My Piece of Red

Landschaft (1935)

 by Emil Nolde 

The red sky

Framed in my

Night-time window

Is sometimes

A piece fallen

Out of a childhood nightmare.

And sometimes

A suffocating

Expanse

Of erased stars

And swallowed air crafts.

Sometimes,

It is so still

It seems it is sore

And taut in pain.

Sometimes,

It is alive.

But barely.

But it is almost always

A dull red.

Like blood

Of a long long time ago.

Dalhousie Dawn

In the early morning

When not even the sun had paid this hill town a visit

I woke up to mountains

That were a soft molten blue. 

Not rock solid with sharp peaks or edges

But gentle in form

and fluid in stance

Almost like calm waves formed on the surface of a benevolent sea.

The tips of snow rising above the rest like the foaming heads of the incoming tide.

While the smaller hills

Bowed low in reverence.

I traced their lines from this side of the window

Running my finger across the cold glass.

Miles away

Did I not just see

The mountains shiver at my touch?

Rippling delicately as I floated along? 

City Trains II

But sometimes

You are also

A moment outstretched

Of solitary thought

Between where I came from

And where I am going

A chink in time

To slowly

Leisurely

Think things through.

Things that otherwise

remain unthought.

Like whether we are really headed somewhere.

You and me.

Oh mighty metallic centipede.

City Trains

Under the El 

by J. Reedy

Are we really headed somewhere?

You and Me

Oh mighty metallic centipede.

Or are we merely 

shuttling back and forth

like an abandoned broken toy?

A Rare Catalogue of A Merchant of Lights

A quivering fluorescence of a firefly

Once trapped in a child’s palm

Let go into the sky.

A drop of a heavenly highlight

Bounced off from a lover’s cheek.

An aged paper lantern

Turned saggy-soft over the years

No longer a winter white

Glowing a creamy-buttery glow.

And an unsteady pool of torchlight

Still making its way through

An endless midnight rail track.

Amma

Grandmother and Granddaughter

Anna Archer

It has not sunk in yet.

Just that, there is a silence

Where there was once a voice.

An absence in a room

Still messy with her odd things.

And all those memories.

They are hung suspended

Like photographs dangling in a dark room.

Dim. But full of stories.

Let me pick one at a time.

And go over each one

As slowly as I can.

v   

In the very first photograph of my childhood album, she is seated near my cradle. Both she and the cradle are bathed in a blue tint. And out in the balcony to the right of the frame, there is a burst of warm sunlight. Her watchful eye is resting on me. A half empty cup of tea lies at the foot of her chair. There is a sense of a pleasant breeze circulating through the blanket I am tucked under. And if you look closely, she has half a smile still lingering on her face.

v  

I am huddled under the transparent glass top of the dining table. From above it a wrinkled but soft hand reaches out with a morsel of food. As I try to dodge it, she too changes her strategy. She takes off into one of my favorite stories. It was one of those million little tales from the corpus that was the Ramayana. It was the tale of Hanuman and the demoness Sursa.

As Hanuman flew to the gates of Lanka for his divine mission, he confronted the large and terrifying demoness Sursa. Sursa was guarding the doors to the city and anybody who wished to enter it, had to pass through her mouth. Of course, Sursa was a sly one, and she would hardly let Hanuman get off so easily. She thought instead, that she would swallow him whole, and that would be the end of trouble in Lanka. But Hanuman was not to be fooled. He accepted mighty Sursa’s request, but asked her to accept him in his complete dimensions. And on will, he inflated himself, into a bigger and bigger size. And correspondingly, Sursa too, had to keep widening her mouth to be able to gulp him down.

