TWO

Two little mynahs

sitting on a  hedge:

One for sorrow,

Two for joy.

A little girl who believed

in fairy tales,

Blue lotuses lived

in her midnight eyes.

Bread and butter,

Woe and mirth,

Lightning and thunder,

Breath and death.

Life is measured out in pairs—

A duet tuned to disaster:

Two tablespoons, please.

What do you do with a poem

whose couplets

refuse to rhyme?

Would you tear it up

into a million flakes

that snow down upon

your summers and springs?

Would you torch it alive,

Let the howls hound you for life?

Would you incinerate it,

Scatter the ashes

beneath your dreams?

Or would you keep rewriting

till your blood runs dry

and you run out of reams?

A sunrise frozen in a teardrop,

A bulrush gasping in a heath,

A forlorn slice of moon in a bedraggled sky,

Some couplets can never rhyme.

Education for Life

I waddle daily

to the carefree laughter

of youth—freshly flowered—

beneath the casuarinas,

The staccato banter and songs

drifting down the corridors,

The brightly sparkling eyes

that gaze upon endless vistas,

The polite smiles and good-mornings.

You kick and twist and drag me down,

rippling beneath my pulled-down dupatta,

Altering my life’s centre of gravity;

But I brush away the cobwebs and smile,

Acknowledge their greetings,

Maybe in memory of days

not long ago when I too

was one of them.

They say of woman:

Born weak,

And on top, pregnant.

I say:

Born strong,

And on top, forged in fire.

I see the passion

pulsing in their veins,

The dreams

that deck their hair,

The stars in their eyes.

Not so far removed in age,

But alas! I care no longer

for the sprezzatura

of roses and cards

and chocolates

and moonlit verses

and all that jazz.

I talk to them of human frailty

and mortality,

And beauty and infinity;

I teach them the nightingale’s rhapsody,

The desire to cease upon

the midnight hour with no pain,

To soar upon the viewless wings of poesy;

Metre and alliteration, stress and sprung rhythm,

Dialect and diglossia.

I see their eyes glaze over, some of them,

Lost in illusory enchanted lands . . .

I wish I could gently shake them

and teach them

The clanging, jarring

onomatopoeia

of reality,

The falling tone of vanity and ideals

and hopeless romance,

The enjambement of disillusionment,

The deconstruction of truth.

But then I know I mustn’t.

I must let them feel it, taste it, live it

for themselves.

For what is life, if not these brief preludes

before grimness punctures the heart

and greyness punctuates your laughs?

If not the steely resolve that rises

like a phoenix to soar over the ruins

of the present to swoop down on that

liminal land of luminosity

that lies between knowledge and despair?

And I know that is what I must teach

these tender blooms before winter comes,

And you, my child, in the years to come.

TWILIGHT AT MOULA ALI

Buttery mellow evening

slathered across the city

enfolded in enigma

hundreds of feet below.

Tranquillity tossed with

windswept dreams

against a preening sky,

That slowly dabs her cheeks

with hues of pink and mauve,

Checking herself out in

smoky lakes underneath,

Like a coy girl setting out

on a first date.

The azaan glides out

from minarets far and near,

Rending the stillness,

Rippling in the soul;

Dollops of divinity

dripping through the dusk.

And now the city lights up,

Hopes flickering to life,

One after the other;

Thousands of concrete lives

sprawled out beneath us,

Like earthen lamps set

afloat on a swarthy river.

Streetlights and headlights,

Neon billboards and lamp posts,

Suspended afar in the velvety darkness–

Disembodied voices from the past

singing silences of yesteryear.

Pyaar, ishq, mohabbat…

Fireworks burst upon the firmament

in colourful melancholy,

Love works in ways you cannot fathom.

Rooh, ashq, maut…

How would it be

to float off this edge,

to the lights that beckon below,

Like a feather waltzing in the breeze,

A petal swirling down a stream….

Love is not for the weak-hearted.

Tender is the night,

She yields no answers.

MATURITY

You say I have matured,

Well, maybe...

But-

Ripened by Experience,

Weathered by Age,

Tempered by Time,

Or beaten by Life?

INTO THE LIGHT

She was worse than dead,

Or so they told her.

Defiled, impure, plundered...

Worse than dead.

Her life was now torn into

before and after:

Before-

she had coffee with her colleagues,

baked brownies with her niece,

wore his favourite colours.

