakes of waters
And outside the rusted window rails
On the yellow- dropped leaves
Yesterday was the day of cockfights
The birds stared at their bound legs
Waiting to bleed their bird-friends
Our white fluid glistened in the pots
We went high on smelly rice drinks
We made a rope circle among trees
That was the bloody arena for cocks
Our basket threw up big plastic dice
Our village youth staked day’s labor
Our children now have blue uniforms
They will one day be clerks in office
Our women continue transplanting rice
Our gods have stopped being angry
Whatever we did in billowing skirts
Our moment never came, actually
Inclusiveness submerged all, just like
Yellow sick-sweet fly-riding pulp
The fiery snake slithered quickly away
The fluidity of confusion remained.

Songs

The night advanced slowly casting
Its ominous shadows on the faces
Outside her house the neem tree shook
By the gentle tug of a dreamlike wind
Rustling through its autumn leaves
The sky rumbled vaguely in the distance
Silver lined clouds dissipated in the hills
The wind fizzled down in the stillness.
She sang to the sky all sorts of songs
Infused with meaning, at times
Celebrating and at times cerebrating
She caught the essence of rhythm,
Some times bewilderingly different
Following a different logical course.
There were so many other ways
Of penetrating the core of sound.
Mesmerized by alternative rhythms
Embodying other approaches to life
She wanted to change history’s course
And the uninterrupted flow of life
Executing brilliant rhythm patterns
By an artful manipulation of sound
Through a blind trial and error,
Or through an endless deduction
Assuming no fundamental premise
Her songs took turns and twists
Of beyond-logic, an unpatterned rhythm
From the idea of cosmic creation itself.
Her dreams did not seem to end there
Slowly her canvas started coming to life
As the evening tapered off to dusk.
Why did she want to create and destruct?
She randomly vivisected the image
As a restless child would do and
Each time, ended up with a different face.
Each face was a harmony in sound
The rhythm of life's logic was all there.
A random splash of resplendent colors
A digital manipulation of a puckered up face
Seemed to be approximating to Truth.
The essential Logic still eluded her
Being the logic of the Grand Dream.
Did she know why the faces were there?
Why we were here to begin with
What if the Dreamer stopped dreaming?
Or the Cause did not lead to Effect
One thing did not follow the other in time?

The Tirumala hills

Delve into the nature of things
Become them. Bridge distances.
Here yawning time-distances shrink.
New chemical formulas emerge.
All that is thought logical merges
Into camphor-fragrant unreality
Words quickly change into things
Time stands immobile and petrified.
Bright yellow sampangi petals
Breathe fragrant life into the sky
Tall swaying red sandalwood trees
Tilt precipitously towards
The orange fringe of the western sky.
The holes of my eyes are filled
With salty tears like yesterday's
Abandoned bottomless stone quarries
Fresh with pellucid rainwater.

The Woman in the Picture

I look. Then I turn away.
The curtains are drawn
In a bizarre way, in a knot.
There are heaps of books
Book upon book, little hillocks
Good enough for an eagles' view,
She looks down, calmly
She stands on a flat plane
Uniquely two-dimensional.
I try climbing the hillocks.
It is pretty dizzy over there
And her breath is ice-cold
Let me open the curtains
The sun is behind the hills.
The shadow of the hills
Grows minute by minute
And, silently, book by book.
The moon is peering through
The spaces between curtains
Touching the frayed edges
Of the hard bound tome.
The woman looks out of her
Trapped existence in frame
She had happened in time
Just a point in the plane of time
The same plane that passes
Through our own existence.

The interview

One went into deep slumber fully aware
The air did not touch nor melodiously sing
The tweet of the gray bird went over and again
As the helpless chick tried to find way
Hemmed in by clusters of grass squares
The mind’s baby gurgled as if threatening
It got mixed up in the easily penetrable skull
The story of someone deeply drowning
Hold your breath and flap your wings
While your daughter’s saving dupatta floats
The elephant-God whispered in your ears
As the sun went down the shimmering lake
We all waited impatiently to be hurt deeply
The head shrinker asked searing questions
Pretending petrified wisdom of the pure mind
The phantoms went their way, their job done.

Homo Sapiens

The ape reviewed the Homo Sapiens that was
A fistful of matter seemed to matter so much
Why then blow it up in search for other matter
His sun had brilliantly thought he was the sun
Then other skulls came telling of other suns
A bearded man dropped a lightweight petal
Another’s fruit explored the physical world
A rainbowy microcosm appeared with spirals
Yet there was saffron fear in a fistful of matter
Knowledge was but neatly stacked craniums
With the entire inside matter notably missing.

A train journey

Then the world moved away slowly under our feet;
A barebacked child mopped the floor under our seats
A fifty -paise coin glistened in his hungry eyes
Like the broken sun found in the muddy puddle
That had formed in yesterday’s wind and rain.

Acceptance

The body had struggled for a whole night
Calling for a tranquil, unquestioning acceptance
A typhoon in the intestines caused the mind to swirl
In a smelly rejection across the car seat
In the acceptance lay the complementarity of rejection
Then the rain went musical on the misty windshield
Beauty appeared, in wistful rain, across time
As though it were life briefly rejecting death
Buddha sat there smiling in Time’s burnt earth
There was no acceptance or rejection, only beauty.


(A poem written on a visit to the 8th century temple and vihara complex at Sirpur in Chattisgarh )

A day at the training academy

The trouble arose out of needless self-knowledge
The organism recoiled even on gentle pin-pricks
Here goggle-eyed girls touched tender spots
A phallic water-tank towered, Shiva-like,
Over the stony portals of glorified knowledge
A shrill sea-gull-cry vaporized as rain-cloud
Another morning bird fanned the dewy garden air
My glass eye lost the bee in floral confusion
There was this gently smiling anaconda in the hall
There were no beauty-tokens, only tattered egos.

The Rain

On the hills everyone’s courage failed
That meant a clean break from the past
A clear-cut informed decision in the rain
A prophet sat right there, cross-legged,
Smiling in the polished marble vault
The decadent city dropped away gradually
In the semantic vagueness of the general rain
The lovers promptly lost their pristine bodies
In the fecund continuity of the falling rain
A little rain-girl smiled beatifically
In the blue and green of her eyes
There was no tentativeness in their slant.

At the Jehan Numa hotel in Bhopal

In yesterday’s laughing wind and rain
The trees waved helplessly on my window
A spiritual lady separated my spirit
From my morbid mind, body and intellect
Buffeted by a moist wind-blown illness
In this history room the royals reveled
Separated by sunless fog-screens of time
The wind howled all through the night
My consciousness grappled with the body.

My childhood

The midsummer tin-roofed alphabet-school
Burst with thirsty crows and earthen pots
Long-gowned smoky-eyed phantom-teachers
Guided tiny fingers along chalked letters
The water glistened telltale in the bottom
Waiting for the crows to bend and breathe
Deeply over their gently moving reflections
The pebbles would take long time to drop
In the meantime a squeezed citrus leaf
Mingled its delicious smell perfectly with
The lazy crow’s caw on the branches
At the altar of the church I tried to find
The fragrance of my life’s beginning
In the sandal paste and burnt incense
Our pond smelled of the aromatic chemistry
Of wind over water and long lotus stems
At midnight dark burglars made oval holes
In the neighbor’s house with a shovel’s thud
In the afternoon scary policemen arrived
Hand-in-hand with ebony-backed thieves
The ghostly tamarind brooded in the night
Little tomato plants shone red in the corner
Our petite pig-tailed girl played peeved wife
On long summer nights the circus band played
The stars flickered in the chinks of the tent.

