Listening

 

I haven’t seen you for some time, though you’ve been

all around me everywhere, in the needle thin

alleys, on Juliet balconies in spring –

not in eggshell numbers, nor pixels nor a pin.

 

Flesh smells and blood’s awkward outside a vein.

No one knows why it stops. Nor exactly when.

We only know it will. Without a question.

It too will pass. Never come this way again.

 

I’ll yank my senses free and come hold you close

and breathe you in, the rankness of flesh and rose,

purple orchid heart, the exhaust off the roads.

And we’ll walk off someplace where no one goes.

 

I’ll listen with my entire body to you,

the peace of your quiet, velvet voice all day through.

This Too Is Love

 

It's been quite sometime that you've gone away - 

there's a creeper growing in one of the cracks

on the ledge - rather a pungent bouquet.

It's sinking in that you're not coming back.

Your coffee mugs lie dusty with disuse.

Your bedroom slippers are neat on the rack.

Absence feels like a gently spreading bruise - 

a purple tide, because you're not coming back.

Vases and glasses wear chips on their rims,

pages crumble along silverfish tracks,

even the light in these rooms is muted dim.

A strange cast that knows you're not coming back.

I still open windows. Dust off the years.

Keep keys safe. Just in case. Though you aren't here. 

~~*~~

February has just zoomed past me. There's been a family wedding - so a mega reunion of the clan, gathering for a few days from all corners of not just India but the world. That's always super pleasant, to catch up with the gang. Cousins remain my firstest, funnest and bestest Valentines ever. 

For every high there will be an immediate and corresponding low - the offspring picked up some ghastly bug, therefore an ER visit had to be made, stressful at the time but all okay now. This too is a milestone, first time admission in the hospital. Anyway, all's well that ends well.  

As you can imagine, not very conducive to poetry-ing. However, there's no control on thinking. The thoughts come unbidden, without any respect for timing or place or state of mind - whether the aforesaid mind is panicking in the ER or teasing out the meanings behind the rituals at a wedding ceremony. Always a chance to get fresh angles to love throughout the year. Weddings can celebrate it publicly and very visibly, with solemnly taken vows, effusive displays of affection and joy, heaps of tinsel and glitz. Love can equally mean a whole host of quieter, everyday things. Long loves are mostly made up of ordinary stuff - giving a cup of coffee, refuelling the car, adjusting the thermostat because you notice the sheen of perspiration on a loved one's forehead. Just small acts of consideration and courtesy, offered freely without having to be asked.

At the wedding, a cousin of mine saw my father in my son. We talked about our loved ones who weren't present, remembering past weddings they had attended. "How diminished we are now!" my cousin said. But are we really? They weren't there physically but they permeate our life. We see them everywhere, in our children and in their values handed down. The memories are fresh, almost tangible. And we carry our departed loved ones with us into every family reunion  and into everyday dinner conversations. We tell and retell the stories they told us, hear their voices in our own and laugh again at all the same places. We keep the keys safe. Is this  not love too? 

No high alert

 

I don’t have to close my eyes to see your face,

it’s in passing clouds, in each clod on the road,

it’s been outlined in the rise and fall of days –

as winters have frozen, as springs have thawed.

 

As summers have stormed in with their fangs bared,

as the lissom rains have twirled on the ground.

I hear your voice in the soft, whispered prayers

of the sea breeze in trees that it weaves around.

 

I don’t have to prime myself body and mind

I don’t have to take any extra care,

to sharpen my senses for symbols and signs.

Wherever I reach out blind – you’re always there.

 

However great the time and space we’re apart,

you’re with me still – nothing needs a high alert.

A scheduled post - because I'm on a short break in the Nilgiris but I'm reluctant to let anything disrupt the hard-fought fortnightly schedule of posting here. Fortnightly? is that archaic? I never see people use it, come across it anywhere in writing either, unless it's 'period' writing. Ennyway. I digress.

What I meant to write was that I'm quite unsure how to label this poem - all love poetry feels like something else too, to me - deeper than the glib labels words define. However, the lines have come about because of an old 1970s photo a childhood friend posted on a social media platform. I oohed and aahed over it, I'm a sucker for old snaps. It struck me later that I've managed to remain in contact somehow through all the intervening years with all the people captured in that photograph, though we each are continents apart at this exact moment and have been so through the major part of our individual lives. 