And as she toke on the role of Hanuman, puffing her mouth and stretching her arms wide, I could not help but carry on the play. I became the mighty Sursa, tempted with hunger for this messenger of God. And my mouth too opened up nice and wide. And just then, with a swift movement of the hand, the clever Hanuman, slipped in the morsel into my mouth. I proudly gobbled what I imagined was the great Hanuman captured in my mouth. Yet it was she who always won the game.

v   

She has inscribed in me a whole set of beliefs that won’t go away even if I try. Well now, I hardly want them to go. I carry them within me always. One of them slipped out of me into the open as I sat with a friend in a café. For some demented reason, we were making twisted faces at each other. And suddenly I gasped in horror. “No. No. Don’t do that. It’s breezy today. If your twisted face catches the breeze, it would remain like that forever. Seriously.”

v   

Pomegranates. She fed me those very often. As a child, it is a tough fruit to eat on your own. The intricate peeling. The million tiny gems that either scatter into a frenzy, or get stuck to the hard skin, and refuse to come apart. Thus she did it for me. Squeezing each juicy globule into my mouth and flinging the seed in her own.  

v   

We fought a lot. Usually, over the television remote. She lay on the cane sofa, and I dumped myself over her legs. She needed a human press for her aching legs, and I got a soft, undulating, bean bag like throne. And in this strangely choreographed co-existence in our drawing room, we switched between our preferred shows.

v   

One of her most precious possessions was her sewing machine. It roared and rattled through the day. It often woke me up from my afternoon naps. It bred a bed full of cut and uncut cloth, a paraphernalia of scissors, buttons, needles and threads. But it also patched up each tear we endured. And gifted us tenderly crafted new clothes once in a while.

v   

I miss her. Her glares. Her rhymes. That sharp smell of mustard oil in her room. The holy ash she smeared on my forehead as a blessing at the start of each important day of my life. The laughs she shared with me. The tears she let me see. The crazy love that we shared. From the beginning of time. 

Dwindling Words

Meloncholy (1894)

 Edvard Munch 

There was a time when there was no room for silence.

Words poured one after another in a frenzy.

Now, do you sense like me

That they are dwindling?

Slowing down.

And leaving gaps.

Filled mostly with sighs.

Not all sad

But not all happy? 

Basant

'Girls Flying Kite'

 Kulu Folk Painting

 18th century Himachal Pradesh, India

Photo source: Pinterest 

Happiness incarnate
is a bunch of kites
dancing in the wind.

Manacled and maneuvered
by human hands
and made directionless
by the playful breeze.

Held captive between
two indomitable forces
of heaven and earth.

Look how they find
a moment of ecstasy
to dance their happy dance.

A Monsoon Memory

 Last year's diary entry revived in memory after a dear uncle gifted our home, this beautiful Kashmiri carpet. 

Roads are built and rebuilt each day in my city. The drilling. The dust. The frozen traffic. The clusters of brown glistening bodies moving about over eroded pieces of land. There is an incessant mechanical drone and a drab grey mist that envelopes your entire being. So much so, that it never really leaves your system. The noise,  the dirt, the sweat seem to seep right into your skin and stay with you, making each of us look a little more tired, a little older than what we ought to.

It was a day like all others. My rickety auto rickshaw along with numerous other vehicles on the street were stalled by such a road repair feat. As I waited impatiently for the traffic to start moving again, I noticed beside me, the endless concrete grids that formed the skeleton of the new road to come.

This was a fairly familiar sight. The uniformly constructed, vacant, concrete squares. Drying to form harder, coarser insides to sustain all the weight and pressure of the city. But these grids had something unusual about them.

Unlike most other streets in Mumbai, this one has the sweet fortune of being lined by tall flower-ridden trees. Moreover, the city had just dipped itself into the early showers of June. The breeze too was rather generous these days. It must have been at some invisible hour of the previous night when the wind had brushed the trees off their delicate yellow flowers and strewn them all over that lifeless spine of the street.

I sat, transfixed for quite some time, gazing at all those hitherto colorless and empty squares now filled with a fine layer of yellow flowers. Luckily, nobody was trying to remove them. The glistening bodies carried on their work as usual. And the flowers kept settling deeper and deeper.

Now, every day as I pass by that street, I smile to myself thinking of all those millions of flowers forming an invisible but fundamental layer of the ground beneath our feet. In between layers of hardened concrete, the memory of those soft and fragrant flowers gives me a renewed strength for another day in the city.

Knots

  

The last bell rang, nice and long, trilling with a cheerfulness of a young bird having taken flight for the very first time. It would only take a few more minutes and the gates of the school would be pushed open to make way for the sparkling waves that would spill out of the red-bricked convent premises.