The Resolution

That time the script was promptly made
And sealed, waiting to be enacted and, later,
In the marshy outreaches of my somnolence
There arose several original questions
Of ethical propriety and logical integrity
The bit players seemed to evolve differently
When awareness took an abrupt turn
The leading up to and the denouement got lost
As always, I have to start all over again.

Questions

I go back in pearl-white consciousness
Where lies my own future possibility
Thousands of grey existence questions
Remain to be answered in the finite space
Filled with tiny snow-flakes of fallible logic
When I finally go knowledge shall arrive
In luminous trails and gusts of wind bringing
Autumn-leaves of answered questions.

Laughter

Meanings do not accrue
They happen on the side
Away from the world’s centre
There is no fear of uncertainty,
Of not being able to cope.
The metaphors sound clichéd
In the world’s understood
Something much deeper
Comes out of the tranquil eyes
That brimmed with meaning
We laugh all the time, here,
In the parks, under the trees
We do not understand the world
Our talk comes from the medulla
Our thinking is under the ribs
A transition from the concrete
To a fuzzy laughter-filled world
We stopped crying long ago.

The white screen of death

I can visualize that happening
The power of death is palpable
Amidst disbelief, impossible reason
Unthinking brain-aliveness
I can see the yellowed feet
Jutting out of the white sheet
Fleeting flies gratuitously sharing
Fickle aliveness with the dead
Existence logic is devoid and white
Like the all-enveloping sheet.

The paper

That was a mere red-banded paper
Itching to reclaim original state
Of un-sweet bagasse and bamboo
With absolutely no musical possibility
As lonely as our drooping eyelids
Behind the vacuous legal scroll
Some faded white trousers reiterated
Black legal existence and bow tie
Our sleep-together of fearsome nights
Leapt out of the window cat-silent
Into the sterilized portals of wordy law
Our mummified before was not this
Our after-thoughts slowly cauterized us
As we waited for the black decision.

The tsunami memory

I saw her usurping chunks of the sky
That was some misty moments
And a thick orange sunset ago
A lone crow, sitting on the railing,
Surveyed the distant shoreline
When my eager glass eye caught it
The blur of brown hills broke
The blue sea-sky continuum
She sat there still, seemingly human
Where was this blue benevolence
When little supplicating hands
Burst out of her rising white bosom
And tiny lotus-lungs gasped for air?

My ancestors

These mountains had existed
When my ancestors had lived
They had roamed their risky ridges
Their tall silhouettes scurrying for cover
When dark silences echoed in the hollows
A silky sky touched the mountaintop
While fluffy cotton clouds had cast
Diaphanous shadows on their flanks
In the unblinking moments of my eyes
They saw my foolish childhood
in knickers, asking silly questions
These were the very questions
Asked by my ancestors who thought
They mastered the mountains end to end.

Sleep

The birdsong came back
This time with a bearded man
The sky was deep blue
In the mountains and beyond
And gently touching them
The man's eyes slept for long
The blue in them disappeared,
Above the yellowed stone shelter,
Into the translucent April sky.
It had rained from the white sky
And he had slept and slept
As if he had not woken up
From yesterday's deep sleep
And the sleep of the day before
When my car had passed.
His breathing was rhythmic
There was no warm life
Yesterday he had existed
And today his breath stirred
Under the unkempt beard
Tomorrow under the blue sky
When my car will pass this way
There will be a grey space
Then my eyes will turn away
I shall roll down the panes.

Dreams

Several flimsy images are played
Behind the opaqueness
Of my heavy-lidded eyes .

I am not at the centrestage.
They are nothing,not even existence
Just fragments of a fractured reality.

The Hampi rocks

The evening swapped the orange sky
For a silver-lined cloud in tatters
The rocks sizzled through the day
At sundown their fever subsided
Their blazing orange desires ebbed
In the nucleus of their inner being
Time had burnt them to perfection
Beyond the pale of their stony selfness
Their sun-smell touched the bushes
Quickening life in their brown limbs
As the sun sank behind the world’s edge
Their shadows vanished in the sky.

The miners have come

Then the mountains fell silent.
The leafless shrubs pretended
They did not exist, waiting for
The mountain’s endorsement
Of their terrestrial existence.
The night’s silence broke through
Stacks of brown mountains
The wind blew in their faces
As though it was flowing water
And the monsoon had arrived
The fact is that the monsoon
Has already come and gone
There was no water flowing
Only hot brown sandy space
With the west wind whirling in it.
The cloud that would bring water
Has already come and gone
And there would never be water
Only blood from recent wounds.
After they have come and gone
There will be large circular holes
You stand on their rims guessing
Where their inky darkness ended.

Wounds

In the recent monsoon
Our rivers felt as if
The mountains had bled
From fresh wounds
Their flesh has gone,
Across the green seas,
To the distant Chinaman
To fill out his bones.


(Iron ore exports to China in the wake of the pre-Olympics construction boom have left deep wounds on our mountainscape in the Hospet region)

The temple

Thinking never felt so good
Beads of perspiration glistened
While luminous peace arrived in spurts
Behind was electricity of high voltage
Words flowed steadily in thought
In fast disappearing streamlets
There was the power of fragrance
Of lighted camphor and tiny flowers
My people’s concentrated history
Flowed through these stone archways
Stone people who lived on forever
These are my own dearest kinsmen
My flesh and bones are made
Of the same powdered red rock
We worship the same granite god.


(At the Hazar Rama temple in the Hampi ruins)

The sister rocks

The sister rocks woke up
To the sun's golden touch
Their delicate fingers
Reached out, reaching,
Beyond the temple towers,
Into the translucent sky
Fond sisters they were
In close familial bond
Their smoky eyes filled
With slowly sun-melting dew
Their sisterly shadows
Lengthened luxuriously
Over night-weary shrubs
As hundreds of other shrubs
Were being set on fire
On the edge of their world.



(Two giant rocks in Hampi stand leaning towards each other at the top , their silhouettes looking like two fond sisters hugging each other . Hence the name “sister rocks “)

The Return of Beauty

Things remained unsaid
Over a long gap, a wide chasm
Beauty cried in torrents
Of words bereft of thought
Till the blazing March sun
Beat the history's stones
A midsummer celebration
Ensued with images galore
Beauty returned from the hills.

Happening

The breakfast is happening
Other things are happening
At other times and places.
There was this hum
That happened all the time.
A yellow flower popped out
From behind my ears
A syrupy sweetness
Pervaded my situation
A waiting, a painless hanging
The layers of the world
Piled one on the other
I mutated and became it
Of unrecognizable species.
Things keep happening
All the time, all the space
Nothing by me, whatever.

The woman

Her shoulders wildly swung
To the left and the right
Her body surged ahead
In the crowds ,above them
Life-force thinly transparent,
She emitted diode-rays
Feeling , thinking, making
She occupied all our spaces
Including our epithelial cells.

