Not the Typical GRWM Post

 

It’s been forever. It’s not been that long.

Half the things are scattered. The other half’s gone.

Faded fuel receipts. Cassettes of faded songs.

A phonebook full of numbers of long dead phones.

 

You are more than ready. No, you are not.

The whole has been refinished – walls, floors, cupboards.

You still see the old things at the same old spots.

The new, low height switches feel a tad awkward.

 

You still reach for them where they once used to be –

the switches, hooks and door knobs. And you still keep

skirting phantom footstools from muscle memory.

That too feels like something. Grief or its relief.

 

Painted over now, someone’s height markings

on the kitchen wall. Some tiny growth rings.

Can't Pin It Back on the Map

Screengrab from the net. Credit where due.

 

It feels consequential. Like small talk

isn’t small. Like the sharpening winds have brought

more than cusp seasons. Memories of smoke.

The varieties of ash and dust that choke throats.

 

We both wear black and white. Ordinary, spare.

Her eyes are haunted. And I instantly know

another tower has imploded somewhere,

entire lifetimes have telescoped in one go.

 

She rises, lets me have the seat. I accept.

Going far? No, just a couple more blocks.

Smoke and ashes are our eyes. Not much left.

And the texture no longer feels like small talk.

 

She squares her shoulders. Adjusts her rucksack straps.

