One Road, Many Routes

 

There’s only one road and not a thousand,

though the ways to get home are many.

Mango blossoms and the flamboyant’s,

piled up clouds on a day that’s rainy.

 

The sound of a key turning a lock

the rattle of a cracked casement glass,

a worm’s eye view of bridges of smoke,

grazing cattle configured on grass.

 

An old railway map marbled with tracks

boarding passes of bleached, faded trips

a chipped drawer stacked with photographs -

the preserved debris of old friendships.

 

Each one of them is a sufficient route

to loop back in a flash and touch the roots.      

What does the world have that home doesn't? Not a trick question, genuine. 

Well, chocolate for one. In my case. Chocolate has been produced in India from 1960's onwards, but except for niche, artisanal (read super pricey!) chocolate, the mass market stuff is overly sweet and too hard/harsh for my palate. European chocolate is still my favourite, available through out the ME but extremely expensive in Fiji as well as India. However, Fiji produces its own chocolate and there are other brands from NZ which aren't too bad. I will lose access to them obviously, once I move back. It will become an occasional treat from a-few-squares-a-day-keeps-the-heebie-jeebies-away type daily essential commodity at present. I'll have to deal with that. Home is not where the chocolate is. 

The reason why I am thinking all this is because that's what the prompt is at WEP next month - 

Join us! Post Aug 16th-18th, 2023.

.

Bittersweet, dark or white, studded with nuts, dusted with candied fruit, encasing intoxicating liqueurs in various heady flavours. Haunted by dodgy dealings and mirroring its own bittersweetness in its history,  which is changing but not changing fast enough - it's a veritable metaphor for life itself!  What's not to love, right? 

Waiting

 

You’re waiting for news but it does not come,

the rain is hard needles, yet still lissome

the cobbles are worn, the bricks are a ruin

a hair’s breadth between right and wrong doing.

You want to escape the nonstop urban noise

the jangling of nerves and the shattered poise

but you end up where you’d rather not be

walking the bleak footpaths of a sob story.

It all looks so pretty at the eye level,

the flower garlands, the bass of the conch shell,

but under the skin of the red mud pathway

it turns different -  right, might and power play.

Blanking the Verse

All I see is a sparrow, and a dove

perched on the windowsill against the glass

and the sunfilm lets me get quite close up.

All I read is that the deaths have gone flat

even as the cases fizz and spiral

I don’t mean to disregard any pain –

yesterday I heard a friend of a friend

has passed, a colleague of a cousin lost

both her parents within weeks while away,

her mapped mother had slammed the borders shut

and so she wasn’t in on the last rites.

I’d heard in childhood even walls had ears

but now they’ve evolved into empty eyes

in which one screaming headline’s reflected

briefly followed by another, graver -

that chokes off the ability to scream.

Only the glass shows me a pair of birds

perched to avoid the worst of midday heat,

on the wall a death curve that has flatlined

somehow bends into the outline of hope

even though it’s probably transient

even though the numbers are enormous.

For  now I have the dove and the sparrow

and no guilt in choosing a narrow frame.

I have  for now much less than a blank wall

and to blot it out, I have this blank verse.

An attack of Hindi

I get these sudden attacks of prehistoric Indian songs sometimes.  And thanks to Youtube I can indulge. Anyways, I was listening to this ancient and lovely number last week, and spontaneously this verse floated into my head fully formed.  A little scary even, I didn't know I had any Hindi left in me, certainly not enough for a spurt of shayari.  I am not sure if the genders/grammar are correct, so if you are a native speaker, or a non-native one fluent in the language, please feel free to point out the errors.

हम भी ले आएं हैं कश्ती तुफानो के बीच कहीं
मौजों में है जो सुकून वह न मिल पाया साहिलों में


रखते हैं उम्मीद ज़माना नादान हमें कहेगा नहीं
मोहब्बत दूर कहीं डोलती है न सिर्फ तेरी महफ़िलों में


हमें तेरी छुरियों, नज़रों से क्या? रोक ले इन्हे वहीं
जो तेरे दर तक पहुँछे हम नहीं उन काफिलों में


हम भी हैं तक़दीरवाले - मौज, मझधार, तूफ़ान ही सही
दरिया ने दी है वह जगह जो न बन पायी दिलों में




***

hum bhi le aayein hain kashti tufaano ke beech kahiin

maujon mein hai jo sukoon woh na mil paya sahilon mein

rakhte hain umeed zamaana nadaan humein kahega nahiin

mohabbat duur kahin  dolti hai na sirf teri mehfilon mein

humein teri chhuriyon, nazron se kya? roke le inhe vahiin

jo tere dar tak pohuchhe hum nahiin un kafilon mein

hum bhi hain taqdeerwaale - mauj, majhdhaar, toofan hi sahii

dariya ne dii hai woh jagah jo na ban payi dilon mein

***
I too have steered into stormy waters this craft of mine
the peace that's in the waves can't be found in coastlines

I have hopes that the world will not call me clueless
love pulses somewhere far, not just in gatherings you address

what are they to me? your knives, your glances? keep them on hold
I'm not part of those caravans that reach your threshold

I too am greatly blessed - never mind the storms, midstream waves
the river has given me that space which no hearts ever gave

Okay, written, transliterated, and translated, though the rhyme scheme changed in the translation.  Phew!  Hopefully out of my system now.  It'll take some time to recover from this one! :)

Pearls, beads, and wisdom

My final farewell is watching

the work of a known artisan -

the beads threaded on a string,

the silk knotted after each one.

