A RUBAIYAT FOR RETURNING

A ten-year old December anticipation

turns into suffocating frustration

A black smog has smothered sunshine

Home is now an alien destination. 

I've come to see a face growing old.

For too long, I've ignored time's cold

finiteness. Finally, I submit to its grip 

to return to nativity's primal fold. 

I came to stay, but strayed apace.

To flee the tarry air licking my face.

Finding solace in Buddhist viharas and the

shade of trees, gleaning calm and a bit of grace. 

I return to the face I've come to see. 

The first home that housed me, my first tree. 

The air clears up, I take shelter in my roost,

forgetting time and its limits. At last, free. 

OLD AND NEW

A new neighbourhood. 

Training the mind to forget old girlfriends. 

A new school; learning how to sit in 

the same classroom with boys. 

New bus numbers. 424, which keeps you 

connected to the old neighbourhood. 

411, 432, 490, 541 and a numberless mini bus

that pull you through the city's arteries 

so you can hear it breathe. 

A new house, unpolished and incomplete

but with a terrace overhead and a wide field behind.

New markets, haphazard and dusty,

sleepy in the daytime, grubby and

noisy in the evening. New neighbours,

all sharing gossip in your tongue.

Old shenanigans on new street, field.

Old lunchtime mischief with new school friends.

Old joy of sharing produce with, 

asking for ice from, new neighbours.

Old sweat and crowd on new bus routes. 

Old luscious chapter of mangoes in new house.

Old comfort of studying constellations 

with grandfather on new terrace. 

Old relief of finding known strength in the sinews of a new life.

THE OCTAVE RETURNS

Saptak, the octave’s seven 

notes, reconfigure my mornings. 

After a night's quiescence, 

my voice rasps like sandpaper 

grazing brick. The notes, like 

hungry birds, want out.  

The harmonium, a treasure 

chest, turns the sandpaper
into a sky free of clouds. 

My voice climbs the saptak's 

seven steps, riding on 

the reeds of the harmonium my 

mother lovingly secured for

me by saving two months

of her salary. The birds sing 

as they take flight. My mother

enters the kitchen to make

tea. Water sings in the kettle.

Her voice joins mine. In her 

youth, she had wanted to pursue 

music. Couldn't. My daily riyaaz 

returned her dream, if only 

on a different morning, drifting 

across her offspring’s sky.

DAAK NAAM

Tutun, her grandparents call a little girl.

A tiny bird when it rolls off their tongue, 

but tobacco in another language. For her 

mother, she's Pompa, a sacred lake, 

a mythical water body that makes waiting 

worthwhile. Like the amniotic pool Pompa 

swam in before emerging onshore to meet 

her. The sweet, intoxicating pain of wait 

takes flight with her arrival. 

Her big brother is Joy to the grandparents. 

A hulk of double-meaning moniker. If its 

English import weren't enough, in his 

mother tongue, it meant victory. In the 

labour room, he and his mother had 

deflected death in a close shave. 

His mother calls him Babu, 

a respectable, educated man. 

In Joy, victory and aspiration conspire with joy. 

Daak naam, a name to call someone by. 

Nestling codes, defying meaning. 

TRANSCEND THAT FENCE

Mornings have lost their notes of innocence.

The daze of days quiver with a dissonance. 

What was once known like a neighbour's kind face

is now memory's vapour, smoke escaping an incense.

War's a sport, laughter staged, justice a rank joke.

Celebrations phone-y, meaning unhinged mid-sentence. 

Listless evenings grow limbs and crawl vermin like

Music is only falsetto, squalling without grave sense.

Try loving still, Bhaswati, you don't get two lives.

Stop obsessing over yesterdays, transcend that fence. 

A WEIGHT LIFTS

The weight of winter's wait. 

December arrives coughing. 

A bronchial shadow shrouds 

its celebratory air. How long 

before this flinty fog lifts, 

before that visage, delicate

and keen, is seen, wearing

the smile of spring? The pool

of waiting lengthens even as 

daylight does, speck by glinting 

speck. The face surfaces, like 

dandelions always do, in spite of. 

Like April's moody sunshine, 

it plays hide and seek for a while 

but ultimately sustains. With 

summer’s breezy magnanimity.

THE RECALCITRANT CHAMPA

Supposing I became a champa flower,

just for fun, and grew on a branch high up that tree, 

and shook in the wind with laughter and danced upon 

the newly budded leaves, would you know me, mother?

~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Champa Flower

A potted money plant, its leaves hugging a moss-

stick like fledglings reluctant to duck out of a mother's 

wings. Next to it, buds of cape jasmine on a plant 

with ambitions of turning into a tree and hosting busy

 

mynahs and chipmunks, quintessential arboreal seekers. 

A few pots down the line, a curry leaf plant stirs the air 

with smoky memories of mustard crackling in a pot 

about to sizzle with the zing of tangy lentils. 

At the far end stands the champa, a frangipani tree. 

Crowded with lush, fat leaves, but refusing to flower. 

In Tagore's poem, a little boy imagines himself as 

a flower hiding in the foliage to tease his mother. 

This frangipani at the far corner of the balcony won't 

hide or let hide. This diva of a verdant assembly 

commands attention without a single flower stashing 

heady fragrance in its pinwheel frame. 

This cheeky Champa wants to be seen just the way she is. 

SEEKING, ESCAPING

I write to look for the country I left behind. 

