Once in a café 

The following few poems were written in a space of one month, while moving through three different cities. Each one has been triggered by a random image, a fleeting moment, or by a phrase caught inadvertently by a curious ear.

1.

"just forget 'bout 

it";

A bit lonely 

repetitiveness

slips in...like

the hollow slow

call of a solitary 

crow pheasant

lying unanswered

on the other side of

a buried reality

"just forget 'bout 

it";

it turns to

silence, but the

insides still scream

like cassandra.

echoes rise and

fall against the

sanguine darkness

lost to time

and lessness 

"do you remember?"

2.

do not mourn for us

who existed always

in each other's dreams

even without knowing;

strangers no more.

each listening quietly

in the wordless hush

of silent yearnings.

eyes closed, we brush

past each other

in the folded darkness

and lo the sparks that

rise, the cinders that

fall...a chrysalis aquiver 

on this rainy day

3.

the gentleman 

with pink umbrella

under the cupolic sun

forgot his wreath

of smiles somewhere

along the cemetery

he passed on the

way to work

now there he goes

wondering why

today feels a little

emptier than

yesterday; his hand

clutching the smooth

wooden handle 

wishing it were holding 

the light brown palm

of the beloved, with

infinity etched on it

4.

      

in the old bookshop

renovated, smelling of 

fresh paint and defunct

identity, they cruise

from aisle to aisle

searching for fragments

of departed time 

with its musty smells, 

coffee dregs, and pages

aflutter with impatience;

hearts racing past its 

'silence please' corners

drumming pulsations

slowly dying like embers;

hissing

5.

infinity squandered in 

trying to forget the few

moments we spent

together: yet who could 

have known that every

leaf  sighing in the wind

would remind me of you?

6.

i shall merge 

forever in the now, 

the then pressed gently

against my heart

The Way...

It passed noiselessly from our front yard. "Good," my mother exclaimed. "This would take care of those thieving rats raiding my papayas right off the trees". Yes, the enormous whip-tailed rodents were not only partying up there, but also leaving fat chunks of turd right by her entrance door as though to rub it in.

"Great," my husband remarked, chuckling. He was thinking of the fate of all those toads which had turned our shoe-rack on the porch into a convenient housing complex, with each slippery individual occupying the cozy interiors of our infrequently used sneakers and sandals. However, as part of his morning ritual, he went through each footwear on and off the rack and shook it vigorously,  waking up the sleepyheads and sending them scurrying to look for some other place to house-sit. Needless to say, he also had to ensure that they hadn't left any proof of their eupepsia behind. So, for my husband having a snake around was reassuring and translated into one less chore to preoccupy his morning hours.

My brother too was overjoyed. His reasons were quite different, as he nodded his head thoughtfully and said, "hm....very auspicious indeed".  For the legend has it that we are the descendants of King Agrasen of Solar Dynasty. And King Agrasen is reputed to have  married  the  beautiful  princess Madhavi, the daughter of Nag Raj, the Snake King. Somehow my brother was very taken up by this legend and proud to have some reptile blood coursing through our veins. The conspiracy theorists like David Icke who propagate the reptilian humanoid/reptoid theory would surely feel vindicated by this belief.

Two-meter-long, dark green and unaggressive, the welcomed visitor, which came and went as it pleased, was a harmless rat snake. Soon a mongoose too had begun to drop by our yard in a casual 'howdy' kind of way. And the brahminy kite was heard circling the swirling heights above the cashew tree. The sprawling indolence of summer-swathed days assumed an air of alertness with shadows once still, beginning to breathe, and hiss, and  glide.

"Nothing is permanent" , says Buddha. One morning we were woken up by  a sudden commotion of excited voices. An image of two drunkards in a tussle swaggered across the mind briefly before I was nudged hurriedly back into the tempting arms of Morpheus. Later, on waking up, the dead snake outside the gate met my eyes: killed, slaughtered, hacked. "It is released from this world of Maya", my mother philosophised, adding, "now, it might  be reborn as something else". She had found her peace. She always does.