Breeze

I thought in words
A certain breeze
Blew in my being
I looked at the banyan
Its shadows played
With yesterday’s leaves
The words were leaves
My shadows played with.

Ashes

Then the drama continued
The words were spoken
From the guttural depths
Of a middleman’s throat
And washed by drops
Of sanctified water
The pursuit of silver
Went on in the waters
With sonorous words
Chasing multitudes of
Life-death shadows
The waters flowed silently
Over the rocks nurturing life
And its golden-brown ashes.

Beauty-tokens

It had happened too quickly
As though it needed to happen
Experience then sat on my brow
I remember the first cataclysm
When it had fortuitously happened
In the green sea of nothingness
When there were no words
There was all-around green fluid
My breathing was slow and rhythmic
My reaching out was tentative
Now again it is spasmodic, yelling
I want to reach out, my palms
Cupped in clumsy supplication
Then I did not ask to be born
As a mere chemical experiment
I do not want now to cease to exist
Merely as another cosmic event
Leaving a trail of flourescent words
Tell me quickly what I shall do
With the pretty luminous astral pieces
I have been garnering all these days.

Smoke

Beyond the grey hills
Thick white smoke
Rose in a column .
From my vantage
My glass eyes saw
Veiled habitations
Heard voices rising
In musical supplication
Drum-beats quickened
Existence went up in smoke.

Rhythm

The voice flows
Like clear water
Some times flowing
In thin trickles
Amid boulders
Made for it
And dying for it
Making music.
You want to make
Music of the spheres
Right here, in the way
The body crouched,
Amid polygonal shapes
Amoeba-like
And free flowing
Where is the rhythm ?

BE 

Be

The flowers spoke nothing
They waited patiently
For indifferent lovers.
Their rainbow colours
Briefly touched
The edge of the sky.
Their existence, however real,
Was close-ended
Being trapped in the sun.
Drinking moon-beams
As birds in the higher zones do
They want to be .

Airborne

Yesterday is not felt now
He that touched the core
Could feel it in the clouds
The trees were mere vapour
The breeze touched the treetop
The leaves rustled gently
The rocks were cream-coloured
A boy rose out of the tree
A mere speck of experience
A dot on white consciousness
Another stood on a stick
One more image tucked away
It did not matter what, when.
Consciousness streamed forth
In sleep and in wakefulness
Sometimes I do not remember
History of the mind, of the body
I recount experiences in a haze
Their chronology in a heap.
Today is another matter
Frail bodies floated in the air
They were the essence of things
A fuselage is in the making
The yellow bird will soon take off
But, alas, thirty percent weight is fuel
As we enter the sunset zone
Its elfish lightness will go down.
It will become a vaporous entity
Of tomorrow’s yesterday.

The wooden nymph

On a hot languorous Sunday afternoon
The nymph trembled under his touch
The finish of a half-formed symmetry
Was irritating and hurtful to the senses
See the crazy rebellious asymmetry
And the absurdity of the underlying ideation.
In fact, a different she had taken birth
In the anarchic aggregation of the artist’s mind
The wood is wieldy and the mind meandering
Everything changed so elementally, so quickly
These frequent changes are traumatising
How she wished he followed a structure
His freedom of mind violated her own
All this rising rebellion came to nought
She melted under his delicate touch
While submitting to his artful manipulations.

Poetry comes

Fleeting reflections and evocative images
Strike like moths in the first rains
At the dead of the night, they embrace
Their shadows on the frosted glass
The window –sill is carpeted with wings
The garden walk is strewn with
Innumerable carcasses of one-day glory
Where were the creatures the last season ?
Then the weather was warm and oppressive
It was only towards the vaporous evenings
That light rain kissed the fragrant earth
Nowhere was the north-west monsoon in sight
These fairy creatures crouched under the earth
With half-sprouted wings for take-off
This season it is entirely different
These are long wet nights followed by
Rich rakings of their gossamer wings.

The elephant-God

Before the onset of winter
Our dear elephant-God arrived
The beginningless God presided
Over every worldly beginning
Rising from the mud-peelings
Of our own Magnificent Mother
He laughed at the annoying
Asymmetry of the imperfect world
The moon mocked at his belly
That rocked with food and laughter.
The crowds cheered their clay-God
Painted in kitschy acrylic colours
And national pride was restored
Amidst cacophonous film music.

Jaws

We ruminate here , in this space,
With our highly flexible lower jaws
Making vigorous elliptical movements
A soft morning sun calls us out
From behind the General Post Office
A dark child , naked and shy,
Laughs from the ripples of the pond
“Cracker !”, shouts the girl in English
To the utterly lovable Great Dane
Who sniffs busily at the roots
Of the wide-spread butter-cup tree
Looking for a chance burial bone
These men and women laugh
For no particular reason , really.
They cannot help it , however.
They belong to the laughing club
Other people hurt yet other people
While everybody laughs for no reason
Endowed with a free lower jaw
Soon we retire to our caves
In our venerable teacher’s village
We cannot sleep yet, you know.
If we turn to the left of the bed
We fall to the Earth’s bosom
If we turn to the right of the bed
We remain suspended in the air
Like so much particulate matter
We have our frightening day-mares
We lie supine with wide-open eyes
Fixed on the wooden scaffold
A giant anaconda sleeps there
When it wakes from its slumber
Our jaws will come unstuck.

The shadow

First the silence of the hills
Echoed in my closed ears
As if they existed outside of me
The tall casuarinas called out
Yet remained chillingly silent
The valleys dripped with mist
The mountains lay noiselessly
Stacked one upon another
The eagle broke their silence
A shadowy figure smiled at me
Through the morning’s silence
These trees became gnarled
The salt had blackened their leaves
From out of the mangroves came
The growl of my own royal tiger
I have to conserve this species
Then came the sound of the drums
I have to preserve this culture
And the flame of my spirituality.
My body cried out for pleasures
My soul for otherworldly attainments
My poetry’s cadences became stilted
I have now become half-human
And demented , deprived of my logic.
He walks down the afternoon streets
In wooden slippers under a palm umbrella
Sending down gentle reminders
Can you not hear his footsteps
Down the rain-soaked streets and lanes
My unfinished jobs are many
I have yet to resolve my contradictions.

Phantoms

That night unhappiness struck
As phantoms of past hurts
Knocked at my midnight
At the unlit corner where
Awareness took a blind turn
I tried to think tall cedars
And tiny violet flowers
Strewn on the garden path
Sundials with quick hands
Full-grown Great Danes
Chasing winter shadows
Then my morning came soon
In the aura of the glass-house
And the luminescent spaces
Of the sun-lit bamboo groves.

The statue of Gomateswara

He interrupted us ,smiling,
In our endless dreams,
In the infinite space beyond
Where the eagles soared.
The earth came alive
Where his feet touched .
Thick conical leaves
Intertwined with his legs
To hide his splendid nakedness
From the sleeping world.
We felt small as if
We had to remain silent
While the earth came alive.


