The temple in the jungle

Just when the temple bell rang
In the silence of the jungle amidst
Scattered temple pieces in the trees
There they stood beaming in faces
Tall and naked ,their splendor
Not diminished by time's weight
Their stones do not saints make
But their unfading smiles do
We stand with our hands folded
Shrunk in our fully clothed bodies -
We who came looking for our sun
Find our sun will not set today
And our glass eye cannot capture him.

(The Jain temple in the Samasgarh jungles visited by us for photographing the sunset)

Houses

All the while we want houses

That protect us from fierce tigers

From demons and midnight spirits

Drunk on smelly country liquor

Fed through special stone holes.

We make our gods feel spirited

And bribed enough to give houses

To us and they do not knock

At our midnight doors and scare

Our hair erect on our bodies.

Houses cost filthy money which

Our spirit friends alone can get us

In their unguarded moments

When we flatter and coax them

In chaste Sanskrit incantations

Via fat priests wearing ocher robes.

We love three bed room houses

With gleaming Chinese crockery

And objects d’art in drawing rooms

Of cement and concrete perfection.

Our hearts truly jump up and down

In the midst of much brick and mortar

When they enclose our inner follies

And our absurdly comic enactments .

Copies

Poetry is hard to come by
For want of uninterrupted views
From inside my brain.
Words jingle but not the views.
At the window I see a tiny strip
Of the winter sky
And some passing shadows
Woman carries headload
Of red shiny bricks .
Not just one but three.
Not the bricks but the women
In white polyester sarees
A colourful copy I am in a hurry
To classify and file “save as”
I am in too much of a hurry
To make a play about it
With tall earthly creatures
As dramatis personae
It sounds a bit foolish
To enlarge mere copies
For they only depixellate
The sky is lost irretrievably
And the trees lose greenness.
All the while I need their largeness
Their solidity and their greenness.
But the copies !

Irony

True ,one does not break foot always
On two-wheeler scooter on a windy night
When one returns from buying
Fresh vegetables on a slippery road
When machine stops and men slip
Near the all night petrol pump.
Here grease bubbles have rainbows .
Beauty is not just that but macabre humor
Here laughing does not cause beauty
But writes pain in time-ravaged faces
Surely irony is exquisite but strikes one
As though it were last year’s lightning
That struck the flourishing palm tree
Leaving it friendless and frondless.

Our past went into numbered lockers

you then went into brown sculpture beauty
when the sun-shades played fun with art
You promptly returned with priest-chants
between two deaths there is a years space
her father entering time and your mother.
her ashes box snugly in a numbered locker
his met watery diffusion in distant river
our future deepened our past presently
and the past our parents were went into
numbered lockers and fast flowing rivers

We all hurt each other

We all hurt each other and ourselves
When tears stream down smoothly
Our helplessness breaks mask
Our images stream down like tears
Holding reflections of broken thoughts.
We are trying to break silence.

words

Words hit you like swarming flies
On a sticky summer afternoon
Words fester under your skin
Like wounds refusing to be healed
They enter your eyes like dust
Filling them with hot salty tears
You gather them like sea-shells
To empty the pocket and throw away
The moment you reach home
Words grate like steel furniture
Being dragged on a dusty floor
Words fill your tummy with nausea
Like the guts of a dog run over
By a passing truck on the highway
Words turn into a handful of dust.

The Bankura horses

In Bishnupur now our horses do not fly
Like the horses of the Sun-God’s chariot
Their decorated necks are humorous and brittle
Our crumbling terra cotta temples are Godless
The temple ponds are now washer men ghats
Our gods no longer adorn the Dance Hall
We have potato cold storages, everywhere,
And our listless young men are playing cards
Under the shade of the ancient banyan tree.

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 song

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.

The Wishing Well

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. 

Night safari

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

Summer sky

 I can smell the morning grass 
Beyond the red-and-white saree 
That hangs, dripping, on the clothesline 
In the broken pieces of the summer sky.

Indecision

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 .

Failure

He stands on the other shore 
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. 

Corners

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.

Theme

I am trying to find reasons
For silence. There is something
On my head, a towering gear
Smiling underneath is tough
All the time I have to balance
Against the whiff of wind
I am trying to find reasons
For speaking. When I find some
They are the same for silence
The headgear is precariously
Perched on my head, whichever.
The diamonds there glisten
In early morning silences
Between piercing train hoots
And old watchmen’s mutterings
I have now found my form
And my theme, my silence.

Time and again

I was just asking time
Once again.
Because my words had fallen Into night.
They were not luminous.
When Rilke dropped them
They were.
But they fell into the same
Aggregate of darkness.

Clay-pot

The lights glistened forgetfully
Yesterday over fried potatoes
It was just a whiff of thought
These bones in the clay-pot

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.

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 into the sky.

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.

The rock

The drill cut through the rock
Until there was no rock
Only a bluer sky.

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.

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 )

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.

On her first death anniversary

At four the morning was night.
A bird landed on the plastic sheet
Waking up too early for the worms
For the other birds’ comfort on the tree.
The tube light whined sorrowfully
Against Octavio Paz and certain poet
In the inner tube of my computer.
Mother would come with rice balls
In Sanskrit incantations and dhoti
Tied across my waist and thread.
All we lay stretched on the floor
Remembering her dead a year ago.
Night will soon be morning birds
Their noisy calls were like that time
When she laughed the last time.

Growing old

I don’t want to wear my oldness
Like a long robe dragging behind me
But as an under-shirt with holes like
Stars flickering on a moonless night.
They are in old man’s thoughts , being
Covered by a thick polka dotted shirt .
The polka dots nearly hide all my holes
While they are filled with green envy
At others’ lack of holes under shirts.
But I manage with these green holes
By a precise overlap of the beauty dots
With the green holes ,their greenness
Always neatly sticking to my leather .
These polka dots make up my dignity.

