No Flying Objects

 

Tranquil Arabian Gulf and sky from a vastly different time.
Amwaj, Bahrain, 2019.

The warplanes didn’t fly today, no drones,

no sirens nor alerts every now and then,

and there were no frantic calls on the phones

so I came out to the park to walk alone

if some peace could be plucked from a war season.

 

It was emptier, the grass had withered and wore

a fine mesh of soot and ashes, motes of death

blown in by the winds from a stricken shore –

trophy targets had been bombed the day before,

there was no spring anywhere, not a breath.

 

Some old trees had been damaged by the fallout

I too am changed – lopped and bent by strange degrees

too complicated right now to figure out,

there’s no peace though the sky’s clear and I doubt

for those who witness war there’s ever a peace.

 

Those trees are severe wounds that might perhaps mend

and the grass might claw back again, and birdsong

might fill the park at dawn and dusk in the end

as if all this ruin had never happened,

but that will take lifetimes. And roots that are strong.

The war is on my mind still, it's too close to be otherwise. I sit with the intent of focussing on something else, write something else but somehow all my thoughts loop back to it. The first line here floated up on my feed and became the prompt for the above. 

Meanwhile, some friends have got back to their respective homelands to relative safety, thankfully. But there are others talking about the hardships of being in a war zone, the difficulties of living life in uncertainties. The crash bang thud thumps of the missiles or interceptors and falling debris. The deserted streets and souqs and malls, the huge financial losses being incurred daily by ordinary people unable to ply their regular livelihoods. Schools and universities going into online education mode. Can't imagine the panic and stress the war must be causing exam year students and their families, their exams start early May. How does a 16 year old concentrate amidst missile strikes? My feed has images of smoke rising from buildings, road closures, screenshots of SM posts on tips for conflict zone survival, dos and don'ts for civilians- all super scary and agonising. 

Meanwhile, the effects of war have reached us too in India, prices are up, morale is down. There's a LPG cylinder (cooking gas) crisis - we managed to eke out ours somehow till the refill arrived. Was looking at induction cookers as a back up, but there's a total stockout, not one available for love or money. I'm getting the heebie-jeebies because Hormuz isn't just the import route for LPG alone, it carries fertilisers, helium and many other crucial industrial inputs. If this continues it's going to affect farm production to MRI imaging in hospitals. Shudder. 

Our travel arrangements are still on, so glad that we didn't book our usual route through the ME, which is really the default setting for us, having lived there for so long. I am going to be away from couch and computer till the first week of April. Some of my A-Z posts I've managed to schedule, the rest will have to be pantzed  after I'm back. Fingers firmly crossed the war will be over by then and we all will survive/surmount our individual challenges, alphabetical and otherwise. 

Colours

 

The colour of distance was a kaleidoscope –

glass shards, shiny dreams mixed in with river gravel,

wildflowers flattened by raindrops, dusted with hope,

a lone evening star pierced by a mountaintop,

the primordial rhythms of footsteps, sands and travel.

 

Everything isn’t a journey, there’s standing still

to observe the intent rain trickle down your nape.

Everything isn’t colour. Endless climb uphill.

It’s picking up a seashell too, and watch it fill

with rain and ocean, reflect you and the landscape.

 

The colour of home, in contrast, was more specific

tending to terracotta – burnt clay pots and pans,

a mud-wide riverside, a wall of exposed brick,

my father’s wedding ring, my mother’s old ceramic

mug of clear black Darjeeling steaming in her hands.

Everything isn’t home and home’s not everything.

There’s being alone, a stranger, under vaster skies,

the thrill of unknown earth, unknown paths beckoning,

the bone deep peace of trees, the flash of a birdwing,

feet firmly on strange tracks with nothing recognised.

I came across this book title and a quote from it - 'you can't go home again' by Thomas Wolfe, a famous author from North Carolina. The quote's been buzzing around my head...it has permeated everything I've written subsequently, home and away, the various shades of homecoming and unhomecoming. Someday I would like to get my hands on this book. 

Amazon offered me a free audio version - but you know me, my neural pathways are paved in concrete and it's too late to change their preferences - audio isn't remotely as satisfying as a regular printed book with that crisp papery feel between thumb and fingers. It might work for a short story, but don't see how I am to manage with audio for a 700+ page novel. Hubby keeps extolling the various virtues of audiobooks - no shelfspace requirement apart from being practically free, no stress on eyes etc etc, but the heart wants what it wants. No arguments possible with that.

