1.
The big clock tower at the railway station
The big
clock tower at the railway
Station no more works;
Their dials remind of dried up wells,
hands mere decorations like that of an invalid old man.
Don’t
approach any stranger with a smile
And bother to ask the time;
In small personal watches,
Adjusted to be a bit slow or too fast,
Today everyone inhabits their own comfortable
Zones of history and time —
Public time has died.
Keep
inhabiting your own space in the platform.
Smile only to familiar faces.
Let the fact that your watch has stopped, and you
are totally out of place and time,
Remain a secret.
The big clock tower at the railway station has
Been shut down;
In the platform below the tower,
To take us to very different places of existence,
We wait for the same train.
2.
Thinking of my grandmother,
Alzheimer’s at the institute of
Astrophysics, kodaikkanal
Certain
months are like birds;
In troubled
throats,
Voices burning like defeated people,
They sing from the altar of the devil:
every note
is a wound then,
every song is a new sin,
every egg hatches a cruel emptiness, frustrating you
like wet clothes on a monsoon day.
We scratched
on the paper tree for new words and meanings,
Working on diffraction, lenses and solenoids, we
tried to separate from your world.
But,
While closing the eyes on top of the wind mill tower,
I am filled with only your memory,
Inseparable like the remains of height on the wings
Your skin,
old like that of the earth,
Your love, eternal like your forgetfulness
3.
Twenty lines of despair and a word of
love*
Some
trains are identified only by their numbers.
While
arriving at the Bangalore station,
They always prefer the painful language of time,
The estranged body of an old girlfriend,
The disguise of an ignorant witness
They
resist revealing much more or more less,
Like the new magazine cover at Higginbotham’s.
Precise in their vague, smoky appearance,
They remind often about her,
About
how she does so perfectly,
while reducing memory into
a strand of long hair in the bathroom,
a wrinkled bedspread,
a careless line ‘I will be back’.
This may
or may not be the hour of departure.
But,
The saddest line can never be written about
a total stranger.
*- Thanks to
Pablo Neruda’s Poems.
4.
At the town hall junction
Legs are
connected to the pedals;
Pedals to the chain,
chain to the spoke,
spokes to the wheels, and
Wheels to one another
Everything
in the same rhythm,
The mind and the mechanism,
The chain and the whistling.
Never stops.
Never separates.
It keeps on rolling;
Not man, not cycle.
Probably this is the mythical
creature man-cycle.
In the tip
of the long beard at its top,
Totally detached and out of place,
A black ant keeps on circling.
Standing at
the town hall junction,
I am tempted to say;
“I saw a black, depressed ant riding
a man-cycle quite acrobatically sitting
on the tip of its beard.
At 5 km/hr,
I saw the world moving
into a different perspective of movement”.
5.
What my grandfather likes
When rabbit hunters come from distances
with smiling guns and moustaches,
he plays the flute deep and painful,
closing its helpless holes as if his eyes.
And as the night stinks of meat, fire and victory,
He lies on a thick bed that hides undisclosed keys and wet eyes,
among the many layer of secrets.
Dismantling the dear, old cycle into independent entities,
he makes strong statements about memory
on mornings that supersede grief.
No point searching for him behind the lost round glasses,
Feel him in that stretch to pick up cigars from the top of the door frame.
Not even in the robes of a mediator who unknowingly passes
the gifted word from one tongue to another lips*.
What my grandfather likes is to
Slowly disappear down the slope of hills,
Turning each empty rabbit hole into a meditation;
Probably,
without reducing the world into a mere instrument of existence.
*-- Yehuda Amichai in “And We Shall Not Get Excited”
6.
Certain things in relation to a man standing at 3rd block
Certain
things can be said without explanations.
Without
the knowledge of three hundred years of history,
they can embody the incompleteness of existence with perfection.
They can
make love with the girl smelling like wheat without the
shades of darkness,
pluck a moment of ecstasy from the haunting silence of wilderness
without remembering the forest guard,
smell the granite of old Tamil temples in dark pubs without the
consent of gods.
A man
standing at 3rd block can imagine without pain
that the next bus in the stop would run through roads with ever unseen
meanings and reach the doorsteps of the girl he loves
And then
the rest of the world would go still
at least for an eternity.
Certain
things can be said without explanations.
They can cook up stories without beginnings and ends,
And still believe with all optimism that
he is the only one who leaves from all this.*
*- From Cesar Vallejo’s poem.
7.
Traveling
long to inform a friend’s death
The task on
hand is easy;
Search for a lane where
the air is rusty and bleeding
by the long absence of a beloved son.
Spot the house with
walls looking like long lost childhood;
New grown mosses on them fighting against
Skewed alphabets, inverted numerals and memories
of a young child.
Look for a father waiting with that favourite dish,
Compensating the extra spice with a face full of
Smile and moustache.
Hear the silence of the bird’s long lost song,
Of toys tied up in trees
And the marbles that reappear from the soil.
The task on
hand is easy;
Never speak
a word to inform what you intend to;
Walk back just like yet another stranger,
knocking on the wrong doors
In this scorching heat of summer.
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