Faith

When the stars sprinkled dust on our roof
And the night’s queen whitely bloomed.
There was déjà vu in the night’s smell
The left over one of the previous day
That had mixed with tar and hot sun
Which had in turn mixed with bodies.
That night was hope and some angst
While nothing ever happened , it would.

Refusal

I know you have said that enough
In the horizon I looked far enough
And deep in the tree’s silences
As the leaves rustled in the night.
In the hollow of my downy back
Your after-being remains as refusal
As though my senses are conscious
And are offended deeply by refusal.

Myths

We have our myths, carefully polished
Over Time's washed stones of the riverbed
Our accumulated minds enormously meshed
As a haystack of shared consciousness.
Our gods have uneasily existed all these days
With spirits who have to be driven out
From darkly lonely houses and fearful men.
On the hillock pallid ghosts come haunting
In moonlit houses amid rising blood-chants
You know our god is fear ,not rain's beauty
Or lonely jungles with the fall of cascades.

Enacting transience on a pleasure boat

Here, on the boat music flows in drum-beats
The lake is resonant with the city’s vulgarity
And shadowy figures enact transience in its night
Their beauty-dance flows in absurd movements
Their arms and feet are hurled in the air helplessly
Their shadows crouch in flesh and blood transience.

The making of the road

Hot were the words, mixed

With liquid tar and boys in the shade

Their eyelids closed and play-heavy

This man turned the drum of liquid

The fires crackled and black smoke

Went up above the tree and red wall

Smooth and black like a snake.

By the pond in Char Imli,Bhopal

The sun pours through every leaf
Playing shadows on the white wall
As red-and-white temples ring bells
The banyan rises from colored plastics
In warm yellow light and water shades.

On failing to get admittance to the Taj Mahal

Yesterday's eye-red was but a phase
Having lost the moonlight all the way
Behind large doors and khaki authority
(When we pray in marble mosques
We tend to get killed on Fridays
Because beauty does not really matter
But only the blood-red duty-call)
In the end we see where the king went
In the cold cellar,past earthly beauty
The priest's God-call pierced the vault
As beauty is not truth,only coldness.

The hillock in Staff College,Hyderbad

It is the sleeping rocks that glowed
Their contours passionately etched
Against white houses in blue spaces.
We had tiptoed all the way to the hillock
As the trees looked down on us,clinging,
Their foliage witness to our fecund follies.

The wind

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.

Celebration

On the wall the elephant danced with his tail high
The kings of yesteryear s rode on camels that laughed
On the opposite wall yesterday’s man and woman
Joined in the life’s chorus from across death’s borders
Space merged with time, fragile images with solidity
Water flowed in the gardener’s hose, silver and soft
With a flowing sound that smelled earth and water.

Afraid

The rain beat the lake, in rising shrapnel
A girl hid there under the rain shelter
In the eye –shadows of the afraid lover
He that was afraid of the lens’ blinding light.

Mother

Thinking is so much chemical.
The nasty smell of death
Is in boat, earth-pot and river
It is all a game, my being
Your being and the sky-being
A simulation or something
Mother-love remains and not.

Poetry words

The ugly caterpillar eats beauty-holes in our garden leaves
Which are poetry- words scrawled in thick sticky leaves
And then they become fatter on the flanks with floral designs.
The stinking caterpillar then disappears beyond the fence
Leaving behind incandescent thingy poetry- words.

The mountains

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.

Hail

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 sea at Calicut

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
As the trees' shadows fell into the sea
Their dark hair hiding red agenda.

Dream

In the morning it all came back ,awake
From the dream, the planet called the earth
The birds chirped among new-born buds
Their colors spoke interminably of dreams.

Tribute to the Shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan

I had dreamt of a magic, a mere thing
Waiting to become a mere thing
Just like a rock of inorganic cells
A few chromosomes carry all memories
Of my primordial world, of giant-sized eggs
You see I have invented a reed bringing forth
The finest smelling finger hole music,
Smelling of oil-lamp flames extinguishing
In ancient temples behind closed doors.
I have invented golden- robed gods smiling
In flower decked finery, with vermilion
On my forehead where it is all written.
I have invented half-burnt corpses flowing,
In flames, on fragrant heaven-promises
This morning the reed vanished abruptly
In the fragrance of the river’s shadows.

Thinking poems

Thinking poems are autumn-falling
In criss-cross patches of golden sun,
Actually these are pallid ghosts
Pulled out of unlit eastern skies.

The Brihadeeswara temple ,Tanjore

These stones had a golden-hued finish
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 luster machine-done
The shadows do not fall on them of the sun
The stones had come from far, hoisted by hunger
When there was no hunger there was death
Death by sharp-edged swords, pointed spears
There were these stone-houses full of grains
The king bought beauty for a handful of grain
As the phallus-God stood silent in the sanctum
The bells tinkled , beauty sprang from his loins
His magnificence broke through the skies.

Buddha

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 nascent answers.

Pixel perfection

Several transformations worked technically
In colored copies of quintessences.
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 ,pursuing pixel- perfection.

Morning in Hyderabad

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 gust of wind

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.

Her canvas

Slowly her canvas started coming to life
As the evening tapered off to dusk.
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.

At the Srirangam temple

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.

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.

Airborne

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.

Breeze

I looked at the banyan
Its shadows played
With yesterday’s leaves
My words were leaves
My shadows played with.

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 raking of their gossamer wings.

Train journey through Kerala

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 go red in the face.

The laughing club

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
Everybody laughs for no reason
Endowed with a free lower jaw.
of course, they cannot help it .

Inside the second class railway coach

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.

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.