I write to escape the country I've returned to.

I write to look for cramped living rooms with televisions

ballooning like a whale's yawn to house a whole neighbourhood.

I write to escape the tyrannical drag of TV channels

disgorging the same greasy fare across immense living rooms.

I write to look for the water seller, the cobbler, the ironing

man. Replenishing, mending, pressing wrinkles smooth.

I write to escape the necessity of air-conned malls in

a city bloating with the flatulence of innumerous AC cars. 

I write to look for a time when gods of different faiths

didn't get in the way of the friends who followed them. 

I write to escape a time when friends with certain last

names must think of ways to find a house on rent.

I write to look for a country I knew as mine. 

I write to escape a country I no longer know.

LOSSES

I try to measure the losses I incurred 

in the years I stayed away from you. 

All the heartache I couldn't unburden to you

after disagreements with my partner. 

All the tears that dried in my eye sockets, 

without your shoulder to soak them. 

All the markets we didn't wander through, 

you embarrassing me with your hard bargaining.  

All the plays we missed watching together in the

twilight generosity of our unforgiving city. 

All the holidays we'd dreamed of but couldn't 

go on together, our timing never quite synching. 

All the summers I couldn't bring you to my garden 

so you could pluck blackberries and see the logs

zucchinis turn into when left, like time, unattended.

All the patio evenings we didn’t infect the neighbourhood 

with laughter and echoes of half-eaten songs.

The years took away years from your body and mine. 

Time dries on us. Our losses spill over.

MY MOTHER LEARNS TO WORK HER SMARTPHONE

Celluloid dreams of youth bleed off a rectangle 

in monochrome. Your mind's palette isn't missing 

a single shade. This thin apparatus fits in your 

palm, unsure yet eager. Dream over, you scroll 

up to join a globetrotter. In Zanskar's sub-zero 

obstinacy, the bubble of Thailand’s floating 

markets, the mysterious pull of tree-capped 

temples in Cambodia. All that travel must make 

one hungry, so you pause. To learn new ways 

of cooking old things. Steamed eggs with grated 

cauliflower, lotus stem shami kababs, moong dal 

with meat balls. In the small, shriveling palm 

of your shaky hands, you hold and inhabit 

a cosmos throbbing with impalpable breath. 

THE MYSTERY ENABLER

The ascent of summer's sanguine syllables.

Groovy green mango scent hitting schoolgirl nostrils.

Pickle jars, starched saris making the most of a raging sun.

Talking with cats, checking on the delicate tendrils of 

potted plants, waving to kites blazing the afternoon sky.

The day's gossips, jokes, grudges, unwrapped in fading 

sunlight. Life's drama rehearsing itself in twilight silhouettes. 

Layers of heat trapped in the body, the air, the airwaves, 

released to the microgravity of a night sky. 

The terrace, a cross-border confidant, 

conduit between worlds, 

mystery enabler.

CURVES

In his boyhood, my uncle used to draw in curves. 

Unfurled orange petals coiled like burning paper.

Leaves looped into and around each other in 

an emerald embrace. Paisleys swirled into a 

swan's wavy wings and swept a canvas whole.

Years later, he walked on tarred roads for 

miles on end. Colour had left him for good 

and he'd forsaken the canvas to process new 

curves. A twisting spine had bent his neck 

permanently, its spring broken, like his fate. 

In late life, even words walked out on him. 

Of his once-cursive handwriting, no more 

than curved scratches remained. The blue 

of his hand stained the white paper like 

dead veins squiggling for one final breath. 

My uncle could never perfect the straight line. 

POLL FLEXING

Knife-edged yowls.

Promises hurled like 

torn marigold petals.

Stale fear refried, 

sold in new packets.

Power flexed with 

helicopter twirls and 

intensively trimmed rolls.

Elections, a laboratory 

for testing the limits of 

human submission.

MAD DANCING

The dream dance of lance-like olive leaves 

has deserted my eyes. That was back then. 

When I was in place. With a husband, a hearth

a house, a harvest. It's been a while and my

feet haven't stopped dancing a mad dance 

all of my own. Ditching the olives, the figs, 

the grapes, a room of my own, to run to a school 

with no walls and no curtains. Scouring bombed 

buildings for soaps and shampoo to clean lice 

off my head. Crouching like a terrified rabbit to

escape shelling, running (again) to stop smelling 

smoke, blood, piss, fear. Pausing. For months

before trudging to my sister's shop that 

collapsed on her from (another) bomb. 

Returning with her corpse, decayed, decaying, 

still searching for the face I knew as hers. 

Dodging, interring, surviving, reconciling rubble,

soot, dispersion. Scampering to the shore to live

in a tent. A nomad-refugee's dance over everything, 

that collapses into a heap, love included. 

Everything, save memories that keep crowding 

my mind like those olives once did my kitchen jar.

 

A DOG’S DEATH

After Saadat Hasan Manto

When they redrew the borders,

a dog was sleeping. Canine 

wisdom is superior to its human 

variant, after all. Upon waking

up, the dog moved between this

side and that, wagging its tail,

eating biscuits they threw at it.

This Side claimed it as its own,

then That Side did the same. 

But as it walked between This 

and That, both sides bristled 

and pulled out their guns. 

On its next walk to lunch, 

the dog lurched to the ground.

Its blood drenched This Side, 

then That Side. Neither side

claimed the carcass as its own.