( The statue of Gomateswara , a Jain saint stands tall at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka- the world’s biggest monolithic statue constructed in the 10th century )

My child-God

In the dark I think of ways
Lateral and skywards
Then and now I think him
A tiny paper scrap
Holds all his secrets.
On its glossy obverse
There is a mystic mantra.
Behind it, he smiles
At first unfelt, unseen
His bejeweled child-feet
Touch the orange sky
As saffron pigtailed bearers
Swing his palanquin-cradle.
Beauty waves surge
Amid perfumed sticks
Yellowed holy rice
Sweet banana slices
Fragrant camphor flames.
Metallic discs meet
Fingers dance on drums
To feverish headshakes
Hair tousled,foreheads moist
The blue-sky child sleeps
Behind closed eyelids.

You

You


That night I thought of you in my dreams
That was , of course, an electrical impulse
Born out of a chance cloud-collision
Later the flowers were paper and of pink hue
The days were red-hot and the evenings weary
Thick green leaves glistened in the sun
Tunneling tiny translucent sky-spaces
I thought of you, again, in my daydreams.
When the brown cows returned with sun-patches
The dusty haze of their hoofs hid the orange sun
I had thought of you, briefly, in my cluttered mind
Before I moved on to my worldly business.

The Brihadeeswara temple in Tanjore

Beauty-struck, I returned empty-eyed
My hair all in a warp, my eyebrows knit
In a mock-enquiring way, logic apparent
The philosophy cried, the structures collapsed
The stones had a golden-hued finish
None of the multi-coloured modern kitsch
It was hunger in the belly, a king’s anguish
That caused the beauty’s exuberance
Up there it is giddy, the tower piercing the skies
These stone beauties laughed in the rain
Their skins had their lustre machine-done
The shadows do not fall on them of the sun
These stones had come from far, hoisted by hunger
When there was no hunger there was death
Death by the sharp-edged swords, pointed spears
There were these stone-houses full of grains
The king bought beauty for a handful of grain
As the God of phallus stood silent in the sanctum
The bells tinkled , beauty sprang from his loins
His magnificence broke through the empty skies

Sleep

This creature of the earth
Sleep-talks to himself
Nobody has heard him.
As the temple bells ring
The earth burns slowly
And goes up in swirls of smoke
These lights hurt him
But the smoke does not.
It is just like then
Of comforting mother-softness
Of all-around emerald aqua.
His limbs do not move.
Nor do his eyes see.
At the tunnel’s beginning
It is like what it was
When it all began.

Broken images

At eleven, beauty captured, I return
Consciousness streams in, with broken images
A motorcyclist touches the fringe of my existence
The Lord of the Universe secured my sanity
Images of wooden Gods, of a jungle neem tree
Interspersed with celebrations of celestial love
The theme remained of beauty in sandstone
Of its golden brown hues against the blue sky
Of a yellowed middleman between me and God
He , the omnipotent God ,seemed armless
His eyes were large , circular and lidless
He sees us unblinking ,in our absurdness
And in our countless follies and pointless fears
Another day’s images come crowding in
Of the vast expanse of a salty lake
And a multi-hued shrine rising from its depths
Celebrating a young bride’s watery death
How we tried catching orange suns
Lurking behind shattered mountains
While aliveness ate sea-aliveness since dead
Then blissful somnolence takes over
My hotel walls crumble and then the world .


( The images here are those of the Jagannath temple at Puri , the exquisite sculptures of Konarak and the magnificent Chilka lake . While returning to Bhubaneswar my car had a minor collision with a motor cyclist and some traumatizing injury on my head as a result of the sudden brake applied by my driver . The temple in an island of the Chilka lake refers to a legend in which a young bride drowns and becomes a Goddess installed in a temple in the island. The images of the orange sun refer to my efforts to photograph the setting sun from a stone crushing unit beside a mountain on the highway )

The skull-pot

I sit here on the precipice
With my feet dangling
In the dark abyss of time
On the far-line I espy
A pile of neatly stacked skulls
Of large circular eyes
With the mountain air
Hissing through them.
You see other skulls had thoughts
When their holes were eyes,
That wished no brains in them.
What did the old man think,
When lying on a string cot,
He saw the smile of death
Where the banyan met the sky.


(Pol Pot, the infamous dictator of Cambodia was responsible for the genocide of a million innocent people in the name of ideology )

Failures

These fearsome phantoms
Knock at my midnights
Consciousness flows by
And embedded in time,
I stand on its banks
Like a giant banyan
With an immobile future
Then the first scent
Of the mango blossoms
Whispers in my blood
The orange winter sun
Crawls out of the coconut frond
The sky above my house
Turns saffron and then white
Soon I give up guessing
Where the roof ended
And the white sky began.

Sunrise and flowers

In my nights of waiting
For sunrise and flowers
I look pain in the face
I struggle to think in flowers
And rising orange suns
My night then fizzles down
With its false props to pride
At five I wake up bleary-eyed
Trying to catch beach suns
Before they turn white.

Images in a train

They lived outside the pale of my existence
Just a few images that touched the fringe
“Hello image” :Mersault addressed Marthe
Just like only one of her other lovers did
The woman here was a mere image
The way her eyes flashed at her husband
As she changed the nappies of the child
The child swung in the cloth-cradle, gently,
Like a weaver bird swings in the fibrous nest
He cried , he gurgled ,he knocked about
A mere image in another image’s existence
Mersault knew Marthe was a mere image
Flesh-and-blood Marthe did not know this
This woman did not know she was an image
Only I knew she was an image ,like Marthe.



( Mersault and Marthe are characters in the Albert Camus’ novel “A Happy Death “. I was reading this novel in the train )

Prayer

We do not like it here on the earth
Our eager hands rise from our hearts
Our feet beat music out of the earth
But these shadows keep playing with us
Our music cannot break through the sky
We play our goat-skinned drums feverishly
We produce our living music from death
Our prayer hall is full of holes in the roof
We see fine particles playing in their beams
When it rains droplets from the broken sky
Fall into extended palms disturbing prayers
We do not like it here on the earth.

Fear of Death

Death crawled on the tender underside
The body threatened to explode in fear
Up there, on the first floor, you were alone
With sweaty fear between you and infinity
What seemed to matter was a dusty existence
Enclosed in divisions of space and time
In the cold cellar darkness touched your body
Smelling fearfully like yesterday’s death
There was death in the smelly dankness
These insects were creatures of the dark
Their life signified your ceasing to exist
We know their venomous bites would not matter
There is this mountain in exquisite morning light
Which will become the center of your self
And grant freedom from the flesh to the world.




(A poem written on a visit to the Ashram of Ramana Maharshi in Tiruvannamalai )

The Song

The sound settled on our core
Touching our conscious, our selfness
The body meant everything to us
Metallic music poured forth
From yellow discs in fevered rhythm
As our sepulchral child-egos rose
Our consciousness flapped its wings
We only rise once over the clouds
Our waxen wings melt too quickly
But our memories remain of flying.

At Sriperumbudur,
The birthplace of Ramanujacharya


What floated idly in our dreams
Incorporated our liquid selves,
Quickly , into its fluffy cotton clouds.
We are not we of our dreams
But just fleeting fragments of light
That roamed the silent inky night
To coalesce into daylight’s phosphorescence.


The luminous red-and-white chalk-lines
On our profoundly furrowed foreheads
Extended, over our tenement tops and temple towers,
Into an anarchic aggregation of scriptural argument
The truth lay, mainly, not in monistic oneness,
Not even in the dualistic separateness
But in the fiery union of the flesh with the spirit.