The second graders always ended with a session dedicated to fitness and meditation on Thursdays. This new addition to their curriculum was a curious mix of clumsy martial art kicks and punches and a vague summing up with sleep inducing breathing exercises. For some of the girls, it was two hours of additional play, ideal to release any left-over energy saved up from the not long enough recess.  For some, it was endured indifferently like the moral science and EVS classes. But for Tutul, it was nothing less than a dread. Not so much the class itself, but the return from the exercise hall back to her classroom. You see, this class demanded Tutul to shake off her tightly bound canvas shoes and jump and hop, stretch and balance, all on her puny-pale bare feet. That much she was used to. Why, that’s what she did at home all evening. Actually the matter was not in fact her feet. The matter was her shoes. More so, the treacherous laces that snaked around devilishly over her shoes. They lay sprawled teasingly. Not how they were supposed to be. Not how they were pulled and tugged to sit by her father in the morning. She walked back to the bus slower than usual every Thursday, making sure she does not trip over those tentacles growing out of her little feet.

Tutul hated knots. Of all kinds.

There were those that magically formed in the depths of her bushy hair each morning. They were for the most part invisible. But they would spring to the fore painfully, as her father ran the sharp toothed comb through her hair.

Then there were the knots of her pajamas that refused to budge when she wanted to go pee so bad. Which string were you to pull for salvation? She always chose the wrong one. And the knot tightened its angry fist into a ball of stone.

And how could she forget, her brother’s tangled earphones. It was rare that she managed to steal them from him. But when she did, by the time, she had sorted out all those stubborn twists and turns, to allow a smooth and blissful moment of music, her brother would already be on her back and would snatch it from her hand. 

And as she grew up, the knots only proliferated more and more around her.

Some she encountered each day on her travels in the crowded city. The kind that was at every other junction. A giant knot of smoke exhaling trucks and buses, cars and motorbikes. She wondered how they got so chaotically tangled. Sometimes there was a patient man who would slowly and painstakingly, with the concentrated and noble air of a classical orchestra conductor, try to disentangle the many threads jamming the road. But almost always, the symphony created was a harsh blaring of impatient horns and angry howls. And through all this, the knot remained intact, all of us, tightly bound in its grip.

But there were those that kept getting more and more oppressive. These knots cropped up in her friendships. And in her love. Taking root in misunderstood silences and growing stronger with careless words. These too, In spite of fierce battles with them refused to budge. And then she saw, on some days, and most nights, as she stood before her mirror, the darkest knots creeping upward from her neck and spreading all across her face. She watched herself carefully with a melancholic resignation in her eyes, running her fingers over the crisscross of dark strokes that shone through her pale skin.

But at uncertain times like these, she also sat by her high window and blinked at the blinking city lights. And slowly but steadily, a humongous and beautiful patchwork of knots illuminated itself before her. It lay sprawled defiantly and with a rugged pride for miles and miles below her. A confused tangle of wilting towers and dusty foliage, of lonely corners intersecting brimming highways, of clouds of dust kicked up into the universe and a stagnant pool of water holding most delicately a perfect half-moon in its breast.

And for that moment, however brief, she with her knotted insides and the city with her own, they sat together like friends on their way home in the bus, tired, but resting on each other’s shoulders.

Day at the Studio

Long Shot

A neon green world

smoldering under a horde of suns

choked in red-black wires

struggling to tell a story.

Setting the Stage

Perched atop a towering ladder

a brown sweaty body

screwing a yellow light in place.

Down below a small caked man

layered with powder and pride.

Frowning and fidgety.

Waiting...sipping lemonade.

The Green Room

A large tin chest

tucked away in a bulbed room

holds within it colorful treasures.

A golden hat, a jeweled robe,

shoes made of glass.

The owner,

a dusty wrinkled man

stares at them longingly.

His treasures.

Destined for another.

Accompanists

A ceaseless beat rises

from the drum set bold and new.

The woman hums a melody

a favorite of the crew.

Her lips word the happy song,

her eyes a different tune.

Actors

The stage of life

is full of actors

some big, some small

and some invisible.

The big ones smile

the small ones wait

and those invisible

are almost God like.