Should poems be labelled to reflect their source of inspiration? On a different note, isn't that - that I'm still able to be in touch with them - an ineffable blessing and a celebration deeper than words? 

Hope your month has begun well, have a wonderful July. 

Seesawing

 

Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash

Love is fear. Seesawing with hope.

Strategising for ways to cope.

Love’s keeping still. Not moving an inch –

it’s got no space to fidget and flinch.

Love is faith. And following on

blind, groping through the known and unknown.

Love is steel. Mercury and lead.

Its colours are more than just blood red.

Love is a mauve bud and green thorn,

the crinkled hands of a new-born.

A pleated silk sea of sunset gold,

the drooping elbows of the old.

Love is bone white. Flesh-pink, sky-blue.

I’ve loved them all and they end at you.

The villanelle bug has left me, thank heavens. It's a lovely form and I'm very fond of it, but weeks and weeks of it buzzing around the brain gets a bit much. So yes, I was glad to write to it but also glad it's out of my system now. I'm back to my usual form. This one is the first part of a series of four, as of now. I don't think it's over yet, I feel a few more parts coming.

 

It started with a quote on my feed on Mother's Day. "All loving starts with the Mother." I don't know the source, it wasn't mentioned but it resonated completely. May has both Mother's Day and my child's birthday so it's a great time to ponder on both parenthood and love. Though any time is a great time, really. 

My mother's birth story was pretty much over in two words - normal delivery. She was never forthcoming on the subject, so all I know is that her labour was short, no complications and there I was, born a week before the due date. Was it painful? - slightly worse than the monthly cramps. That was that. If you pressed her, her standard rejoinder was - one forgets, I've forgotten, that's nature's way. It was strange that she was so reticent, because Ma wasn't especially reserved. Childbirth just wasn't something up for discussion those days. 

My own birth story has lots of words - 'preterm', 'footling breech', 'fetal distress', 'emergency caesarean', 'get this patient to the OT stat', 'neonatal convulsions', 'observe for 72 hours' 'low birth weight' and other similar medicalese. Terrifying. Quite the contrast to my mother's. And I've not forgotten, so that doesn't hold for all women. However, I don't like talking much about it either. I do appreciate and celebrate the resultant offspring, in May and in all other months because of dem words. More than 20 years later, the baby's turned 22 this month, love is still fear seesawing with hope. 

Have a wonderful week ahead. 

A Worm's Perspective

 

IV.

If I had nine, and I was aware of that

number, exactly how many and their span -

I’d try some perspective, just like a cat.

I won’t do something just because I can.

I’ll leave the mountains to the mountaineers,

burrow deeper underground, try the dark,

for once stop equating light with crystal clear.

Try if the earth itself can strike the spark.

I’ll leave it to the birds - the clouds, the skies

and I’ll stick closer to the ground, as close

as the grass and the worm. Nothing king size

but the minutest I can curl to. My toes

crumbed by the soil, no flesh showing, not a hint.

And I’ll wait in all nine. For your footprints.

~^~*~^~

Last week, somewhere on my feed was this idea - love is the sure basis for a more equal, more just world. 

Universal love. The kind of love leaders, prophets and mystics speak about. Love thy enemy, because loving thy neighbour is no big deal after all, there's no virtue in loving what's familiar and therefore, not feared. Learning to love those we fear, now that's something that takes effort, application and discipline, we must get out of our own heads and get into their shoes - if successful, we're rewarded with a glimmer of understanding and compassion, even if we can't get to love. Love is the strongest force the world possesses. Love is a bridge to everything. Hate the sin, love the sinner. Every religion preaches it. Easily preached, near impossible to practice. 

But suppose, for the sake of argument, it were to become a reality, would it lead to social justice? Does love automatically lead to fairness? Are we always even handed with those we love?