( The 11th century saint-philosopher Ramanujacharya , who had been born in this place, founded the Vishistadwaita school of philosophy , an enriched blend of the philosophies of Monism and Dualism which were prevalent then.

It was also here that Rajiv Gandhi , the young Prime Minister of India was killed , in 1989, by an explosion set off by a suicide-bomber of the Tamil Tigers when he was addressing an election rally )

Sideshow

Things happened here, flowing from me
The stage was set for my eventful existence
Other things happened elsewhere, other time
Couldn’t you hear the loud thump of my feet
Amidst the muffled creaking of bones
My world was self-defined , its contours pre-set
But my luminous eyes looked far beyond
The other small mimes did not matter
Only their laughter rang intermittently in my ears
As though they were the main shows
But now as the frilled curtain goes down
My closed eyelids belie my substantial existence
A cotton swab in my nostrils cuts off my air
There are other things,other creatures ,other shows.

Existence



The rain touched bunches of crows
Intermittently in the wet treetops
Stirring them from their half-sleep
Diagonally viewed from my hotel
Their caws deliciously defined my dawn.
On the earth spirited brown rain-moths
Went about their business like nobody’s .
I sit in the crowded ground floor café
Sipping brown coffee over a pastry
A white man came down with a thud
In the hotel lift, bright and gleaming
The white woman wore fresh and fragrant
Threads of strung jasmines in her hair
Just like the other ebony-backed woman
With luminescent flowers on her back
That black woman down there laughed
As her curled pigtail wavered rhythmically
This drizzle will not last the whole day
She had no jasmines in her matted hair
The rains here were so much like back home
The filth overpowering and strangely familiar
I look down on the world through the glass
Behind the blue-haze of the rain-curtains
From the sixth floor room of my hotel
Wondering if the twitch of that woman in red
Meant unequivocally that I actually existed.

The firangipani flowers



The firangipani tree bloomed
In my village temple compound
And where it hurt it bled milk
Just as it had done in my childhood.
I smelt God through the peephole
Of a child’s memory enclosed
By the fragrance of its flowers.



(The firangipani trees (also called plumeria ) are fairly common in temples in India and their flowers fill the temple precincts with a haunting fragrance. In Telugu they are known by a very evocative name Nooru varahalu (a hundred gold coins))

Alive in a train

It poured in bunches, quickening
Acacias that needed no quickening
Once in the train I cogitate on
Fevered awareness in my skin-pores
Heightened and hysterical
A youth makes small-talk over chicken-rice
Aliveness eats aliveness, recently dead,
I withdraw in pretended disinterest
And submit to forced sedation
Let eyelids fall smooth and unaware
Followed by forced ceasing of being
Like that piece of once-aliveness
Unkicking in an alive stomach
A griping baby howls awareness
Then thick curtains fall over the train berth
Today and I have both ceased.

The secret of Chidambaram



Nothing is clear, nothing whatsoever
What is deep inside the cosmic-embryo
Remains buried under consciousness
Where lies the tantalizing secret
As warm tears well up in the eyes
Imposing stone archways open one by one
The fog-screens fizzle down slowly
Only to reveal the ether of nothing
The Chidambara secret slowly unfolds
In the vaulting dome of a nothing-sky
As the primordial God dances in rapture
Whom neither fire singes nor poison burns
A yellow flame flickers amid pealing bells
Under a golden dome over empty space
It is the empty space that defies Time
Then three thousand God’s men flash across time
Their bejewelled women step out of the dome
With the flame of knowledge between their brows
And silver music on their dancing anklets.



(Chidambara Rahasya:
The Chidambaram temple (Nataraja temple ) is known for a Rahasya or secret (Chidambara Rahasya). Lord Siva makes his presence here in the form of space or nothingness (aroopam). Worshipping Lord Siva here appears to be more by imagination since one can never see an idol being worshipped. Nevertheless it is not entirely imagination since Lord Siva in the form of Space is worshipped here. This itself is the secret . The three thousand Dikshitars (Brahmins ) referred to are the original devotees of Siva whose descendants still run the temple .)

A blade of grass


I have never felt my loss of space
As I do now in these unaware moments
I cannot focus awareness on the winding road
The distant hill is covered in a blue haze
There is allaround oblivion felt in my unbeing
Only the other day I was a blade of grass
Today I cannot wave in the mountain breeze
Uprooted from my mother I do not know my being
Just like that hill covered in a haze of forgetfulness.

Reverse View

Up there a pair of keen eyes
An involuntary twitch of beauty
A taut screwing of eyeballs
Consciousness flowed this way
A white kurta, a speck of black hair
From behind the parapet wall
He sees me whole,flooding my being
My diagonal view is a rebounce
Consciousness reverse-flows
Reinforced by the fluid present
In horizontal ether-filled space
He happened half a century ago
While I exist ,here, in finite space.

Fever


I lie here , on this side,
A miserable ,reluctant host
They enter me, quietly,
And cling to the nuclei
Of my epithelial cells
Stirring up fevered passions
Beyond lies opaque space
Mysterious and impenetrable
Neither I nor they have choices
That is the way the script goes.

Fire and water
(A morning in Sivakasi* )


Stillness could not be heard
Only the the airconditioner’s drone
A shrill peacock-cry from the bell tower
Pierced my morning silence
The temple bell rang and rang
With its thick tongue in fever
Images , some fiery , some smouldering
Came dropping from the white sky
Clusters of acacias that had grown
Waterless under the skin of the earth
Spread their ghostly hair evenly
Into the rainless , blazing August sky
The girls with jasmines in their hair
Stood unblinking all day, in the hall,
Bringing fire into people’s lives
Dark sweaty men made balls of fire
Old ladies kneaded fiery dough
There is fire in their tired hearts,
In their minds , on their hands
But no water to quench their thirsts.

(Sivakasi is a town in Southern India which produces most of India's production of matchsticks and fireworks .Their business goes into boom during Diwali, India's festival of lights celebrated in Oct/November , when every man and woman in the town is engaged in some activity or other relating to production and supply of crackers to the rest of the country )

The Wishing Well

With my back turned
I hurl stones after stones
Into the wishing well
Disturbing the frog's sleep
In its libidinous dreams
My moon had fallen into the well
My pail could not bring it up
I continue to drop stones
Someday the water will rise enough
To bring up my beautiful moon.




(This Wishing Well is found on the hills of Yercaud in Southern India.The legend says that if you manage to drop at least one stone into the well ,out of three attempts, with your back turned on the well , whatever you may have wished will be fulfilled )

The blue kurunji flower



These questions came up early
Thoughts streamed in, interrupted
By a bizarre subterranean logic
They have gone away vacating space
Here, on the ground, there is brown space
Where there was a vaulting dome
The elephants cried then in streaming tears
Shuffling and stamping chained feet
I see a one-legged crow sitting, quietly,
On the cable that bridged vast silences
The only link between then and now
Between man and the rest of mankind.
We had gone into the depths of the forest
Looking for a blue kurunji flower
The flower of beauty and wisdom
That bloomed once in twelve years.
We returned entirely empty-handed
There was empty space everywhere
There was no kurunji flower in sight
That ebony-backed tribal laughed
And denied there was any such thing.
We do not believe him in our dreams
The old forest guard told us the last time
He had seen the tree in bloom this season
We shall wait for the next season
Twelve years will pass in no time
There will be magnificent pageants
In this space of time , right in this place
We shall barter our innocence for beauty.