I dither over a pendant - 

it seems somewhat expensive

ultramarine with dark accents

left matte by the gem-smiths.

He sees me drop the item,

“Madame, don’t look so upset,

there is always a next time

for reworking stones and budgets.”

I pay for what I’ve purchased

and quietly leave the old shop;

For me there will be no next,

no rewrites, the time is up.

Seven stanzas and a garden

The garden hedge has been grown

tall and tightly knit;
the early morning light takes on
leaf-colours minute by minute,
not much light  gets through to the lawn
till the sun makes the summit.

 

A small blue rag of a sky is seen

if the eye’s raised right up.
At ground level it’s only green,
fresh or dry as seasons dub
some flowers let into the scene -
a few blooms on a shrub.

 

How simple it is! to grow things high -

a decade and that’s all;
a few seeds thrown down and the sky’s
portioned into small;
some trees in a garden trained awry
morph into a wall.

 

Some trees grown too close, too straight

twist into a fence.
Did the gardeners know what they’d create
by planting them so dense?
That a screen can also isolate,
slice skies into small fragments.

 

The gardeners step back and feel proud

of hedges straight and even
and round the world without a doubt
trees in a home are a given
but then a high hedgerow shuts out
as it shuts in an Eden.

 

Think of a garden green and cool,

shaded early from the sun
the hedge at the edge is a natural rule.
When it's tall and overdone
breaks up the grass into modules
and obscures horizons.

 

Think of Queen Sita in a garden

abducted by a King
and guarded day and night by demons
and that’s the one true thing -
trees and leaves are as much a prison
as a high-walled building.

Not reaping what I sow

Some I will reap,

though not of my sowing.

The others will keep.

There’s  no knowing

to whom the last fruit will fall.

 

Maybe birds peck it

or maybe a squirrel;

a child could visit

and tear off and swivel

it over the garden wall.

 

Seeds I plant here -

if they’re coaxed to sprout -

with the passage of years

will fruit no doubt.

But not for me those harvests.

 

For all and one

welcomed to the orchard,

the fruits will ripen

and will be offered

after me to future guests.

In a specially jelly-kneed thanksgiving today for those who have sowed for me for years and years,  and the grace and favour I reap consequently.

Witness

The small sweep of lives, the orbit

of gravel on string, moons as white
as unused pillows, the infinite
squeezed into tiny and tight,

 

as tense as a crude catapult 

in the hands of giddy adolescents.
A supreme nothingness result
from minute spasms of moments.

 

What else can I have witnessed?

Whole galaxies stripped bare,
an entire eternity undressed
a white hot radioactive flare;

 

and then all has gone ominous

the silence swells with its own ring
that can’t be shared between us
with the same degree of meaning -

 

like peanuts from a packet

while watching a furtive movie
scenes and seats heavily padded
with a raucous ambiguity -

 

and so I’ve have come back to it,

back to the small sweep and sphere,
shrunk, flung back into these orbits
of my lives and my gravel here.

 

No-one ever speaks anything

a languid angst burns up space
and keeps the moon from yellowing
nudges the status quo into place

 

keeps the gravel turning around

fingers of centrifugal force
and skims meanings off sounds
and ruffles pages to find their source;

 

but the meanings can’t be made

by turns of page, by the swivel
of stone and clock, empty decayed
stars in their tracks. The lights shrivel,

 

while you witness the same events

and even call them similar names
and yet the meanings fall different,
haphazard, and nothing’s the same.

 

 

Beyond the one-dimensional

silence and its disconnects
there’s no orbit that threads it equal
smoothes the jerking, turns defects

 

into a light-hearted anecdote

shared on cocktail-cold evenings
“this I’ve written, just a small note
on catapults and sundry things,”

 

with a deprecatory shrug.

The hesitation and the fear;
the difference, much-abused drug,
mutes the impulse, we quietly steer

 

the moment away and each

smile a little uncertainly
understanding sways out of reach
neither of us can quite break free

 

to enable a common template

for catastrophes we witness.
We spin at our co-ordinates
once or twice we snatch a guess

 

look through the other’s lens

feel the other’s pebble and string
there is a tiny flash of sense
and then we are back to nothing.

 

The night trickles a little colder

now the moon’s a wrinkled pillow
hard as rock against shoulders
there’s nothing to be said, we know

 

the limits to word definitions

each perspective sharp, fine tuned
to what’s been seen, done, and undone
but in the end, mired and marooned

 

within our own discrete islands

of silent helplessness, tongue-tied;
turn away and understand
perspectives rarely coincide.

 

And that too is fine, my friend

that we could not articulate
all that we’ve seen, all that’s happened
that we can only stand and wait

 

watch and serve just one purpose

without any gods to oversee
that we each stood up to witness
the lexicons of plurality.