May 2012
2 posts
Morning
The lake shimmered through the shanty on its edge with a woman sitting like a tree. There was foam in her mouth cleansing the night. The sun shimmered beyond her on the lake, like the glint in a child’s eye. The shadows played on the tree softly from the trees on the edge.
This side there are houses everywhere in lake spaces.People in place of water.and in place of rocks. It is as if...
I have buried all my hatchets
The grass connects your body through toes wiggling to life in a black muddiness imparted by grass water. Cut grass turns tiny whorls of hair knotting around your thumb as if they were the hair of middle aged spinsters thrown out of the window in afternoon combing.
Back in home of childhood, boy roams the morning looking down for abandoned currency notes in the grass. On the off-chance that such...
March 2012
12 posts
Stonehenge chairs and laburnums without dogs
In the morning I saw tall towers of white plastic chairs stacked on the park grass like they were Stonehenge.There had been a public meeting in the park the day before. Hence Stonehenge.
A bunch of ladies occupied my grass for a new yoga class of ladies. The ladies were persuading others in the park to go their yoga way. A movement, they say is spreading across the country towards fitness. Is...
Death in Facebook
Yesterday was the birthday of a friend who had died a year ago but his Facebook pretends to be celebrating his birthday. I too have celebrated it , not with a happy birthday wish but with just remembering. I pretend he is still around. He may not be playing Farmville and pestering others to join. But for me he is still on the other side of the cyber space. An open-ended presence in...
Grass words
In the grass again its blades are familiar to the foot, soft on the underside and gently yielding. They provoke thought in words carelessly thought, but leading to essential meaning. A man in the bench is drowned in words, words that issued from his lips flowing from a newspaper. Newspaper drowned him in words,his pants reeling under the tyranny of its middle spread. Papers spoke through his...
The middle eye is now large
The cricket had fallen silent for two days near the park trees. I now hear it back again, this time like the creaking of a tree wood in the wind. On the passing tree I see a big black ant making its appearance for the first time.In the next rounds of walk I look for it. Actually look for it ,till it became an obsession with my eyes, heavy with uveitis, an inflammation of the middle eye. The ant...
She did not die too much
A river bank had beckoned from afar , beyond domes of haystacks that rose like temples and palm trees that stood in lines on paddy field hedges. A girl who died to the river bank would have her ashes added to its flow. This girl of woman had always greeted me from a child’s mind that recognized a kindred spirit acknowledging the truth of an invisible connection that existed between us...
My people
After I had got up this morning I remembered a scrap of dream in which I wanted to be with my people, the dream people who bore a distant semblance to the childhood creatures who had populated my universe . A world view about grown men from the puny height of a kid. From a diagonal view of an adult’s face from a child’s. My goodness, why do I get mixed up in my mind about realities...
The night cricket that forgot it was morning
The grass was soft, silky but not wet. Today there is only light ,no dew. Yesterday’s little paper planes the kids had made out of literacy pamphlets have flown or their debris has already been cleared after yesterday’s crashes.
Where the tree began a new sound was born of a night cricket that forgot it was morning.In my future rounds it would cry out, in a staccato rhythm, as I...
Milking thoughts
The squat milkman ,who must be smelling of milk from polyethylene bags is performing daughter’s wedding.He has milky dreams for her. We wondered if he got the milk for the wedding free. In the evening he is bursting crackers in the sky, lighting a moonlit night with color. Besides, he is bursting his sky with humongous sound .His eyes are bursting with milk dreams. He is simply bursting....
Feet on the ground and other lowly thoughts
The mornings are pleasant on the park grass but the bare armed man is still making weird nose noises .A new addition is an old man whose throat seemed to somehow manage to reverberate with “om” .Something like the mountain calls you make as children which will always come back to you , ripple after ripple. The grass is good on feet . But the feet become cracked like a looney ,its...
Euphoria
In the morning pretty yellow laburnums burst upon your consciousness as you look up and a gentle breeze touches your skin, the way it touches the laburnums. We said “burst” with an element of violence in it. It is as though you are sharing a euphoria with the flowers and the sky. Come back to the room, turn on the air-conditioner to face a steady draught of cold breeze on your skin....