The memory slowly slinked away, leaving in its wake the usual cavalcade of unanswered questions; the whys and the wherefores. Summer days grew hotter and clammier. The three amaltas trees in our neighborhood with their dangles of golden yellow blossoms refused to bloom. Even the vermilion gulmohar was reluctant. The wonted abundance of the mango season eschewed us. 

It was only May, the wee beginning of summer, and most of the country,  embroiled in communal upheaval,  was already reeling under an unprecedented heat wave. History was being dug up to resurrect the past, while the present itself was being quietly buried. 

  

Let's Get Serious

It felt surreal to find Ravish Kumar on NDTV's Hindi channel speak about Trevor Noah. Suddenly the living rooms of Ravish's prime time audience were alive with Noah's unstoppable humor which seem to be pumping up  an animated Joe Biden with an insane amount of laughing gas.  Interestingly, oftentimes the butt of the joke was President Biden himself. Yet, the 81-year-old leader found it within his ambit to be a good sport. 

In 2015, Trevor Noah, the stand-up comedian and South African television icon succeeded the longtime host Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, a satirical news program on Comedy Central. And seven years later, here he was, the 37-year-old Noah, invited to do a skit at the White House Correspondents' dinner. Poking fun at the President's many policies as well as the complacency of media, Noah was as much at home as his audience. 

The above example just goes on to illustrate that a vibrant democracy embraces criticism at the apical level. Here is a non-American, who is not even a citizen of the country, making fun of the highest authority of the nation in his presence and on his turf. To envision a similar scenario in our country steeped in a culture which encourages an almost groveling and reverential attitude towards the powers that be, is chimerical.

To be able to expose the hypocrisy of a society, amnesia of a system or short-sightedness of a leader through humour sometimes may be the most effective means to get one's point through. The front page editorial cartoons in the newspapers worldwide, for example, have long been considered representational of the publications' respective socio-political leanings, and often succeed in mouthing more than the editorial or the articles on op-ed page can. 

While political satire is as old as the Greeks, stand-up comedy is a twentieth century phenomenon where a comedian addresses a live audience. Even though India has had its fair share of popular satirists in artists such as Kaka Hathrasi, Ashok Chakradhar,  Safdar Hashmi, Pradip Chaube and Alhar Bikaneri, stand-up comedy has made its foray onto the Indian stage only a decade and a half ago. Artists like Kunal Kamra, Varun Grover, Hasnein Sheikh, Vir Das and Munawar Faruqui have not only become household names, but were once considered a force to reckon with. 

Lately however, this business of being funny is becoming less and less funny. Awkward

silences or an audience that is not in on the joke is one thing, fragile egos with easily-hurt sentiments, quite another. While the former might land the artist in an embarrassing situation, the latter could land him/her behind bars. The truth being that along with the risk of content-crackdown or a show-cancellation, there is always the realtime apprehension of being sued. And it is this  which is driving several comedians to run their stand-up videos by lawyers before uploading them on social media, just to be on safer grounds. "Getting shot dead while performing is not out of the realm of impossibility anymore. A slap on stage is quite a mild thing in comparison," remarks Grover on the mishaps of being a stand-up comedian in India.  

Whoever said, 'Laughter is the Best Medicine'? 

Are you serious?

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

Composed, consciously shutting out the latent snobbery of my non-believer's heart, I step into the grand ancient interiors of the Meenakshi temple.

Two rock doves flutter above me to land on the monolithic buttress supporting the entrance. A tiny salamander slithers across the path. People dressed in silk, forehead smeared with ash and sandalwood paste, eyes filled with jasmine scent and fervor file past. I touch the stone-carved pillars, dating back to the 6th century CE, wondering if I were to reach the closest star at this very moment, would I really be watching dinosaurs rollicking around the earth? Their damp coolness feels soothing against the sun-soaked granite floors where we walk bare-footed on this hot summer day. 