The Hanging of a Child-rapist

A silver-locked man shook his head
That was a clinching moment
Darkness spread its wings
What was to happen , would.
The walls were closing in
Like they had been threatening
All these years , nights and moments
Their pale textures merged
Into the corners of his mind
The time has come to experience
Slow and painful unfilling of space ,
Sudden and abrupt ejection into Time
Just like that little girl, you see,
Whose piercing cries precipitated
His own descent into hell
On the other side of the glass wall
Her lips seem to be moving
He cannot read them, now,
The mists on the glass have thickened.

butterfly

Stinging, stinking caterpillar
Ate beauty-holes in our cheekoo leaves
And disappeared into
The rainbow outside our compound.

The Palm Trees in Our Village

These palm trees cogitate in groups,
Just as our mild-mannered cattle do ,
Casting their dark brooding shadows
On the limpid waters of our paddy fields
In the sowing season their shadows
Tickle our women’s delicate feet
Submerged in soft knee-deep slush
When our fields are shorn and brown
Our palms proudly sport golden fruit
This male one in the shadowy corner
Sports no fruits , only leafy extensions
We love it all the same for its gentle shade.

Our Pipal tree

Our moss-laden backyard wall played host
To hundreds of creeping-crawling creatures
A little Pipal with thick-green conical leaves
Spread its roots in its entrails leaving a crack
The widening crack soon became home
To a wild creeper with tiny red flowers
That set our entire backyard sky ablaze
The Pipal grew quickly in horizontal space
Little blue birds from far lands visited the tree
Hundreds of big busy black ants crawled
All the way to its top dangling in the air
Our proud Pipal swayed, blissfully unaware
That its burgeoning growth brought havoc
It is a matter of time before the crack widens
And the bricks give way spelling its doom .

Early Rains

 
 
In early spring our mango tree burst into flowers
And filled our verandah and our hearts with fragrance
As our swinging feet touched the translucent sky
By May tiny mangoes appeared in the dense foliage
Then , one dark night,when  we were fast asleep
The monsoon arrived with fierce wind and gale
Spoiling the children's fun and promises of sweet fruit
We blame this entirely on our cuckoo friend
Who brought in premature rains this season 
By persistent and persuasive musical supplications.

Yesternight's rain

 
 
Our dear hibiscus tree had stood upright
In wind and rain,not shedding a leaf
In the morning when we shook the tree
Tiny tingling raindrops fell like icicles
On our falling eyelids and outstretched tongues
Yesterday we were afraid of the fierce rain
Our dear tree stood between us and fear .

Windows

 
I try to open these windows
Their rusty hinges make creepy noises
As they open out , difficultly,
To endless vistas of light and shadow
The night queen bloomed below them
And I can smell the morning grass
Beyond the red-and-white saree
That hangs, dripping, on the clothesline
Amid shattered pieces of the summer sky.

A night in the Topslip forest

  
All through the stillness of the night
The wind howled in the bamboo clump
The bamboo bushes danced in rapture
In the inky darkness our searchlight beamed 
On  shadowy forms of  giant-sized bisons
Their luminous eyes stared in unconcern
The creatures of the wild refused to appear
A night safari was just not their idea of fun .
 

Corners

 
 
 
Those days we felt every corner
Light poured through them
A gentle breeze blew over them
The corners had their own soul
They were lying in a pool of light
Creating their own silhouettes
The jasmines whispered in the corners
Through soft jellied moonlight
Their fragrance held us in thrall.
Our old tiled house had its corners
Soft and purring like our family kitten
They cast such fine shadows
Dusky, deep and mysterious
We looked into our abandoned well
To fathom the depth of its corners
The water there was a mere shadow
The shadow of a reality that once was.
 

The Temple of Avinashi

 
 
 
I stand,here, on the night’s edge
I come face to face with myth
Mankind’s collective conscious
Through the hazy mists of time
I see images of life and death
And an evanescent human existence
A poet sang his mellifluous song
Of regeneration , of reawakening
A boy rose from death’s nonexistence
The Lord of Time and Destruction
Restores to the Creator his powers
Here, both the poet and the Creator
Have regained their creative powers
The crocodile emerges from the lake
Yet another image of life-in-death.

Stillness

 
 
 
He stands on the other shore
Beauty comes to us in waves
Up there , he rolls them , softly,
With hypnotising hand-motions
The morning is gilded and mystical
There are now only gentle ripples
I sit alone in the hotel room
My limbs stiff and my mind still
After several acts of inane tokenism
I have failed to synchronise
The movement of my body cells
With the music of his waves.




The decision
-----------------------



The night is advancing
The afternoon shadows
Have slowly vanished
We have yet to decide
Our future and theirs
The evening is full of
Uncertain despondency
Nothing is clear , not even
Where we stand in the scheme
Perhaps we don’t exist
Or, may be, we do
Who knows , who can tell
There is a gentle rustle
In the coconut frond
Our hand fans fail to
Stir the wind around
Outside , in the garden
The squirrel runs up the tree
Soon a half-eaten guava
Falls to the ground
This very moment
We don’t understand
We want to participate
We are unable to decide
Soon the night will be on us
The crickets will chirp
As if nothing has happened
The crows will retire
Noisily to their nests
As if a gunshot is heard
Over the trees and the rooftops
We have seen it all several times
And heard it from our fathers
This is not the first time
We are entirely paralysed
In our face and mind .

The roadside bathers of Kolkata

 
 
 
The water of life streamed
Through the broken roadside tap
The sun burned like a death-fire
On bodies, bloodless and charred .
The white cloth clung to flesh
Laying bare embers of lost hopes
Unceasing the water flowed
Onto the soap-lathered bodies
And thence into the foul gutter
If only time went reverse
These ebony bodies would love
To swim back to the safety
Of that primeval water body
From where they had journeyed here
A journey back from fire to water.

My father

 
 
 
Invisible is his presence
Ethereal,not unpalpable
On dark nights he acquires
The luminosity of an astral body
At Gaya the waters reflected him
As did the leaves of the pipal tree
I tried the Zen and thought-waves
He smiled through the clouds
The cloud’s shapes were
Mysterious and friendly .
Cant you see him there
In the morning , when the sky
Is bare of the white fluffy clouds
And in the blue distance
The mountains pile one on the other.
On the day of the holy bath,
He comes riding on the ripples
Of the sacred Godavari river
On the annual ritual day
The crow becomes him ,
Pecking at balls of cooked rice
At other times he resides in my dreams.

Knowledge is power

 
 
 
 
Yesterday evening, as on all evenings,
The banyan briefly dallied with the river
Its tiny red fruits floated on the waters
Glistening in the sun like rubies
The woman-bather, busy disentangling
Flickering stars of pieces of driftwood
From her floating amavasya-like hair
Took no notice of the fruity overtures.
The last ferry did not bring him
Nor did the five ‘o clock circular train
Which disgorged people in sweaty shirts
Onto the dusty Bagh Bazar platform
The mongrel got up from its disturbed sleep
Sniffing at the coal-smell left by the train
Went back to its sleep under the cement bench.
The beggars on the river steps ate their early dinner
And retired for the day on the platform
Somehow they had scintillating prior knowledge
That nobody was actually expected
On the train or by the ferry on the day
Or for that matter , on any other day.

