Rootlessness

Rootlessness… weightlessness…

as the winds of modernity separate me

from everything I defined myself in relation to.

 

Blood relations scattered too far apart

for memory to traverse

Devices occasionally carry words across

But devoid of feeling.

 

Belief riddled with holes

as it is forced through the sieve of rationality.

Gods are there on the pedestal, obscure

and in the heart a gnawing void.

 

This language that’s all lines and edges

feels like a virus that’s conquered the intellect,

and the one in which mother sang lullabies,

the pen has forgotten its curves

and the tongue is losing its cadence.

Remnants of a life

Ash and bones

That seem to reverberate

With the echo of cries of pain

Of the enfeebled body that’s no more

An empty bed

And clothes that smell familiar

Yet evokes dissonance 

A sense of loss of identity

That defined you in reference

To the deceased, and

A gnawing feeling of daily routines

Left in the lurch

Descendants, who now must wake up everyday

And confront the void anew

And learn to live with it

Rituals to assuage the guilt of the living

Of past neglect of the departed

Or to console loved ones

With the promise of peace in afterlife

A place beyond suffering

Float along

That pressure gauge you think

Is inside your head

With its needle in the red

Is only a phantom.

 

It’s just a crowding of

Thoughts uninvited

Knocking incessantly

At your mind’s door.

 

That cosmic tick tock you think

Is counting you down

To judgement hour each day

Is contrived too.

 

Time is indifferent

To moments both meaningful

And trivial.

 

Its nature is to flow

And all you need to do

Is float along…

Decline

 

Entered the maze of memories

and retraced steps seeking

a clear pool of the familiar

and the unchanged, for the tired soul

to drink strength from,

so it could carry on…

 

Lost bearing in the dimness and

lost footing blinded by cobwebs

and fell through to the past…

 

Looked around and saw

the familiar had declined

and time had corroded

the contours of things and people

into obscure contorted masses.

 

The reserve of strength hoped for

had run dry from years of munificence

and I didn’t have enough

of what it needed to resuscitate.

 

I sat a few moments in its embrace

and left lighter than I’d come

with a promise that soon

I‘d come back holding

the tiny hands of the future

for one last hug.

Lifetimes

In a fraction of a lifetime

I’ve aged many

Friendships supposed forever

Have long frozen in photos

I can barely recognize

Memories once light and effusive

Have turned black and viscous

An undifferentiated mass

That evokes nothing

Mind fastened to glowing screen

With endless things

Enslaved beyond redeem

Promise and potential abandoned

At the altar of expediency

A restless soul rendered inert

By the sheer drudgery

Of trudging along interminably

Conspiracy

For my school friends, a group of five, that we call...

Conspiracy

 

Against what? You ask…

In this world of each on his own

We conspire against estrangement

Against disaffection with life’s dispiriting echo chambers

That judge us short

A soundproof room

We come here to yell and swear

An asylum for idiosyncrasies

We conspire against the world’s indifference

Where things are pronounced stale by the minute

A constant, like a buoy

We conspire against obsolescence

Walking Islands

This city is an island

And me an island within it

I have my back to you

And indifference painted on my face

Lest it reveal some affinity

I suppressed long ago

The line of my lips renounced its curve

Lest it indebt me to empathy, or worse

Invite you to probe

The hollowness of my being

No!

Share your soul’s abundance

With those equally prosperous

I shall savour my emptiness alone

You are too normal

To be worthy

Of the hell that I’m in…

Bricks and Blooms

Bird named Dew...

Roots

What do you picture in your mind when you think of death?

 

Maybe you picture a loved one who passed away. Maybe the word induces nightmarish images of blood and gore if you’ve witnessed accidents. These are normal thoughts.

 

But I always imagined it as a magic trick. One day my grandfather was lounging on his old chair watching me color giraffes and whales in my little coloring book, the next day onwards the chair was empty… like some magician had waved his wand and opened a portal in our house and taken him away. That’s what I told my friends in kindergarten… complete with sound effects.