A cat basks in  the snug embrace of one of the sculpted gods. Its proximity to such divine company hasn't spurred it to lose touch with its wilder instincts for in-house adventure. My eyes follow its maverick movements as it sidles up and down around the pillars, finally finding its way towards a hidden window and quietly disappearing therein. No doubt, in search of something new...or maybe merely seeking some privacy away from the bemused expressions of the devout.

Many temple guides are eager to woo us and show us around. They speak several languages and understand different psyches. Their locution and interpretation varies depending on whether the individual is local or a foreigner. But, it's getting harder and harder for us to walk on the parched grounds. We do not have the same stamina as these thousands of devotees who have thronged here from various parts of India. 

Mere observers, our little group of four is full of oohs and aahs and wows, captivated by the sheer magnanimity of such a project taken some 1700 years ago. The fervent beauty and the flowing rhythms of sculptures draw us into the very soul of rapturous harmonies. The painted murals too are immersed in the perpetual light of earthly colors. Marching down aisles after aisles, under the beatific gaze of thousands of gods, goddesses, twelve-hooded serpents, ferocious demons with dragon faces, elephants, bulls and The Great Rattus itself, a sense of awe gives way to a sudden surge of catharsis.  'Free me from myself so I can aspire to be Thee: Joyous, calm, filled with light in all thy myriad manfestations', I pray.

Back on streets outside the temple, it is business as usual. Vendors from rows after rows of small shops call out irresistible deals to attract customers. An out-of-place showroom seems to be truly cashing in on the spirit of the place with the following caption on its storefront sign: "Your Search For the Incredible Ends Here..". The store is dedicated to American brands like Levi Strauss, Ralph Lauren, and Route 66.

I want to buy something local for my mom as a souvenir from this holy place. The sun is relentless and the dry heat is beginning to rise in swirls. The cool dark interiors of small shops seem inviting. I walk into a non-descript hand-woven silk emporium looking for a saree. Within minutes my aspiration to emulate the great gods has ludicrously rolled off my being. I am human again as I dive into some petty haggling with the shopkeeper -- the adrenaline rush coursing through my bloodstream is wickedly palpable.

Our Grandma's Trunk

An object gets reduced to junk when it outlives its usefulness. Today, on Earth Day, I rescued our grandmother's trunk from such a dire fate by reclaiming it from  the mafiosic violence of an overloaded and chaotic storeroom. And, by the patient process of sandpapering the rusted exterior, and applying a new coat of paint, this 60 year old 2'x1'x0.75' hunk of metal was finally accorded a new lease of life. I chose to depict a glamorous kingfisher on the lid because of the bird's pre-dawn waking habit, a routine which our grandmother too observed rigorously until the very end.

This trunk accompanied our grandma wherever she went, be it to visit one of her seven sisters, or her own grown kids. In the case of the latter, it was mainly to help them manage a newborn baby and organize the many festivities which revolve around a birth. In fact, any occasion which demanded her diligent presence, she was there. One would hardly notice her as she moved around unobtrusively like a slow, stealthy shadow, attending to a thousand and one chores.

The trunk contained all she had: a few white cotton sarees, neatly folded, some blouses, a woolen shawl for winter, and a paltry sum of money which she would have liked to invest in the stock market. Black and quite ordinary, it was a heavy little thing and it seemed almost laughable that its content should have been so lean and simple. Just the way she was.

Beyond a smile and a quick, 'Namaste Maaji', I don't think we ever indulged in any kind of  significant conversation. I can conjure up a couple of reasons which might have given way to such reticence. Firstly, I didn't understand the dialect she spoke, and secondly speech was not her forte. 

Overwrought and bent at ninety degrees, she moved around the house straightening things up, or mending a torn dress, fixing a button, hemming a skirt...folding the laundry in a way that it wouldn't need ironing...she always found something to keep herself busy. In an era where televisions did not boom across one's living room and the radio was a means to set the time on one's watch and listen to the news on AIR (All India Radio), we never found her marooned on the island of boredom, wondering what to do with all those hours of a day. She had a bag full of unshelled watermelon and cantaloupe seeds which she had collected, cleaned and sun-dried over the long summer. If nothing else, she would sit down with a pair of tweezers, gently squeezing on the seeds, popping them open, extracting the kernel inside and storing it in bottles, to be later roasted with salt, or to be used as garnish for festival sweets.

