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.