A boat trip on the Ganges in Calcutta

 
 
 
 
At nightfall the pretty Ganges wore
A black sequinned satin dress and
A splendid necklace studded with
Luminous images of candle-like lights on the bridge
The flickering flame of the lantern in the boat
Refused to dance to the passing wind’s death-tune
Near the jetty stood a steel-and-wood monstrosity
Brooding over its unillumined loneliness
And its cavernous stomach ached with
The darkest secrets of the high seas .

Love

 
 
 
 
Flesh on flesh
Bone on bone
Eyes go astray
He that spoke
Also unspoke
The mornings
Presage grey
The evenings
Live up to them
Monochromatic
Experiences
As always.

The ageing film star

 
 
 
 
Then was different
Of different hue
And music.
Her eyes spoke
Of liquid love
Her leathery skin
A graveyard
Of skin-memories.
There are holes
Where were pools
Sadness unbecame
Then differently,
Now making way
For deadness
Through flakes
Of make-up .
Her eyelashes
Flutter like
A bat’s wings
Embers of selfness
Still smoulder.
Unreturned love
Yet another cover
For bruised ego.

Midday in Midnapore

 
 
 
The day sizzled as though
The Gods were angry
In the evening the sky opened
In electric anger hurling
Torrents of water through
Our hotel room windows
The windows were fragile
And too full of gaping holes
Alone , in the hotel room,
I thought a thousand things
The day's vacuous bits , inane images
An old heritage building
Overrun with wild vegetation
Can I have a replay of what
Happened then, the phantoms
From the past rising from the ruins
There was something delicious
In the air heavy with events
I heard the Kauravas’ war cries
Ferreting out Pandavas in exile
From their secret existence
Then a trigonometrical puzzle
On the hill everything appeared
To this speck of consciousness
Standing on the edge of time
As though one looked at a slice
Of life of what it was like then
Soon sleep came in waves
Demolishing the hotel walls and
My flesh-and-blood existence.

The River of Desire

 
 
 
 
On the banks of the River of Desire
The abodes of our Gods are empty
The Gods deserted our village long ago
Leaving behind all the sanctums
That crumbled through the ages
Their broken walls yielded fine bricks
For the masonry of our village homes.
The River meandered around our village
Threatening to swallow our temples
Our children have hunger in their eyes
We have no oil to light God’s lamps
The River now threatens to swallow
Our parched paddy fields and our homes.

The Bankura Horses

 
 
 
In Bishnupur our horses do not fly
Like the horses in the Sun-God’s chariot
Their long decorated necks look pretty
But break soon and dissolve into the earth
Our divine Mother’s head broke in splinters ,
In her father’s uninvited house .
Our crumbling terra cotta temples are Godless
Our temple ponds are now washermen’s ghats
Our gods no longer adorn the Dance Hall
To witness the divine ras leela dance
We now have potato cold storages , everywhere,
And our listless young men are playing cards
Under the shade of the ancient banyan tree
Our horses do not fly these days.

Through the keyhole

 
 
 
 
The key would not turn
I can see through the keyhole
A shadow playing on the wall
The shadow moves towards another
Until they both become one
Playing the same music
Of life and death
Of death-in-life.

Aasha's painting

In the beginning
There was chaos
Beauty eluded us
Lacking symmetry
Leaving us speechless.
Our sense of place
Being truly atrocious.
A prestine female form
Appeared from somewhere
Then another,close.
A shadowy dark form
An unmistakable scramble
For crystalline knowledge
Neatly bound volumes
To be crossed over.
A puzzling transcension
A necessary crossing over
Into the world of the dead
A conscious demolition of order
Then emerged tranquil Beauty
Leaving us breathless.

Songs

She sang all sorts of songs
Infused with meaning, at times
Celebrating ;at other times,cerebrating
She caught the essence of rhythm,
Some times bewilderingly different
As though the very nature of things
Could have been something else
And followed a different logical course.
There were so many other ways
Of penetrating the core of sound.

Mesmerised by alternative rhythms
Embodying other approaches to life
She wanted to change the course of history
And the uninterruped linear flow of life
Executing brilliant rhythm patterns.
How would one get at the Truth by
An artful manipulation of sound
Through a blind trial and error,
Or through an endless deduction
Which assumed no fundamental premise
A beyond-logic ,unpatterned rhythm ?

Her songs took abrupt turns and twists
They followed the Big Logic
But no rules of the human logic
But a beyond-logic derived from
The idea of cosmic creation itself.
Her dreams did not seem to end there
Slowly her canvas started coming to life
As the evening tapered off to dusk.
Why did she want to create and destruct
She randomly vivisected the image
As a restless child would do and each time
Ended up with a different face .





Each face was a harmony in sound
The rhythm of life’s logic was all there.
A random splash of resplendent colours
A digital manipulation of a puckered up face
Seemed to be approximating to Truth.
The essential Logic still eluded her
Being the original logic of the Grand Dream.
Did she know why the faces were there
Why we were here to begin with
What if the Dreamer stopped dreaming
Or the Cause did not lead to Effect or
One thing did not follow the other in time?

The night advanced slowly casting
Its ominous shadows on the faces
Outside her house the neem tree shook gently
To the gentle tug of a dreamlike wind
Rustling through its yellow autumn leaves
The sky rumbled vaguely in the distance
Soon silverlined clouds dissipated in the hills
The wind fizzled down in the night’s stillness.

The River

Long ago ,at the dead of the night
The waters rose and swelled
To the high embankment
And spilled over to the village.
The mountains calmly looked on
While a flying chariot-in-flames
Had sheared their edges smooth
Like the lines in the artist?s placid
Landscape on two by two canvas.
Upstream ,the river swelled with pride
As rain had poured into catchments
In the rugged Western ghats
Somewhere in the distant Nasik
The river is now bound within banks
Tamed by a manmade monstrosity.
There is now no excitement of spate
It is now so much brown sand
And thin streaks of shallow water.
These days funeral fires rage
On the hot sun-baked river-bed.
On the annual festival days
Tens of thousands of merry- making
Peasants and townsfolk ,alike,
Congregate on the brown sand
To celebrate God's birthday

The Juggernaut

We had stolen their God
From their deep jungle homes
We had needed Him more than them.
We then made Him in soft
Mahanadi river loam and in wood
From deepest deciduous forests
In our own absurd likeness
A pathetic approximation
To our imagined perfect God.


The holes of our eyes
Brimmed with salty tears
We had made Him so much
In our ludicrous likeness
Not knowing what He is like.
We then cut off His hands and feet
And removed His eyelids
He was still not unlike us
Smiling He entered our confused souls
And our cowdung-smeared homes
His burning chariot now trundles
Relentlessly over our fragile bodies .

Faces

He drew faces
On the city's hoardings
His brush touched up
Their cheekbones to new heights
They cast nebulous shadows
On the wrinkled lower lip
His own eyes were
Large semicircular sunflowers
Waiting for their butterflies
That would emerge only
After the flowers wilted.