‘Puff!” and grandpa was gone… I used to say.

 

When my parents came to know about my imaginative explanation, they deemed me too young to know the truth and left the matter unclarified.

 

So all through my childhood, death was a black hole, a portal… it happened in a flash and then was gone.

 

When I grew up, I understood what death really meant… but somehow the image of a portal and a flash remained, maybe because after grandpa I had never been witness to a death up close.

 

That changed when Mom died. I cried a lot. Dad held my numb body and looked ahead at the pyre with dry eyes as Mom was cremated.

I cried again the next day and the next. But then after three or four days, I had to forget about it and move on. I had a husband and kids of my own to take care of.

 

After my husband went to office and kids went to school, I would go to my parent’s house to check on dad. It was after a few days like this that I observed that death could grow. It wasn’t over in a flash.

 

It grows on the ones who were closest to it and closest to the people it took. I watched it grow on dad… like tentacles that grab you and pull.

 

Or like strange roots that grew out of the earth instead of going in. At first they grabbed onto dad’s legs. Whenever I went to check on him, I found him on the sofa blankly staring at whatever was there on the TV. He remained like that for the entire day. I never saw him move for the few hours in the afternoon that I spent there. But at least he used to answer when I asked something.

 

But then the roots grew further up and bound his arms and body. They wound around his neck and up his jaw, finally sealing his mouth. In a week, he stopped talking. Nothing elicited any response from him. There was not even a murmur of a reaction to anything I asked him. But at least I knew he was alive because I could see his eyes move. Whenever I asked him something, even though he wouldn’t reply, his eyes followed the source of the question and landed on me. At least he looked at me, even if it were empty eyes that looked like they were going to cave in any second.

 

Then one day the roots wrapped around his head covering his eyes. He became blind to the light that came in through the windows. He became blind to the flashes of images on the flat-screen TV. His eyes were open but his irises were stuck… anchored to the center of the dry white. His pupils were dilated, as if he knew he was being mummified alive by death’s roots and was scared to close his eyelids.

 

Death had cocooned dad, wrapped him up inside its winding black roots. He was dead, except for his labored breaths. I knew he was gasping and I knew if the roots tightened their grip any further his breath would cease.

 

I had to do something. Death was the adversary here and only life could fight it. The only life I could find in that house was the memory of Mom. That is one thing death cannot touch… memory.

 

Since breath was the only grasp dad had with the world now, I rushed to Mom’s wardrobe and brought back a red saree that was her favorite. I held it up to dad’s nose. Surely, if he still could breathe, he should be able to smell the saree. It should evoke memories of Mom. I was sure it would.

 

After a while, I heard a low grunt. I held the saree closer to dad’s nose. I could see little quivers on his face and neck. More grunts erupted as he struggled to free himself from the grip of the black roots. I sat by his side and caressed his head as slowly he unspooled himself from the strong clutches.

 

Once he was free, the dry eyes burst forth with tears like a hole had been poked in a dam. He hugged Mom’s saree to his chest and wailed. I held him as he sobbed salty tears into the red fabric.

 

Dad fell asleep after he’d spent the tears that had remained clogged all these days. He was sleeping on the sofa hugging the saree when I left him.

 

When I opened the door to his house the next day, I found him hanging by the saree on the fan. There was not even a breath to salvage.

 

As I stood at the doorstep and stared up at the hanging body, I saw starkly what the wily creature had done. Death had lowered its mighty branches and strung him up by his neck. Once death has marked you with its cold tentacles, you are owed to it and it will claim you by whatever means necessary.

 

Below his dangling feet lay the black roots that he’d shed yesterday. When they saw me, they started crawling towards me.

Knowing you...