Which do you prefer  - audio or printed? Hope your week is filled with colours and books in your preferred avatars. Have a blissful one. 

Representation

 

Whole histories lie in torn curtains, crumbed rust

on exposed steel, in cracks on the stair treads,

in your own careless thumbprint on the dust,

a barely there spider web’s single thread

caught briefly in the beam striking the bed.

Ordinary lives summed up by the contents

of desks and drawers, by tattered bookmarks

showing where they’d stopped reading, sure they’d meant

to go on, only it had gone too dark -

pages spelling out their exits’ exact arc.

 

A weekly crossword has been left half done,

you can’t quite bring yourself to complete it

because that feels like a small desecration,

as if that’s tampering, it’s not your remit.

You waver, you neither write nor can you quit.

 

You want to clear the space out and rearrange -

the useless old teapots, the dulled silverware.

No! - you can’t bear the thought of the slightest change.

Let the lifeless represent the life lived there –

the half done crossword, the same cracks on the stair.

Not sure where that came from - except that some of our old window stays had to be replaced because they had got so rusted that the shutters couldn't be shut. It's 60 days into the homecoming? more than halfway to 100 and it's been a lively time - in a good way and also not in a good way. 

I've been to the wholesale hardware market and shopped for stays (because the style we have is so ancient that it is carried only by the bulk distributors, it's a 50 yo house). I've shopped for textiles, storage jars, frames, planters. I've got the last remaining items on the furniture wish list finally done,  I've got the passport done, I've got my first dog bite - so that last one takes care of 'experience something new' for 2023. Anti rabies shots - yum! :) 

We are still jumping through the various regulatory hoops and this time around my stores of patience, never very robust to begin with, have worn really thin. There are so many safeguards yet the mega fraudsters go scot free while ordinary folk like me are driven insane, one needs to sign forms in triplicate and a password to sneeze even. It would be comical if it weren't so uber tedious. 

It is of course Gandhi Jayanti (birth anniversary) today and the festival season in India begins on the 14th. So the good times are set to continue, as family from Mumbai and Lucknow will be visiting. And cousins are here to attend from the USA as well. There's the spookfest challenge at WEP too...like I said, happy-busy month, hopefully. 

Happy October to you too and happy festivals, whichever you may be celebrating. 

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. 

Fresh new eyelids

Somewhere in a river of red Sundays,

in thick drifts of January headlines,

somewhere in black boxes of old crosswords,

perched nervous on a taut wire of sunshine,

I’ve waited for you to give me back my mind.

Somewhere in yellowed photograph albums,

in a million cracks of brittle glassine,

staring at the six-faced dies of mind games,

turning the wheels of dead mundane routine,

I’ve waited for you to tell me what you mean.

The years fall like petalled rain on fingers

and both my hands and eyelashes are wet.

On the highway piled up sullied winters.

You’re still out shooting, eyeballs on target,

but no more waiting, I’m primed to forget.

Eyelids are woven so they’d be drip-dried,

strength’s a dragon kite flying at its own will.

I’ve torn up all the rivers and cracked glassine

and forced the boxes open, dies to spill.

You’ll be in sometime. I’ll be quite civil.

And I’ll claim back each of the shot Sundays,

and every blank box on the crossword grid,

rake back each ribbon of hijacked mindspace

and weave myself a pair of fresh, new eyelids

and brush off all that you did, and undid.

The Hallucination of Room

I’ve breathed in your dust through my eyes

smelt the waves lapping at your shore

I’ve heard the silent towers rise

felt skin part as they stabbed the skies

reflection of cranes on glass doors.

Who knows who has the right to call

your mud their bone or blood or home

and what’s that except a set of walls?

one trumpet note and that set falls,

the hallucination of room.

The hallucinations of roofs

and rooms, this nothingness enclosed

and dust breathed in without much proof;

home always, but at a remove,

conflicts, and space juxtaposed.

In my house there are a hundred half-done poems

All of these poems unfinished, spaces crammed

full of half-uttered words, inert, tongue tied.

Interrupted windows, staircases jammed

with mindless tics and turns and asides,

with untaken steps to retrace, strengths untried

to fling the whole purpose away, start again.

Nothing feels it’s honed to a polished end,

tightened so well that it won’t spring open

next season, at the touch of buttons. Fattened

enough for blades. Lean enough to be deadened.

A hundred of them precarious, unravelled -

each memory in its groove wrongly filed;

some thumbsore, others ignored, mishandled.

The woods and cells and walls poorly styled,

imperfect the rhymes and rugs, unreconciled.