Some things once lost can’t be pinned back on maps.

~~~

Last week was the 25th anniversary. Quarter century. Enough to bring some long range perspective. 

I spent most of these 25 years in the Middle East. I was in Bahrain, at home with my infant son on the day. The baby was having his afternoon nap, I was having my afternoon coffee and TV. Awful, searing, unforgettable images. Three thousand people dead, the worst terrorist attack of all time.

The retribution was massive, massively out of proportion and affected the region I was in closely. Since 2001, the global war on terror has claimed 4.5 million lives, displaced another 38 million. And now on the anniversary, classified files have been released that show there was ample intelligence that something terrible was coming.  

Twenty five years on, the world is still at war, US is still at war. 

The question is - has the world been made safer? Are we ever getting peace?

Talisman

 

I read this random poem on my feed

and it felt like a sudden talisman –

rare metal shining among the debris,

a flash of green in the stream of taupe and dun.

 

It made me want to cup it in my hands,

to keep it in my pocket, against my skin

so I might feel it all day long as it thrummed

its words and the emotions it ringed in.

 

That was of course an impossible thing –

it stayed a while and vanished from my screen,

the day went on with its relentless rhythms

but I kept seeing phantom flashes of green.

 

It taught me to spot the rare through the debris

and it changed the screen forever. And changed me.

Poetry is my comfort food. I'm consuming rather a lot right now for reasons various - not that anyone needs any coherent reason for poetry, consumption or generation. Some or other thing prods some or other sense organ and off one goes - to find a verse that will do the job of self soothing or pumping a metaphorical fist or dancing a jig or whatever. 

Sometimes I find that in a regular printed book snatched from the bookshelf. At others I click into a long familiar website. And of course, the algos notice all this and pepper my SM feeds with poets and poems. I've found  many gems this way which have gone on to becoming absolute favourites. 

"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanise and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry only changes the poet."  - Mahmoud Darwish.

I do often think of this quote by Darwish, who's also a favourite of mine. I don't know if poetry changes others, I can only speak for myself. As far as I'm concerned, poetry has been the bedrock of learning and a profound change maker. It has certainly grown me up and out - from nursery rhymes in Bengali to Tagore and Sukanto and Jibanananda and Darwish and Faiz and Ghalib and Neruda and Dickinson and Shakespeare and Whitman and Tennyson and Cavafy and Mary Oliver and Roberts both Frost and Browning and... 

It's not obvious, after reading something by say, Edna St Vincent Millay no one can pinpoint the exact thing that's happened, but somewhere there's one extra, tiny tool to navigate the world with that wasn't there before, even if it's too minuscule to notice at the time. So...not just comfort food but also a navigational aid...

Do you think poetry changes people, changes history? Or does poetry change only the poet? Anyhow. I hope you find your comfort food and navigational aids in whichever form that works for you. Have a wonderful week. 

Blooming on the Barbed Wire

 

Blooming against the fence. Blooming on barbed wire.

It's not the stuff of dreams, not the heart's desire.

But still it does its best. The blooms are profuse.

Not all plants find the sun, nor can pick and choose.

 

Blooming against the wall. In constrained spaces.

Not all transplants happen in ideal places.

But still it's sent down roots. And it's climbed the wall.

It must use what's given or not grow at all.

 

The wire for all its barbs does support the climb.

The wall's six feet high, sunlight's a narrow time.

It's clawed its way up and soared into the light,

and it's now bloomed, sent you its message in white.

 

Be you the barbed wire, be you the vine that flowers

in the poorest of earths, with meagre sunlight hours.

It's been an amazing week and a month. Our young people have been unstoppable and inspirational. Much to learn from them - they've not just fixed our devices, they're fixing the bugs in our lives as well. Kudos, bachchalog! Keep it up. 

Someplace Else...

 

Seasons come on timid tiptoes over here –

a sudden spurt of green in a pavement crack,

a roof terrace splashed with bougainvillea,

your balcony hibiscus makes a comeback.

 

They’re all cultivated, but just imagine

distant places in some different hemisphere,

a different ocean and a tide rolling in,

far off plaintive birdsong nestled in your ear.

 

There the rain’s on open grounds and petrichor

weaves its heady perfume into the winds

silver rain drops into its own metaphor.

It’s not the season you’ve ever imagined.

 

There’s no timid green spurt, no paved surfaces,

just the earth, rains, you and the wildernesses.

Rather a lot of things are awry in my world right now,  well, not my world only, I'm not in favour of one individual hogging the world, but you know what I mean. It's been going on for sometime - the war sending the fuel prices into a spiral, routine misogyny and crimes against women, daylight robbery in high places under the patronage of political bigwigs, all kinds of mixed messages from officialdom and so on ad nauseam. 

I avoid the news like the plague but sometimes some trivial nonsense turns out to be the last straw :) Something like that happened last week,  I vented on FB  and a close friend advised me to look up and out at the nature all around - always restorative. 

Now I am physically at a place that reminds me of this song here, though I have to confess I've never seen a single lilac blooming in the wild, the flowers are all different but the emotions are universal. Anyway, I followed my friend's advice the best I could through poetry, the most excellent escape route out of a blue funk and a bridge between having and not having and magicking mood switches out of thin air. Phew! 

I hope your season is going well and you're at a place from which there's absolutely zero need to escape. 

With Billy on the balcony

 

This season we aren’t going anywhere

no Almora, nope, not even Darjeeling

and certainly no quaint cobbled foreign square.

There’s rain. Coffee. The hibiscus is blooming.

 

How pleasant it is to avoid all hill towns –

I have the poetry of Billy Collins.

No need to trudge, out of breath, up and down.

Home with coffee. And the sound of the rain falling.

 

No urge to charge in to ancient monasteries,

marvel round eyed at gold icons and things.

Here’s the flamboyant. And the frangipanis.

A rain soaked bedraggled bird that still sings.

 

And Billy points out that Bologna and Rome

aren’t a patch on rain and coffee at home.

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.

Occupied

 

Some days your absence is less marked, and deep

is your presence all around, everywhere.

The old flamboyant tree across the street

comes into bloom. Checked cushions on the chair

still sag in spots where you'd rested your weight

as if you've not left. A pigeon coos outside

at the exact same pitch as on the days we'd played

at carrom. Not just the chair feels occupied.

We're low on stuff, whatever's in the cup

swirls hazy and bright. Something calls my name

like lightning on the sea. I instantly stop

no one's there - but the flashing sky feels the same.

Not just the chair and house feel occupied -

public roads too, whole cities and riversides.

Happy Mother's Day! - to all mothers here and elsewhere. 

Another Route to Return

 

Sometimes I go back, return just before dawn

to those narrow lanes we’ve long left behind,

those ancient town gates, rough-hewn cobblestones,

the modern boulevards, landscaped and tree lined.

 

The sharp edges of stones underneath my sole,

the whispers of water, wind and centuries,

the long stories that shaped them, told and retold,

the smells of growing grass and flowering trees.

 

I don’t know if it’s I who moves through those streets

or it’s the dreams and stories that move through me

like wind and water, milestones beside my knees,

plumes of grasses in autumn, shells from the sea.

 

A recurrent dream that keeps me wide awake,

it moves through me sometimes just before daybreak.

The way things are shaping up this year - I feel like returning instantly, burrowing back to places and times in the past. 

Though I am emphatically not one of those people who automatically view it with good old days type nostalgia. Old is often not gold, far from it. Go back fifty years, only 60% of women were literate. Go back a hundred, tuberculosis was a death knell. Another 25 years, there were no indoor loos for the majority, poor sanitation killed people. Mortality rates among infants and children were unbelievable. No hot water on tap, no gadgets, everything done with huge amounts of elbow grease. Life was hard. 

Yes, the past is great to romanticise and write poems about, but not so great to return to in actual fact. On second thought, I'm good where I am, thank you. :) Still fretting about the weather, both literal and metaphorical and about the roughness all round. But also grateful for a whole heap of things.

Weak signals

May you go places where the networks are weak,

and time’s marked with birdsong, there’s no need to speak,

the ocean whispers its secrets in your ears.

May you listen and fathom better this year.

 

Where the lanes vanish a few paces in,

the sands are knee deep and the foot traffic’s thin

and unknown lizard tracks rush off somewhere

pursued by predators. May you walk there.

 

Where the grasses are tall and the trees are high,

the fragrance of earth billows in the sky,

wildflowers bloom like fireworks in the air.

May your footsteps enhance the peace over there.

 

May you go places where the signals aren’t clear,

experience a deeper, full body year.

The year has certainly started with a bang, everything already spiralling out of control, breathless at the avalanche of changes. I've been thinking about what I want to do with the blog, if I should go back to my original practice of posting weekly. But nearly two weeks in, that idea doesn't seem all that great, right? :) So sticking to the fortnightly routine for the near future. Less is more. Taking it one step at a time and keeping it as positive as I can. That's the non-resolution for 2026.

I hope your January is going well and you are already experiencing a full body month. 

Desert Rose

 

The desert rose has bloomed in green places,

in coordinates that it may not choose –

in the narrowest of urban spaces,

under heavy skies and a light too diffuse,

 

in soils that are clogged with too much water,

in planters meant for different sets of roots,

in shadowed courtyards, against its own nature –

in circumstances that don’t always suit.

 

It doesn’t bloom prolific but the flowers

bloom a stubborn red as the shadows deepen,

as taller and higher rise the towers,

as the light’s withdrawn they get deeper even.

 

It doesn’t quite meet the trending standards,

but still blooms quietly in a hostile earth.