After-

she drank sympathy at tea breaks,

bored her niece with her silence,

wouldn't meet his eyes.

Worse than dead.

Should I just kill myself

to make it better, she wondered,

Standing at the brink of the cliff,

the wind yowling in her ears,

the cold scalding her skin.

Maybe then the ice would thaw

and the birds would sing....

Deep in thought, she slipped

into a dreamless slumber,

The razor in her hand.

GENESIS

Where do poems come from?
From azure blue skies
and candyfloss clouds,
Rolling green fields,
And soothing sonatas?
From a candlelight dinner,
Or a walk in the woods,
From being content,
Ensconced in love?

Do they drop like dew at night,
Like iridescent rain drops from leaf tips?
Do they waft in like the aroma
of freshly brewed coffee,
Gently, like a sleeping baby's breath;
From the velvet feel of the perfect bliss
of perfect moments in an imperfect life?
Or do they bound in with glee,
Like laughing children or feisty kittens?

Occasionally, they do come like that,
From all of that.

But much more often, they come
from fearful stormy nights,
When you're all alone and the power is out,
and you clutch a pillow,
your jagged breath louder than thunder.

They come from a terrible loneliness
that chokes you as you make your way
through a festive throng,
From pain that swamps you
as you stand in a crowded bus,
Among a hundred oblivious faces.

They come from standing at the crossroads
on a chilly evening while darkness rolls in,
Not knowing which road to take
to reach home, before you remember
You don't have a home.

Yes, the most powerful ones,
They mostly spring from stifled screams
and tattered dreams:
They emerge from squalor and despair,
And carry the stench of death.

They come when you dare to mute
the vibrant hues around,
Step aside and look at the greys,
the frayed ends, at the risk of being
Sucked into the black.

Cut Off

' As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods,

they kill us for their sport.'
- Shakespeare, King Lear

I often lost his voice on the phone-

Bad network

Disconnect

Re-dial

Dialling

How would you even know

if I die, he used to jest.

I'd reply with silence,

it silenced him for the moment.

We hanker to buy with

bleeding bits of the heart,

The cologne of love:

Sometimes so costly

it leaves you with no heart at all.

Just a pulsating void

like the bleeding silence

at his end when I said

"I love you";

And then, (finally),

"I love you too, three, four, five..."

He loved his bike.

Faster, faster, Death cheered him on;

School kids race in the rain,

Splashing mud on me.

As the boat gently bobbed
away from the shore,
Little did I know
it had no oars.

They laid him to sleep

and threw earth over his dreams,
My cat gave birth to three
kittens that day.

Dust to dust returneth;

I to him.

Dial

Dialling

Beep beep beep.

Re-dial

Switched off

Cannot be reached

Out of coverage area

Does not exist.

HIS MUSIC AND MY POETRY

My words fell in love

With his music:

Head-over-heels in love.

Like the golden rain from above

That sprouts the seeds in my loamy lands,

To flourish in lush black

On stark white fields,

His music let my poetry

Out of the cage,

And together they flew,

Into the eternal blue;

Love knows no season, no age.

My words danced in joy

At the footfall of his voice,

They trembled at its silken touch;

My lines to life sprang

When he unknowing sang,

My poetry that much

Did his music love.

A beautiful rhapsody

With no beginning, no end-

With him around,

Life was ever a song;

A happy couple they were,

His music and my poetry;

And though I knew

It couldn’t last long,

While it did, they truly loved,

His music and my poetry.

Silence at Supper

Of late, she noticed,

He always complained:

She was either

Too sweet,

Or too sour;

Too spicy,

Or too bland;

Too dry,

Or too greasy;

Too sharp,

Or too salty;

Too hot,

Or too cold;

Too raw,

Or over-cooked;

Too heavy,

Or too light;

She never was

Just right.

And now he sat

Staring at the soup

She'd served;

Staring beyond the bowl,

Beyond the room,

Beyond their home,

Beyond her.

"Is the salt right?"

She asked quietly.

"Yea, just right,"

He mumbled,

Spooning it up,

His eyes still

On the just-right soup-

Staring beyond the bowl,

Beyond the room,

Beyond their home,

Beyond her.

And she knew why

She never was

Just right.

Outside,

She saw night fall,

Fast and heavy,

Like the silence

Inside.

Thus sat the two,

Three shadows

Danced on the wall.