The abandoned meter
gauge tracks in Chavara
are insensitive like a forgotten dream
The rusted and broken ends of its iron rails
does not seem to remember a time,
like my father does,
when the pebbles amidst the tracks
listened to the vibration of approaching trains
with the surprise and jubilation of a villager
when the naïve soul of rare earth metals
hidden in the night black sand beaches
started imagining the interiors of distant ships
and their epical journey in windswept nights
The children slid down inclined branches
and ran through shorter routes along
coconut groves and school compounds
to see the magic of moving trains
The 120 heavy axles in their giant muscular wheels
working impromptu as in a symphonic music
in this land of straight lines
Unused ponds embraced itself with the
solitude of station masters waiting for the night trains
The fish in them rambled day and night,
imagining tracks beneath their paths
2
While sitting lazily on the beach
Nostalgia is just a broken sea bridge:
Hiding both its ends in wilderness,
A meter gauge train can steam across us any moment
The abandoned meter gauge tracks in Chavara
are insensitive like a forgotten dream
Along the rusted and broken ends of its iron rails,
A row of unnoticed ants
*An ode to homecoming*
Buses that take you home
have a strange smell
They remind the dogs
which go hunting with men into forests
and come back with the satisfied look
of a successful guide
The sun interferes once in a while,
with a beautiful line or word
We share with them,
A solitude sharp and innocent like pine straws,
their smell big enough to remind the village night
I imagined walking from tree to tree.
If you take one more turn,
lamps from home will start touching you
But,
even before the changing shapes of red mud roads
before the smell of glue on film posters
the music of water on the wounds of soil
The metallic messages of Morse code from
the dark corner of the house where my brother sits. **
* *
* *
*November*
**
* **For Karun*
* *
Standing beneath
the dense and dark bamboo bunches in Kadampanad
where rain water flows like a soul,
I remember time as an enormous standstill;
There must have been a time
before all time
when walls did not know about clocks
clocks about hands,
hands about the trap set by circles that
makes them redo fate to perfect history.
when mind could unfold itself like a parachute
and float through the never ending expanse of hope
when the night could go on unending
for lovers hand in hand
Long after the play was over,
The seats in a theatre would have
shared jokes and burst into laughter then
Letter from a friend in Kuwait that read:
'The desert now looks only into it's own days and nights
Send me the smell of stones, the colour of basements,
the feel of rice grains…send me Kerala'
would have been read even without sending.
Standing beneath
the dense and dark bamboo bunches in Kadampanad
where rain water flows like a soul,
I remember myself as the remains of a childhood
Probably,
There must have been a mind
before all minds
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