And how do we hate the sin and love the sinner and be fair at the same time? The racists, the rapists, the paedophiles, the human traffickers, the swindlers, the gloating creators of unending human misery, the architects of monumental corporate frauds, the corrupt megalomaniac politicians who'll do anything, descend to the lowest level of remorseless dishonesty, to cling on to power - how is loving them going to bring about justice for the law-abiding, compassionate, open-minded citizenry, the non-toxic, non-haters who make up the quiet majority everywhere? 

I know this has strayed a bit from the kind of celebrations I had planned for this month over here, but still...I'm on topic even if somewhat at sea... 

All through this month and 24/7

 

III.

If I had nine lives, like a cat, I would hold

more pens and placards, be a bit less bothered

with hemlines and hats, people’s different thresholds.

Give silence its due too, be less awed by words.

Though I’d look at the hollow made by your head

in the cushion, I’d still want to write sonnets

starting and ending with you whether you read

them or not. And I’d almost never forget

passwords. Maybe try being an accountant

in some life midway – if it suited better

I’d stay in it for the rest, I’m reluctant

to change for the sake of it. Write more letters

by hand, use them more mindfully in all nine

and each time, I’d still want yours to hold in mine.

~^~*~^~*~^~

Last November I wrote a series of nine poems in which I explored the theme of love and posted a couple of those at the time. I'll be putting some of the others up here through out this month as I celebrate the same in all its myriad shapes and sizes. And mid-month we are starting off with the first Write...Edit...Publish...Challenge, a new look site and prompts based on movie magic, what's not to love, right?

~^~*~^~*~^~

In the Hindu belief system - and I might as well tell you at the outset, I am no expert on it, it is held that death doesn't part the souls of a wedded pair, their union is said to persist for seven lifetimes. The whole system is predicated - not on a single life and then eternal rest but reincarnations through many births and many deaths and some bonds lasting for more than one cycle. I'm quite happy with that part. Personally, I'll take the same pairing for the next however many lives I have to go through, no issues with that.

Whether a soul gets reborn or not depends on the weight of the sins, its karma, accumulated in a previous life. If it leads a sin free life, then it gets free of the eternal cycle of birth and death and unites with the cosmic soul and is absorbed into an Absolute Bliss. It doesn't have to come back to earth to suffer any pain. Earth is referred to as Martaloka or the domain of death while where the soul goes once it is freed is called Amritaloka and Anandaloka - the space of deathlessness/ecstasy. All material things are an illusion, earthly bonds hold the soul back, the smart thing in this given system is naturally  to detach pronto and hurry to that blissful cosmic union asap. 

In short, the belief is that life on earth is generally a pain in the neck and the sooner one can escape it the better, the greater the part of eternity the soul can spend in perfect communion with the One, in perfect bliss. That first part I'm not so cool with - earth seems a good enough space to me, and being in a human body does not feel as horrible as it's made out to be - death, attachment, grief, suffering, all the nonsense and violence going on in the world notwithstanding. I mean, I'm not knocking absolute bliss, moksha, detachment  or anything, they may well be as super awesome as the sacred texts promise. Only that I don't think this entire earthly existence needs to be so thoroughly trashed, that's all.  It can be mildly enjoyable here too, at times, no harm in admitting that. The planet's breath taking, being human can be quite alright too, there's love and kindness and inspiration and all kinds of other goodies, so c'mon, ditch the nonstop negativity already.... Just saying. 

Here's to a mildly enjoyable week and life on earth in general. To your February and mine. May all conflicts be gobbled up by the forces of love everywhere. 

Inexplicit, 29th January

 

Your love wasn’t given in lunch box notes,

wasn’t nailed to the bed in a stocking.

It was in a firmly buttoned raincoat

a calm hand offered crossing the Ring road.

It didn’t really set much store by talking.

 

Your love wasn’t given in countable stuff,

in branded clothes and trainers, themed décor.

It was there in the knock when I had stayed up

late into the night, in the abrupt ‘enough’

at the thin line of light under my door.

 

It was given in ways so unobtrusive –

in the kneading of dough, in workaday hands

on the wheels - showing how to love and live

without words making it threadbare explicit –

unnoticed, but quite easy to understand.

Yesterday was my parents' wedding anniversary, so...My February and celebration of love starts end January and continues till 29th Feb which is my father's birthday (marked on 1st March on non-leap years). 