Birds of passage
This morning new leaves sprouted in light green on the tamala trees .Actually I have just noticed them.All tamala trees went light and green in unison across the street. Not counting the round dark green leaves of another tree in between. A light green parrot cried from an arboreal presence not seen, not felt. The cuckoo is frantically jabbing its needle in a summer morning’s silence but no...
Death is a dream,a moving of words away from...
A super world is where I just write ,seeking meaning later. Or finding meaning first and moving words away from it. Such is the stuff of dreams. Because meaning detracts from dream. Poet’s dream is within a dream , contained in words. A raven waiting in the skylight. A shaft of sunlight striking the floor obliquely. Aldous Huxley’s wife is trying to make poetry of his death. And...
In the morning
In the morning I go around the trees and gently tap them so they do not feel lonely. The man on the bench flaps his hands as if he is calling white birds from a far sky . Then he gyrates to the music from his pocket, in violent jerks of the midriff. He goes to the park wall and imitates the sounds of a wood-pecker on a tree bark. In between he triangularly drinks from his Bisleri water bottle....
February 2012
7 posts
A hundred gold coins
In the evening, the summer appeared to begin gently with no harsh tones, just a soft a tender sunlight on trees and stones. Trees and stones co-existed in the ambient light even without a unifying camera light from my hands. It was as though I had the camera in my hands before I saw God . I could not have had a camera in my hands because if one has a camera in the temple premises the sign there ...
The grass walk
In the grass walk I trampled on my laughing friends but they got up laughing all the time. The trees were friends whom I failed to accost but then I would walk between two trees every time in my “8” walk and would some times gently tap on their barks in a most friendly touching manner. I did not fail to notice the first laburnums of this season on my tree. Back in Bhopal I had made a...
Shapes of sounds
The morning was a pleasant concern with pipal leaves, their conically shaped needles piercing space in between grass-heads. The shapes were many, some conical but some shapes resembled sounds, being derived from them as bare feet scrunched their brown crispness. I asked what was the shape of a pipal leaf, fallen to the ground in autumn, whose needle edge ,when green made a funny sound when we...
Cats
Tengo got down at the rail station of a town of cats. There was something secretive about the way the cats went about in the town, thanks to the rubber pads they had in their paws. Like them Tengo’s father was a cat with rubber feet and he made no noise when Tengo’s mother allowed her lover to suck her breasts. A brief moment that was the only picture of his mother in Tengo’s...
Grass-footing
You leave your sandals near the bench and stake claim to the grass around. Like the other man, bare-armed and with a water bottle aslant against the sky pouring water in the throat. Triangularly drinking. Lays claim to bench in bare arms,making nose noises.
I acknowledge. I leave my sandals near the other bench. But triangular drinker goes.
Look, there is another one, a grass-footer. A snake on...
Let the grass grow over our feet
By 8 A.M. the grass is bathed with warm gold of sunlight, the silver of morning dew gone. Feet walk less briskly in the sun’s warmth. The park has a rarefied air of just three souls by now,one in the northern corner,making nose noises,the second speaking into phone on the green bench.The third is the speaker with poetry in mind.
Three girls zip across the park,from gate to gate,like...
January 2012
2 posts
Shapes
In the bare foot grass walk there is solitude buzzing in the ears. The dew on the grass seeps through your feet into your being. That is when you look downwards and you see shapes.
A plastic carcass of a dog lying on the grass unburied. A rubber hemisphere of a child’s ball. A tiny red flower, its petals lying strewn around. Peanut-shells around a green bench. Peanuts like kidneys. Shells...
The day the sun was born
Today is the Sun’s birthday, when we worship him in his chariot of seven colors. His chariot had this guy driving, who has no feet. But the seven horses shall move on towards the equinox, when day and night are of the same length, on our little leaves taken out fresh from our vegetable creeper. There is the spring dew, bird calls of morning and a few caterpillars yet to turn butterflies....
December 2011
5 posts
Mothers of dead sons
In the evening a soft sun was still hanging above the apartments on the other side of the lake as it shimmered from a clearing on the bank. We talked of a mother of a dead son, speculating whether a bond continued to exist between the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law. Did she matter to son’s wife, after the son had gone? After the link between them has become conspicuously absent, I...
Stones in the sun
The chemistry of a winter sun goes well with history’s rocks and the gnarled trees of yesterday’s leaves. Stumps of fallen trees sprawl in the rocks of history as men make their way up on polished stones of time’s footfalls. Up there is a red temple to an ancient mother alongside brown boulders warm with tender sun. The trees shake with birds chirping like the voices of children...