Nothing finds a closure in a short lifetime -

the entire house left open by a crack of rhyme.

First thing in the morning today I read about Om Puri passing away, and the title line which is from a famous Mary Oliver poem called 'Thinking of Swirler' flashed into my mind. And that line kind of ambled into this poem. A sonnet-ish form of my own, with an extra line after each quatrain. Fattened, if you like, ready for the blade.

'Each of us leaves an unfinished life.' Indeed.  Om Puri was a favourite in my cine-going days in Delhi, when I frequented the Indian Panorama at the film festivals, because they were the cheaper tickets - available for two-three rupees each.  The foreign films too of course, as many as I could afford. Om Puri was starting out those days, and rose to a major force in Indian Parallel Cinema. I remember some mesmerising performances by him - Aakrosh, Ardh Satya, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Sadgati, he was flawless in every film. 

As I left India mid-nineties, my relationship with Indian Cinema became a little distant subsequently.  I haven't watched any of his later films, but I have followed his career. Beyond saddened at his passing, and a little shaken too - has the loss of Western artistes that characterised all of 2016 somehow infected India now?? 

Mr Puri, you will be sorely missed.

Not even time

A drizzle of sunlight through the roman blind,

the paper-shuffle of the daily grind,

you called and you said ‘come’ and so I came

to find out exactly how strong the flame

of friendship burnt, and burns after a time.

Dilute

I’ve been drinking half-latte since you’ve gone;

seems fitting – this dilution when alone,

that the strength and taste of coffee should change-

half the richness, the spoon’s lonely one-mug plunge,

the very rims of cup, contents and home.

Nearness underpins all manner of things,

the scents and concentrations of my mornings,

the places and glasses set at my table.

Distance makes my words flicker, disables

them in fade-out grey, slightly shifts the meanings.

The worlds spin the same, and my life too turns

regardless of when you leave and return.

I drink my coffee, I write the verses down;

I chat with friends, mention you’re out of town;

I find new frames for words like ‘lone’ and ‘yearn’.

Dusty and unscheduled and unlit

Lately, I have given up forced schedules -

of voices and gravity, unbroken rules

governing when the windows might open,

when they must shut, when words must be spoken,

a life of finite couplets and modules.

I’ve let the door stand ajar in dust-storms

I’ve piped in dreams of sand and low landforms,

orchestras of fallen leaves, autumn-coloured.

Led merry festivals of haphazard

words into worlds far away from their homes.

And I’ve also let my voice go back to sleep -

the freedom that’s in silence is for keeps,

and when it’s finally woken up again,

I’ve asked it to hold its breath and just listen

to chuckling rivers, to candles as they weep.

The winds have blown out my lamps, and unlit

they stood for whole Diwalis, not just minutes.

Their darkness and their beauty were unsurpassed.

Forget small flames, even stars do not last.

I’ve come across a darkness that’s infinite.

If you’ve stopped here by chance and wondered why

the door’s unlatched, the golden dust’s knee-high -

well, now you know the reason: I’m not absent

I am only doing what I was meant

to do: be still and let all things pass by.

Read if you wish

Read me, if you wish, like a two-fold pamphlet

handed out at street corners by children

forced out of childhood early, their eyes set

into surly orbits of need, desperate.

Patches of limp lines, thrust out as and when

the lights turn red.  A stereotyped gimmick

thrown into cars caught with windows open

weird damaged overlarge wings in that traffic

light, and sudden fright turning to a quick

indifference, “It’s that same old thing again”.

Or read me like frayed love letters, blinking

between dusty pages. The books from when men

still wrote letters, fancy penmanship and ink

counted for, not much, but still worth something.

Pressed, not thrown.  A shade of precious even,

preserved for a future nostalgia fix;

though the addressee didn’t know it then.

Or read me as I am, forget the tricks

of metaphor, of angles and semantics,

just words written into verse and plain spoken.

Ashless

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

It burns intense, and it also burns slow -

great heat, a sheer blue flame, finely haloed

but it yields nothing, no ash, minimal glow

and there’s no charred heap once it’s out, no broad

smear on soil from which meanings can be clawed.

Yes, it’s poetry, that tiny rimmed blue leap,

that transparent smoke with its musky smell

though it leaves no trace of itself in the sweep

of its own wide dispersal.  Hard to tell,

to tease out the proof that it’s burning well.

Because that quote from Cohen just took my brain in its jaws this morning and worried it like a big cat with its prey.