~~~

I wanted to write something ebullient - festive and season appropriate for this post, but that didn't happen for reasons various. Story of my life. Meanwhile, this plant at the back of our house, I've been fretting about it for ages because it looked peaky and wasn't producing buds - it bloomed suddenly. Red and green. As appropriate as it gets.

I first came across the Adenium, or Desert Rose as it is commonly known, in the Sahel in West Africa, where it originates. My mother's gardener Matthias had, after due consultations and round table conferences, lined the back and sides of the compound with these plants in Maiduguri. I spent a whole chunk of my afternoons out in their company, the flowers were a different colour, light pink rather than red, but I'd know the species anywhere. 

Never saw them in India during childhood home leaves - east was east and west was west then, desert was desert and green was green and no one probably attempted growing exotic foreign plants in gardens over here. India anyways has a huge heap of native flowering plants, my folks were content with the local varieties I guess. Things have changed now, I've spotted quite a few desert rose specimens in our neighbourhood. 

Kolkata is quite the opposite of a desert, you turn your back for a minute and there's a banyan or fig sprouting in a crack on the windowsill of your building. The northern Sahel has an average annual rainfall of 200 mm. Kolkata on the other hand might get 250 mm in 24 hours during peak monsoon season. And this year has been exceptionally wet. Therefore, growing a desert plant here is a serious undertaking! :) Not all plants need great gobs of fertile soil and pouring rain to thrive. 