Are our bodies more than stuff?
A celebration takes place for a child of one year’s birth. We gather our cakes and candles A certain old man waxes eloquent, proud of his new grandchild . Some loud music, a little child magic, a piano shown off with a learner’s music.
Snacks are varied and eclectic. The child will now enter the preschool in the land of the sheikhs. The old man, proud of his three houses,...
Star dust
The news came in the morning. A young man who had on the previous night pointed the stars to his daughter found himself turned into one .Forty four was no time for turning a star. Look at the Mars, burning brightly, he had said to a wide-eyed daughter. In the morning he was found absolutely blue. The heart stopped at approximately 3 A.M. trying to gauge the depths of an astral sky.
Did he...
Vertigo
These four days I have been trying to grapple with vertigo, a frightening thing with the head when the world spins without your asking for it. It spins like a top, like the globe-earth in the ocean of emptiness that the boar-God carried on his tusks to save it from the apocalypse. Of course the spinning was in a movie we saw when were still in knickerbockers. It spun like the model earth-globe...
November 2011
13 posts
Evening in the park
One could go there for random images, vignettes from life, stories in the making. Faces tell stories, the way they wince, pucker up, smooth their hair. Some times the way they walk,crouch,and bend backwards.
Some times faces gather up the setting sun, when their wrinkles become deep trenches around their red mouths, full of expectation and reality.
You enter the park ,making...
Sitting in the balcony
When you are behind a balcony parapet wall, the day sounds as if of the sky with all its colors and smells.The sounds come filtered in the opacity of a middling wall ,on which stand majestic plants, embedded in the earth of pots, but equally proud of their lineage under the sky.
Tiny saffron roses, four of them, sit huddled together in the breeze.They draw their inspiration from the distant...
The carpenter
The proud carpenter quickly vanishes like the turpentine he uses on the wood surfaces .His words sound hollow like the half-made skeletons of cupboards he has left incomplete on the stair-case ,gaping at the morning sun day after day. The sun enters their domes as though they are cavities waiting to be filled with matter.
His body sloshes with drink, breathing like hospital. His body...
Head cold
A niggling headache cannnot be cured by thinking away from it. A swig from an old monk may help. All I have is a tall bottle of french brandy, supposed to work against head-colds. A plain anti-histamine seems to work better. So be it. The tablet p.c. is exciting. Stories abound. But one only gathers them like one does parijat flowers that fell to the ground in the night. When will one make a...
Between uncle and nephew
At the end of the room was my uncle who seemed as if in a trance. He had made it to this place for a land sale, after doing a train journey of 500 kms. on eighty year old knees.
He who always spoke now listens.His unspoken words echo in the hall ,side by side with inane small talk between us. The words are stuck in his puffed up cheeks. And the eyes are unable to say them, bogged down in the...
Buying a Samsung Tablet p.c.
In between we buy a Samson Tablet. At the plaza where glitz spills in the hall and the corridors of efficient silence.
The tablets abound in stories. Stories of a prude Helmer and his wife Nora ,trying to echo feminist cries in the nineteenth century. Stories of giant insects one finds oneself transformed into. A metamorphosis.
The cold weighs you down. In the head, a brandy might help...
Warm at the new house
It was a warm night, warmed by words addressed to gods. The gods would bless the new house, in the eleventh floor apartment, when the priests called them down one by one by sacred words. The words would ward off evil spirits . The party was warm and convivial. From the balcony we saw rows of luminous blocks . They had balconies where long drapes of colorful sarees shivered in the wind. Some...
News at the barber's shop
At the barber’s shop there was this talk between my barber and a watchman customer. A man murdered his wife after seeing a few missed calls on her mobile. Missed calls meant affairs of the heart outside the marital framework. Fidelity to partner suspected.
Missed calls are made to check if the coast is clear.
But not all the missed calls are made by paramours, I thought in my head.
Here...
When communications reached their lowest point
In the train it was still night and sleep. At four, the train softly flowed in the night holding out a promise of home by eight. That was when communications reached their lowest point.
The mobile phone suddenly jumped from my pocket into the sink-hole and slid into the dark depths of a running night. Apparently it was time to part company with my phone. Looks like I have to build a new...