In 1930s, in the big haveli built by our grandparents, where our father and his three siblings were born and brought up, our grandmother's day began with grinding the daily quota of wheat flour in a quern-stone and weaving cloth on a spinning wheel, two disciplines which she, along with several women of her generation, had adopted, overtly as an expression of self-reliance, and covertly as a way to revolt against the British colonialism. And, this was only the wee beginning of a long day, which, for her, usually kicked off at 4 in the morning. Waking up early meant being able to sweep the house, mop the central courtyard, start the fire in the kitchen and dive into her usual set of daily tasks before the rest of the household slowly yawned and stretched itself awake from its nocturnal rêverie. 

Relentless in her pursuit of perfection, she went through the day tirelessly, yet never did she thrust any expectations on anybody. She was the epitome of a Karmayogi. Karmayoga is one of the four classical spiritual paths in Hinduism, based on the 'yoga of action/work'. To a Karmayogi, work is a form of prayer. 

Eyes sunken looking into an ever-changing timelessness, skin dark brown and wrinkled like a wise old tree, she gracefully defied the seventh stage of man as described by William Shakespeare:

"Last scene of all

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere        oblivion;

Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything"

For until she breathed her last, not only did she have all her senses together, but much much more. On this Earth Day I remember her as someone who treaded so softly upon the ground that we didn't hear her pass, nor when she passed away in her sleep...yet a small trunkful of quiet memories remain in a remote corner of the mind, lingering. 

My Journey into an Epic

The Reader's Digest's A - Z dictionary with rich red binding was our prized possession. Not only it looked royal and terribly important adorning our father's beautiful rosewood study table, but for us kids, it was a gratifying reminder that English held a prestigious status in our home. This was oddly ironic since in those days, besides our father none of us was conversant in the lingua franca. 

Sharing the space with this treasure was a rather innocuous looking book, light orange, equally thick and commanding, called 'Savitri' by the great Indian philosopher and poet Sri Aurobindo. For someone like myself, mortally afraid of the English language, and convinced of its utter incongruity, the fact that our father could read and understand this magna opus, made him superhuman in the eyes of my ignorant eight-year-old self. How could anyone read, let alone understand a book of such proportion, was beyond the orbit of my comprehension. Merely lifting it equated to a workout. Yet, everytime I was asked to fetch it, my heart swelled up with pride. To be entrusted with such a hallowed and herculean task, was no mean achievement.

I still remember the deep sonorous voice of our father reading the epic poem aloud, filling the house with its long, unending verses, pausing so often to let them roll gently and settle into the pores of our consciousness. According to him, its mantric value sufficed to bring the Great Change. I would just sit there, listening, not understanding a word; my face aglow with daughterly devotion.

Little did I know that in later years, this is what I would inherit from my father: his love of Savitri. As we traveled around the world, Savitri stayed my constant companion and guiding star. I referred to it whenever I felt lost and whenever I found myself in the din of my own confusion.
Written in iambic pentameter, and consisting of 24,000 lines, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, based on the legend from the Mahabharata is a symbol of the spiritual journey and transcendence of the human soul.

As an amateur reader of the epic, and a zealous summoner of the Muse, I recently invented an exercise in which while keeping my eyes shut, I randomly open  up a page of Savitri and let my index finger lead me to a word. Whichever word it is, I endeavor to pen down a free-verse with an 'automatic writing' kind of approach. 

1.

Word: Smiting

smiting desires
into minute bits,
stone-carved and
tumultuous,
she walked on
into the world
making an offering
of every step. she
became a shadow
of all her dreams

2.

Word : labours

life labours on
seeking meaning
in the daily chore
of mere existence;
dust settles, weighing
upon the ticking of 
the clock...slowly
suffocating its
sound, drowning its
meaningless zeal,
arresting the cadaverous
mechanicalness of its
hands -- returning life 
to its foetal silences

3.

