Misty Afternoons

Bright afternoons

cloaked in mist—

Like wisps of sorrow

that roll into the heart

in Spring,

Snaking across beds

of dewy roses

and fulgent dahlias,

To slumber in

the yew tree’s silence.

Happiness is an epidural—

A brief respite of light
in this ceaseless labour
To birth new selves
with each sunrise.

THE FORBIDDEN BIG APPLE

I am crossing the seven seas

To wash off your smell

From my mothball-stuffed drawers that I

open and close—obsessive-compulsive,

In classrooms and coffee shops,

Conference halls and airports,

On the streets or in bed--

A fresh-rain aroma of musk and dead roses

brewed in desire and betrayal,

Suffused with midnight kisses and racing away

on white steeds in chivalrous reins.

But I do not know if all the waters

Of all the oceans can ever achieve that task,

and I know all I really need to do is take off

these glasses that I hold in tremulous hands—

these rose-tinted glasses that have

made me hope against despair,

love against knowledge, want against wisdom.

But oh, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t

bring myself to do that,

Though it breaks my heart every fortnight

into slivers of china on a varnished floor;

Because then, when I am happy,

the whole world wouldn’t be New York.

ANOTHER 9/11

As American alchemy transforms

Third-world sweat and blood

into their Starbucks and McDonald’s,

and builds empires upon the debris

of war-torn nations,

buying bread with bullets,

so the 9/11s of Chile, Egypt and the Jews of Nazi Germany*

get erased along with the fall of the Berlin Wall,

To make way for the 3000 dead in New York

on an azure September morning.

All lives are not equal.

Yesterday, on November 9, America waved into the

world’s gobsmacked visage

a racist, misogynistic, hate-spewing Trump card:

That too was a 9/11. For the rest of the world.

Yesterday, we had a 9/11 that crashed the

economy, converting coveted notes into

paper and nothing more.** As banks and ATMs shut down,

as if in mourning, and social media brimmed

with Trump-struck woe,

I felt for a moment the world shared in my grief—

A humongous pathetic fallacy—

My own 9/11 that splintered my days

into before and after, hijacked my life and

flew it into the skyscrapers of

Ceaseless Avarice, to burst into flames,

To hurtle down sans grace,

And to splutter in the ashes, facedown in muted sorrow:

Tragedy must be a class act, or spectators get bored;

No listeners for a broken piano, so you better soar.

A wannabe phoenix, this was my 9/11.

NOTES:

*Refers to the US-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 and the bloody dictatorship that followed; the signing of the Camp David Accords that signalled Egyptian and Arab humiliation on September 11, 1979; and the Kristallnacht pogrom by Nazis upon German Jews on 9 November 1938.

**On 9^th November 2016, 500 and 1000 rupee notes were demonetized in India, leading to widespread panic among the common man and bringing the economy to a stand-still

SONGS FROM THE HILLS

There’s a certain cold blueness

that wraps round the mountains,

slides down the pepper vines

choking the spiky coral trees,

blooms with the elaichi buds in the backyard,

and brews in the black tea

that you sip, shivering under blankets.

Sweaters and mufflers can ward off the chill,

But what do you do when the soul feels cold?

**********************************

Wisps of mist swirling over peaks

to embrace the snowy puffs

valiantly swimming through louring grey skies

that leak day and night, drip-drop-drip,

In a fine powder-rain.

*************************************

These hills, they hold secrets as ancient

as the hills themselves.

The oldest and the truest of them all?

“To love is to lose, and to lose is to love,”

whispered the wrinkled hills, with a sigh

that echoed in the wet valleys.