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