The Shiva temple
At the temple we saw tiny star-shaped tortoises in a steel basin, scaling their way up its sides. When we were kids we were treated with the sight of fully grown tortoises gently crawling the temple premises to our delight. Now there are stars of kid tortoises wiggling in a steel basin.
Doesn’t God ,in his phallic form, love them? That is what we thought then. Shiva loved tortoises,...
Poor man's chariot
We returned here by the poor man’s chariot. The poor man’s chariot that spurns real poor men, who do not deserve the air-conditioned comfort of a long distance train .In one sense it is a poor man’s chariot . Considering the low tariff of around Rs.500, for a distance of around 500 kms., the poor man actually bears the burden of our comfortable travel. There seems a heavy...
Justice for the deceased
In the yellow light and some green trees we tried to recall a life once lived ,here in the court of justice arguing for others.
Arguing for one self, for one’s own living. A lawyer’s life well lived and loved. Can one remember a soul that is lost to us by a few law books kept in the library for future lawyers? Large trees overhang. Shadows loom large. A library is waiting to be...
Rows of lights
This day , four years ago, in Bhopal, we had stood in rows after rows of lamps around God’s pillar, looking for mirrors of lights in people’s eyes. We saw the pipal tree, up above, lighting with new found love for white birds that fluttered in half-sleep. High above the pipal shone a soft full moon overseeing a thousand lights. The moon stood on the brass pillar like a bright lamp...
Experience
I prefer watching the animals on television
A mind says, to watching them live in the zoo
Because animals in the zoo smell really bad.
You are analogizing a whole experience
With a copy of its part, says other mind.
Television animals do not smell bad
But are animals that please the eye
Mind explains, minus the real mind.
But are they cuddly, surrogate children?
Asks the scintillating...
October 2011
29 posts
Captcha
Captchas dehumanise you as they are trying to find if you are human. One can always find crooked writing ,if it has the faintest resemblance to letters but they are like the Muni Ashtavakra who has eight crooks in his body. It takes quite many efforts to unravel their identity. The trouble is that the page does not refresh at each change, if the earlier effort is not successful. The captcha is...
Feeding milk to snakes
The fourth day after the festival of lights the snakes appear deep in their pits waiting for our milk and worship. The women pour turmeric and milk on the pits.The snakes inside the holes receive them on extended tongues and bless them with more children. The pits were built by industrious ants but their holes are now houses for snakes.
Just in case the snakes are still sleeping inside the...
Our morning with God
As I turned the corner I saw this man exchanging confidences with a flower tree. He had three lines on the forehead , aspiring for God. His confidences were about God, plucking white flowers from the tree’s darkness. He embraced it for God. He floated on it like a flower.
He eye-contacted me for God. My own flowers were parijats that fell to the earth ,their white faces down and their red...
Three Gandhi monkeys
In the evening the whole of this relatively new residential area collects at the “center”, a local name for a busy intersection. Many people do not have any business to transact at the center but merely collect there for “time pass’. Some sit on the road divider, on the grass near the water tap ,which says “ warning : do not drink this water” . Some sit...
The chicken situation
As we passed the chicken shop in the morning walk, we heard the wails of the chicken coming from inside. The morning mood went poof. We imagined wails but they were not wails, just cries from inside the coop, for the sky. To the top of the fences where they would be found shouting what a glorious morning!
But what about the medium term future of the birds when their necks would be wrung for...
The carpenter and our guilt
The carpenter who had changed our bathroom door had played hooky for a month or so when we tried to bring him back to fixing the other bathroom door. Finally we had to get another to do it.
A state of anger towards him had remained in us for a month till it faded away. This morning we got the news that his younger brother had died of electrocution while handling the electric drill when they...
Kitsch for kids
A new building for a play-school named bachpan (childhood) is ready, wearing the color plumes of a strange bird. The colors are mixed and re-mixed like noisy music, generally breaking drums.
The school stands alone among other buildings, like an artificial parrot telling your fortune from a stack of printed cards. The options presented are fixed but covering all possibilities. The color...
Protests
We were trying to probe the mystery of the dark ringed spots on my wife’s skin. A certain hormone under-performing ? A case of hypo-thyroidism? Let the blood tell.
The girls ,in the doctor’s reception ,were giggling. We wondered how silly their joke could be.
The young doctor found the pulse under-performing.
In the meantime the pretty red spots are lying low, under a...