My soul knows

the depth of your eyes

the way those

little black pinpricks

swell for me, and efface

like night’s dark covers

shroud an amber moon’s

luminescence

 

My breath knows

your fragrance

a whiff of the heavens

as your wild curls

tickle my face, its strands

playing me like a harp’s strings

 

 

My chest knows

the lightness

of your arm draped across

soft, yet keeps me close

firm, yet uses no force

and holds my dreams

Safe in its palms

How we sleep

Our conversations resemble the way we sleep

You take up more room

And expect me to be happy

Inhabiting an ever shrinking space

But near the edge, I panic

Self-preservation instinct kicks in

Tells me to claw back relevance

And I push you back

Its no more a conversation

But an argument

I deploy all ammo

I fight dirty

I push too hard

We both fall off, then

Sleepless.

Body speaks the purest language

I feel a tremor course through you

And before your voice confirms through words

Your body tells me I've given it good

You fall on me and let it consume your being

You cling onto me like a kite to its string

To guide you safely down from this gale up high

That colored your face a lovely red

And brought two little pearls

In the corner of your eyes

This moment, My Love!

Brief yet Infinite

Is when I truly feel like a Man

No amount of money in a wallet

No trophy, No medal

Or whatever, that Men consider Manly

Has ever made me feel so whole

You, me and two dead poets

Your breath falls on me

Cool,

The smell of mint

Fresh,

Grass sprinkled with dew

On days like these

I'm a valley in bloom

Wordworth's Dancing Daffodils

But a day soon comes by

When you breathe a storm of fury

Head-on,

The kind that melts metal

Wildfire,

Burning everything in its path

I wail, Darling dont come near!

For I'm gunpowder stuffed tight

This will only end one way

Dante's Inferno

When she shaved off my lockdown beard

you hold my face up by the chin

you clasp my legs between your knees

you make sure i stay still

you put cream on my cheeks

sharp blades slide over, baring soft skin

discarding the illusion of a few extra years

you touch my face, your fingers tracing

its contours; you hold up the mirror

it shows me a boy; i think

i knew him when i was younger

i move it aside and see you smiling

i see the home that boy always yearned for

Before me

I am scared of your past
Of your life before me
The lips that may have kissed yours
The hands that may have held yours
The bodies that may have embraced yours
Do you think of them?
Do you see them in your dreams?
If you were asked to close your eyes
And say what a kiss feels like
Which pair of lips does your mind conjure?

River of Ash

Come back,

Meet me where your tears caught fire yesterday,

Back along the boiling river of ash you left when you ran away,

Come back and show me where it hurts,

Let my cold tears ease the pain of your burns...

Barzakh

The intermediate realm… a conduit between the red earth and the blue sky… conveying the prayers of the living to the eternal being… a barrier separating the two worlds… a portal connecting them.

The soul of the saint resided in the luminous corridors… listening to the prayers of the faithful… comforting them with his ethereal presence… and when they left he supplicated the almighty to relieve them of their difficulties.

His existence transcending both life and death… in a world of dreams… his fingers counting on a tasbīḥ.

Hmmm…?

Sometimes I look at you and for a split second I feel like I am seeing you for the first time. I see a stranger in the wave of people going about their day in a narrow corridor.

I see the wild curls in a half ponytail, a worn off shade of burgundy, and I sense a warmth spreading out from my chest. The cream and the orange of the kurti… the golden brown and white in the eyes… I see them and a rush a familiarity embraces me… and in these few seconds I relive every moment I have spent with you since that hot April day I first laid my eyes on you… those of happiness when I felt loved beyond what I’d ever dreamt of… those of unbound joy as well as those with tears. I remember all those times at night on the bed, when you asked me if I loved you…

You walk towards me as I am lost in this dreamy vision… you look at my blank face and ask “Hmmm..?”

I nod to say, “Nothing.”

In the sound of my breath I hear, “If only you knew how much!”

Still air

Two breaths in discord

The space between them in a swirl

Labored to match each other

Each slowed for the other

Never falling in step

All that was left

In the morning

Was still air