Though I have to confess that I am not much for Valentines and such myself, I am more into the idea that love is to be celebrated at every opportunity, 24/7. It's just that I don't like the Indian right wing going around brandishing their weird morality meter and thrusting it down everybody's throat. Valentine's Day is a western import like many other things and it's up to each individual how s/he will express their love, whether through western imports or eastern traditions or whatever. Get thee behind us pronto, the Indian Taliban! The erosion of women's rights in the last few years is truly unbelievable and being carried out in insidious ways. 

Anyways, I digress. One of the things that floated into my mind yesterday as I was thinking of my parents is that how memories of death tend to overshadow those of the life lived. I struggle to dissociate the isolated last few years and terribly painful, lonely deaths my parents went through, from the long years of happier, more pleasant times they had with each other, with me and with their wider families. 

Their deaths were marked by my physical absence but I was, due to technology, able to witness nearly all of their struggle right up to the very last, for which I am thankful and no mistake. Because from my pov, the alternative would have been even more unbearable. But from theirs, I was not present at the deathbed and not able to offer any comfort. That has skewed my grief with a whole heap of complex emotions and it is not an easy process to untangle this. But the untangling is necessary if I'm to stop defining their life only in terms of their deaths. My father grieved my mother alone in complete isolation for 11 months. He lived for 89 years, fully active for 85 till a stroke made him housebound. That's a good measure of happiness to offset against a year of difficult dying, terrible as it is. Each must be given its due weightage. I'm learning to do that and be thankful for this too. 

As a family, we didn't talk much about emotions, though we talked a lot about other things, my mother especially wasn't a silent person. My father, once he retired, talked and wrote about his childhood in his ancestral village, his life in towns and cities in India growing up and working. Overall, they weren't a touchy feely generation, they had seen too much hardship when young - the partition, the wars, the famine, the communal violence, their own uprooting and relocations forced by circumstances, the untimely, shocking losses in the family. It had squeezed the sentimentality out of them I think, but made them into quietly, deeply loving people. I celebrate them and their ways of loving and I'm determined that somewhere, someday, I'll be able to to do that without their deaths clouding my memories of their life. 

Year end 2K22 : Not Just a Christmas Thing

 

One year, many years ago when the blog was still a toddler unsteady on its legs, my father and I got into a discussion about Irene Rutherford's poem 'Is Love Then So Simple?' That spun off many responses in my head and one of them was this 'ereunder. Reposting it because it felt particularly appropriate just now.

Love Is Not Just a Christmas Thing

I’ll love you with the dance in my bones

and the pigeon calls in my veins

with the soil of my flesh and its stones,

the bungled belly laugh in my brains.

I’ll love you when the dances get dim

when the anklets draw hooks and blood

when pirouette is brimstone and grim

the last thrash of fish on the mud.

I’ll love you when the tinsel’s trash

when the tree’s just needles on the floor

all festive is only one flash,

and the dark is the maw of the door.

I’ll love you still when the music thins

under the amber songs of dawnskins.

It's been an extraordinary year - the good, the bad and the ugly. The challenges have been many - some earth shattering, some just a pinprick, but then so have the high points.

But...at this time, every year end, the bad and the ugly somehow drain away and only the residues of the good remain, like the faint smear of sand on fingers that have been building sandcastles on the beach for too long. That can't be dusted away no matter how hard I try. Has to be properly scrubbed off under the shower, now that it's dark and play must be taken indoors. 

However, I have to confess I'm not taking that shower yet. As I am content to go around with the grit under my nails and inside my shoes, ever so slightly uncomfortable but welcome still because it originates from a place of happiness.  Thankful for everything the year has brought me, the learning that has happened, the castles that have been built and those that fell and/or never got finished. Everything has its place in the wider scheme of things and nothing is ever wasted, not even a grain...my mother, Arundhati, used to say that often.

The advantage of having a mother who was named after a star is that I just have to look up at the night sky and there she is....still twinkling down at me with all her wisdom and laughter and life lessons and love and constancy, still steadfastly beside her partner star in the heavens. Both my parents have been with me all through this year - the farther I travel out from the centre, the closer they watch over me and my family, the deeper and broader their presence feels in my life, both present and past. And hopefully in the future too. 