Word: Impassive

crossing man's troubled
world with heaven's dreams
the impassive sky weaves
itself into Life's nomadic light

4.

Word: questionable

questionable all that was
felt with piercing intensity,
questionable the elation of 
a slow discovery; the gnarled 
misery of unfulfilled
yearnings sweeping across
the being with typhoonic
might and hurtling me 
beyond the vistas of my 
'self'...questionable everything
and yet it flung my soul out
of its ascetic heights
to be trampled upon by
careless feet of  love

5.

Word: turbulent

barred now by a wall of dull logic
the great wave that had inundated
my being with turbulent whirls of
strange and luciferen longings 

6.

Word: pause

while the moment flies, a
dim uncertain pause
latches on to the
leaf that falls and to the shadow
climbing  stealthily up 
towards the light

7.

Word: exultant

serene and exultant
in the inkling of
a distant love
intimate like the
sweet sound of 
koïl on this sweltering
summer day: wrenchingly 
beautiful, and seductively
treacherous...

8.

Word: anguish

all he sees is
anguish and defeat
hanging like Damocles' 
sword above his beautiful
young head; the faint call of
a kite skying up into the
unfathomable heights slips
his sight, as do the 
unwrinkling of the tender
leaves when the morning
sun scatters over them its
column of amber light...
the gentle twirling of spring 
air brushes his cheek as
the butterfly flies past

ideas and their causes sets
his mind abuzz, and he
wakes up wondering why

9. 

Word: smouldering

slow and languorous,  yet
another dawn lingers over
smouldering stones and rocks,
clambers over muted hills, and
skims across brackish oceans
to kiss the world awake and 
fill it with the flutter of
expectation and delight 

10.

flaming mouth

a flaming mouth
sweeping up celestial
verses from the etheric
gold of a hesitant 
dawn, lolling them 
around its cavernous
deep and spurting
them out into the
sputtering fire
of a raging pyre

11.

Word: ungrasped

it is the unseen our

eyes search; the unheard

our ears strive in vain to

listen, and the ungrasped

that the soul seeks 

in its aeonic meanderings

12.

Word: memory

in the haze

of memory

you and i

were made eternal;

our unspoken-ness

finding words

in the ellipsis of

Orion's belt

A terrace, and a takeoff...

 My eager feet scampered up the steps and onto the terrace...ears perked up at the lazy call of a jungle crow. Cloaked in humidity, it sounded muffled, yet somehow louder. A cluster of cumulus clouds was stilled into a bolted forward position, feigning the promise of coolness to the hot start of the day. My eyes took in the vast expanse of horizon, limned with coconut and palm trees. Everything was breathing: a nurtured, deliberate indolence kept Nature alive. 

Since an unwarranted cacophony of birds accompany the brahminy kites, this mid morning quietness should have translated into their absence. But no. There they were, beyond the lengthening and shutting off of shadows. The two of them, slowly circling around each other, in and out of the squinty summer haze. I watched them... Every widening circle brought them closer to the little shard of sky above my territory. I waved, overcome by a surge of spontaneous camaraderie. All of a sudden, the kite which was trailing behind until now, took the lead. And as the distance between the two narrowed, the tip of their wings touched. A blinding spark cleaved the air. High and heraldic, detached from their immediate surrounding, they were the world...the universe. Nothing else existed. It was the most sublime aerial dance, so wholly in sync with the blazing symphony of inner scapes.

How many like myself out there were privy to this ecstatic moment, I wondered. Brimming with gratitude, certain in the knowledge that I was amongst the few allowed to witness this mystical bonding between two beings, not just because of some supreme synchronicity, but because they had wished me to be there. I was Fire, one who hosts...and I was also  the Raven, who had dared to  steal the Fire from the immortals. Yet at that moment, more than anything, I yearned to be Icarus: thirsting for attainable light, wanting to graft wings on my mortal crawl... And maybe touch the stars.