The one who took this enterprise up in the back was my jethani, she was a keen gardener. She passed away untimely in 2023. Jethani is untranslatable in English, the western society is not so specific about extended family relationships. She was my husband's elder brother's wife, what would you call her? Sister-in-law doesn't really mean the same thing, does it? Some Indians translate jethani as 'co-sister.' Even then it falls a little short, because the 'elder' part is built into the word jethani.

Anyway, I digress. She planted several perennials, some foliage, some flowering, both local varieties and a few foreign ones. Among them this desert rose. I think of her every time I see her pot plants - they are a comfort. I'm glad the desert rose is blooming.  

Happies and merries to you. Wishing you and yours all the joys of the season and a happy New Year 2026. May your desert roses bloom under every sky and soil that comes your way. 

Palace of Dreams

 

Didn’t you always crave a lemon tree,

a mango or two, the smell of summer?

A clematis trailing the exposed bricks?

Didn’t you always dream what this would be?

Less concrete and curtains and more runner

beans, citrus suns, hiraeth edging homesick.

The tides of jasmine covering for the sea.

Halfway to a sonnet, half a bit firmer

and freeing itself of every metric 

to lace into an amorphous canopy.

An empty sparrow’s nest in one corner.

A bare bulb somewhere, nothing idyllic.

Rain filling up the sky and rusting grills.

The paving dusted with hibiscus pistils.

July has run into August and I'm pedalling furiously to catch up somehow but always falling behind, always out of breath and vaguely puzzled as to why this is happening. The idea is to post the first and last Sundays/Mondays but I think the first one has slipped by without my realising it. Oh well, what's done is done, or rather what's left undone cannot be done retrospective, only done late. Anyway, better late than never.

August is always a busy month - lots of family and personal milestones, apart from the big national holiday coming up on the 15th. So offline life will muscle in and shove aside the online one - guaranteed. A few years ago this would have upset me, I'd have scheduled stuff and not missed a single Sunday...but one evolves - I no longer obsess about things I can't help, I don't know for sure if that's a good thing but it doesn't feel like a bad one. 'Do what you can with as much as you have and let the rest go' - I'm still internalising things I should have done years ago. Better late than never...

Wishing you a smooth and tranquil week ahead.

 

Stranger Earth

 

I don’t know this city without your footprints

marking out the roads, buildings, the streetlights

glinting on your glasses, your voice mapping

the terrain of neighbourhoods, days and nights.

I don’t know this place, it’s strangely different –

the waters an acrid shade of grey and white,

the neon signs of advertisements pulsing

like a news ticker from a disaster site.

Everything is where it was, yet it isn’t

as if the ground has shifted, ever so slight,

as if the earth’s somehow lost its mooring,

as if the sky’s fallen from a great height.

Grief is a half done crossword by your chair,

an absence the shape of your feet on the stairs.

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? 

Resolution

 

I'm resolute that I'll let joy arrive

at its own pace, I'll not ask it to rush,

nor will I turn away from the less joyous.

Everything comes at its appointed time.

I'll wait and learn. To keep the flame alive

whatever is served. Not let months crush

the night flowers slow blooming in darkness,

the rivermagic supreme and sublime.

And I'll learn to listen more acutely,

to love deeper, in more effacing ways.

Make sure my love is felt, not seen nor heard -

I'll erase the extras most resolutely

till less than joyous also feels like grace,

beyond the need to spell it out in words.  

Well, here we are  - the first post of the year. Hope you've had a brilliant time these past holidays and that those good things are going to repeat throughout the year. Wishing you lots of happies and merries in 2025. 

I don't really make resolutions, New Year or otherwise, the above is pure poetic licence overload.  Mainly because I suck at keeping them. However, the general idea is to do a bit better, to learn something new and go someplace new. To work on the patience quotient, which, after decades, is still not at an acceptable level. And the less said the better on the detachment/decluttering index, yikes. Work in progress, work in progress. Sigh. 

Do you make New Year resolutions? Tell me the secret to not fail at them.