Wishing you all the joys of this festive season. Happiness, peace and plenty of sandcastles to build in 2023. See you in the New Year!

Learning to be more catty

 

If like a cat, I had nine lives, that is, eight

more to go, I’d choose to be married to you

for seven as the sacred texts indicate

anyway, maybe I’d swap to a man to

see if I liked it in one, and then change back.

For the last, I’d take that round-the-world trip, not

in eighty days though. I’d find a way to pack

the important things. I’d learn to sail a boat,

to grow a tree from seed, to write in blank verse.

I’d waste less days searching for that perfect rhyme,

fill them instead with the words of foremothers.

Read more Bengali poets from scratch this time.

I’d live more deep, look more closely at the dew.

Leave more space for wonder. Leave more space for you.

November happens to be a month of personal celebrations of various kinds. This week,  I'm celebrating through the writing of a series of nine sonnets, here is the first of them. A celebration and a thanksgiving for the guy who's stuck around staunchly for more than half my life...despite the shortage of elbow room...

The Heft of Memory

 

I think of you at odd times, the templates

are not a convenient protocol –

and sometimes I don’t think of you at all

as the mind hardly differentiates

 

between the minute grains, the separate heft

of conscious and unconscious memory.

Every time I return to a story

you’re in it somewhere, to the right or left

 

of each chapter. And the city spools in

your laughter like an angler’s line, your face

a mirage of leaf shadows, just a faint trace

of your voice when the peak hour traffic thins.

 

In every courtyard I visit, every square,

in every vanished landmark - you’re there.

Even then

 

Till the rivers run up backwards into the hills,

the ocean currents come to an abrupt standstill

and stars lose their bearings, planets drop dead, blacken,

I’ll never forget, never forget even then.

 

Till the clouds go purple in the face blowing hard

and the wild old trees quietly standing drop their guard,

the grass sheathes its blades, swaps places with the lichen,

I’ll never forget, never forget even then.

 

Till the north winds stop unspooling their razor wires,

and the springs stop water, the volcanoes their fires,

till the earth itself implodes and stops being earthen,

I’ll never forget, never forget even then.

 

You’re woven into my veins, there’s no moving on.

It’s you who glows under my skin, throbs in my bones.

Daily celebration

I did not bring up love this month, because

it felt improper to mark the personal.

The inside jobs of lawmakers and laws,

burnt tyres, broken arches - a huge betrayal

took up all the space. Smoke and vitriol

fogged every screen, an ineffable loss

in the arcs of batons and gun barrels,

shattered glass, smashed promises strewn across

the city. But then you should not equate -

this glancing away, maybe a brief silence,

a preoccupation with the external –

none of these you should consider equal

to change, and certainly not indifference.

Love’s still something I daily celebrate.

Happy birthday, Baba.

And you might enjoy looking back at this as well.

Follow

I will follow you where no one else will -

till the far bank. Till the automatic doors

click shut.  Till the long train pulls out. And till

the last ocean reaches its farthest shore.

From these rooms to the routes by land and air,

on the road and off-road and by the hill,

at rest within walls, or restless, I’ll be there

wherever you choose to stop or travel.

When the light dazzles, or the darkness blinds

and the world offers a shoulder that’s cold,

the ground gets boggy or you suddenly find

the cliffs won’t let you get even a toehold,

when the earth and sky feel like a cosmic sneer

reach out for me and I’ll be there, my dear.

So, I am back in couch-potato mode, newly empty nester-ed and somewhat ill at ease with this whole caper. The offspring is now a few thousand miles away, I'm a few thousand years older, not a look that suits me, I'm sure. My heart is bursting with a deadly strange mixture of pride and fear, and also beating in all the wrong places...

The alarm clocks have been turned off, the school routines binned, but...I'm still waking up at crack of dawn every weekday, uber frustrating! The sleeping in till I drop off (the bed) plans will have to take a backseat for now...while I get my coping mechanism sorted...lots of hyperventilating coupled with beverages of caffeinated and alcoholic kinds should do the trick...and of course, poetry, the panacea for all milestones and malaise!