In the wee-hours of the city
He pictured Time, perfectly,
On the murky banks of the Hooghly
Waiting in the discarded jetties
of its deceased jute factories.

The faces were all there
Jutting out unnecessarily
Refusing to go away
Their cheekbones swelled
In their bony hardness.
Their eyes were fetid fishpools
With a muddy sediment
Of decayed fish long since dead.
The faces were there, all of them
They occupied his space
There was no flesh in them ,
but only bones.

My fellow-passenger in the Train

The way she sat,cross-legged
With her eyes screwed up
She seemed to take a stance
But that was not a stance
Energy swelled within her
In waves after waves
Only to break, boisterously,
On rocky shores of bleak nothingness.
Her cell phone rang fitfully
Interrupting formation of pencilled shapes
Of her future textile creations.
Her shapes, not still forms,
But frenetically moving images
Sizzled and then vaporised
In split-second transience
Everything moved towards a stance
A fixed identity for her soul.
Her fabric brooked no such thing
The struggle was worth nothing
Exhausted,she went off to sleep.

The Tanjore sculptures

The Tanjore sculptor had his bronze dreams
His women needed such impossible bodies
They burned silently in blazing hell-fires
Their midriffs bore marks of mutilating suffering
Their globular breasts weighed down their hearts
Their eyes drilled into you in dilated horror
They loved him for his obsessive perfection
Castigated him for causing cruelty to their flesh.

The Tanjore Paintings

Women filled everywhere, spreading out
Their ashen faces and freezing stares
They broke through explosions of vegetable colours
On the centrestage, crying and laughing
They enacted several pantomimes
Their exaggerated eyes were pools of love
Strands of their hair cast mysterious shadows
On puffed up cheeks and elongated foreheads
There was this allaround woman-softness
Mothers , mistresses, maidens and all.

The fashion Parade

Swan-like , she floated exuding
Unthinking sensuous charm,
The eyes not once fluttered
Being pools of sad knowledge
Nobody noticed her lack of back
She never had it anyway.
The body never had it so good
Her perfume never smelt so fragrant
She wanted her hair, all in a mop,
To stand between her and infinity.
The smoothness of her limbs
Gravitated towards imperfect circles.
She took weird geometric shapes
Vivid colours, alabaster textures
Mind-boggling three-dimensional shapes
Jutting out , obtrusively, in space
Crying out in lack of harmony
Mysterious high-decibel sounds
Touching your feeling-innards
Harsh and jangling colours emerging
In painful dissonance in the inward being
She wanted the world at her feet
Her feet, high in the air, levitated
Gracefully in men’s hearts and minds
Her fame, heady and concentrated, formed
An amber magnetic field around her.

The Nilgiris , a leaf from the poets diary

In the blue mountains
Passions do not rise high
The mountains gently shake
Tall shimmering silver oaks off
The wind in their hair.
These fat matronly mountains
Squat pretty in the valleys
Wearing their best velvets
The air here is tea-fragrant
As magical woman-fingers
Pluck two leaves and a bud
And hurl them into baby-baskets
There is anticipation everywhere
Time here hangs lightly between
Sips of tepid C.T.C. tea .

Just the two of us .

We have lived our lives together
We will, may be , die together
Some times I looked into your eyes
While I was giddy and drunk
With the intensity of my passions
The images there seemed unreal
I thought you had taken birth
And grew up in a small town
With a clearly defined purpose
You would complement me everywhere
Follow the illogic of my own life
The fact is you never really cared
For the multitudes of explosions
That took place in my inwardness
Unaware of the chaos in my inner being
You followed your own instincts
Your sights were clearly set on
Things proximate and achievable
Deep within I resented your indifference
But now in the twilight I recall
The sparkle I saw in your eyes
Whenever I entered your room
Or when my name was mentioned
That will endure till our death.

The Taj

There is this woman-question, as ever
She shrieked out from the bowels of Time
Fluttering her soulless eyes in fiery anger
A megalomaniac emperor had embalmed her
And embedded her in cold marble vaults
The marbled beauty of the magnificent mausoleum
Smothered her inner self and left her cold
Just like this man’s fabled passion for her
A fourteenth child- birth was not for celebration
She had helped create his entity , lost her own.

Voices

Throughout the last season I heard disembodied voices
Unfamiliar and dissonant, taking my life’s oxygen away
This time around, sweet reason came back imperceptibly
When the jasmine bushes in our backyard started flowering
Symmetry in placement appealed to the inner logic
Spurning rebellion,passion-flowers bloomed extravagantly
Amidst persistent undercurrents of double-think, deep-within
Cliches still had no place , a rebel’s dementia disappeared
I actually looked forward to several dulcet tunes
These voices were of serene beauty , not of frozen death.

Death

He went just the reverse
In a splurge of light
A regression from entity
Through amnios to nonentity
A sudden violent breeze
Hit him in the solar plexus
And confused his senses.
Up there it is freezing
In the pores of your skin.
Temporal divisions disappeared
As did the flimsy margins between
Foggy myths and subliminal reality
There was an unfilling of space
Only an infinitesimal form
Close-ended, where he existed.

Choices

It is on a thin line that I exist all the time.
My hours and days become nights
And dissolve into endless time.
Clearly it was not my choice to exist
Remember, when I came into being
In the viscous amniotic fluid
My body actually started pulsating
Outside of my own free volition.
My birth was a cataclysmic accident
Now that I exist and occupy space
I cannot stop my heart from beating.


Outside, the eagle swirled thrice
In circular motions in the April sky
And settled down on the ledge
Of my nineteenth floor office room .
He looked at me nervously , aware of me.
His shrill eagle-call pierced the sky
As he took off towards the vault of the sky.
He swirled , once again, in circles
And swooped on the lizard in the bush.
Like me, neither of them had choices.

Creative Block

My mornings, these days, begin suspiciously
Like remnants of yesterday's rancid dreams
Words pour forth as though they are thoughts
I stand on the edge of my nineteenth floor room
In the same plane of existence as my eagle-friend
And shout them into the misty morning air
They all come back ,over the dregs of morning tea
As so many empty resolutions and so much semantics.

Images

Disjointed and derelict images
Fuse into my flowing consciousness
A dimpled beauty selling hotel space
A nest-builder mother-crow pecking
Green young mangoes hanging
Alongside April's burning morning sun
Suddenly a kurta-clad grey-haired woman
Bursts upon the conscious with abrupt violence
Her comforting presence in the airplane
Complementing,by her side,another woman
Who is sleep-walking,on her way,
Her head in her hands,to take charge
Of a mere body which once throbbed
In the deepest recesses of her own body
Disparate images , wide apart in time ,
Flow into my sleep and then out of it
Sometimes straying into my wakeful self.

this is no poetry

these thickset days
are fizzling down
quick, especially


in the night air
the eyes bespeak
atrocities , unspeakable

the sound of leaves
whizzing through the thick
morning air, leafing


pages in weighty scriptures
ambivalent answers to
disjointed questions, unasked


celluloid horror
of a twelveyear-old girl
lying spreadeagled, shrieking


you lie spreadeagled in
the Mumbai-Hyderabad overnight
Volvo sleeperette ,re-living

what all are the horrors
in the suburban train
three living-dead humans
watching a twelveyear-old
dying of love.