TAMARIND TREE
Dissect
the freckled shade that tunes
the
frequency of this cloudy afternoon,
and
I will appear –
an
unkempt ancestor of your language
of
leafy words and unripe grammar.
You
make me feel I belong
to
your forest of lies, now awaiting
rains
and mercy
in
this confined valley of sadness.
I
stand, like a forlorn soldier
from
a movie, my world
a
grey ghost-country ridden with doubt’s bullets:
Will
I shed my leaves in time
for
the infant girl to pick up
on
her way to the funeral?
Will
the returning painter, that man
who
abandoned his name, recognize
scars
that his palette introduced
on
my history of darkening hide?
You
say you are a poet, seeking
silence
instead of pauses in your rhythms.
I
say you are a poet, only
because
my leaves and fruits remind you
of
exclamation marks, wonders,
goats
grazing self-assuredly
and
colours of marigold petals.
The
sourness I convey behind my rind
is
the only poetry I taught you,
a
wooden heart’s clambering pleasure.
NEAR THE
CREEK
A white mongrel
is swimming
in the muddy creek
-
a scruffy dot of
life
under vast black
lies
emanating from the
moon.
Between the cliffs
that separate our
notions
and their rocky
steepness
lies silence, a
gift
we cannot examine
tonight.
This is the river
of fantasy – a
black sheet
of wonder - where
my childhood
springs casual
surprises,
unresolved
covenants
which need more
than recall,
and more than a
touch
of this estuary’s
breeze to awaken.
Ghosts of kittens that
wandered in our kitchen garden
are adorned in
flesh here, beings that swim reluctantly
against these
currents of silence.
We thought of
beauty naturally, and our ancestors
who marked their
presence in our thoughts
before leaving this
humidity with migratory cranes.
A cloud is hobbling
on the moon’s
trail,
searching,
searching for a
speck,
an illusion of
whiteness.
I cannot deny the
temptation
to condense my
thoughts into a speck,
a compact bundle of
vapours.
That is how I
entered
this muddy creek,
these currents of
cold silence.
BUCEPHALUS
Steed that rode
into the mystery
and pain of
with you pride and
burden
of rugged pass,
watched
acts of genocide
and charming cities
raped to delight
annals of history.
You carried Achilles’
fears
and his untamed
alter-ego,
your weather-beaten
heels
scanning unknown
worlds
of distant gods,
Persian doctrines.
Nothing we invented
after your death
carried our
imaginations faster
or farther than
your last neigh did at Hydaspes.
You tempt us with
resolution
of a truth evading
us.
Whisper from your
tomb,
ox-head:
was your master a
hero
riding with
mountain winds
and Greek dreams?
Or, was he another
savage genius,
one among several
murderers
who visited our
ancestral myths?
TRIPTYCH, TRILINGUAL
Among the banyan
leaves that rustle
through this
night’s saltiness
I sense linear
light, the theory
that condenses
trivial memories
by footpaths, where
I stop
to listen and then
surrender my senses
to this casual
coolness.
Three cardamom
plants
talk their
fragrance
like stunted
forefathers;
three languages of
smells and forgetfulness
that have seeped
into my flesh,
intimate reflexes
of my being.
There stands,
beyond realms
inhabited by quirky
clouds
and jet-lag
distances,
a small sediment of
my past
stuck in red soil,
ageing brick mansions
and anxieties that
have deserted me.
Ponder distances
winding through dreams
and landscapes
scattered among common objects:
the lives afar
subdued on my bookshelf,
a greeting card,
aloof and foreboding,
my smallness on the
saffron floor
cold as beads
broken from the string
which held them
captives.
The bills and
eccentricities
of migration mount,
silence,
and the aloneness
of human life.
The quirky cloud
does not go across
the sky
into the language
of pain
and raindrops or
water colour paintings.
The blueness is
glazed, devoid of peace,
a glazed shell of
illusions
that roof our
makeshift cells
of happiness. The
seasons come
unannounced,
another set of languages
that fold over one
another until
one set of rules and
grammar assert
and blossom into
expression. They hang,
mantelpiece of the
sky, spreading
arms of vapour,
self-doubts. I draw
the circumference
of my fragile presence
and see I have lost
my mother tongue.
Outside, a cardamom
plant has faded
into a surreal
sunset.
HOUSES
Then, the breach
that divided a wall
of light
from my birth
dissolved into
cries,
flutter of wings I
could not resist
as I lay with my
eyes unopened.
That must have been
the house
I was born in,
for I can smell
Mother
and do not remember
its unformed memory
of tile-roofed
calmness
and saffron brick
floor
moist after
parental footsteps.
It does not matter.
The first house,
I remember,
was built on
shadows
and odour of
elephants
that escaped from
my imagination
reluctant to leave
womb.
Sun’s orange before
milk-time
broke into a day’s
last breath,
settled on emerald
branches,
disguised Ashoka
flowers.
The tree met me
again, a virile adult,
thirty years after
outgrown shadows
became a real
object severed
from my umbilical
cord.
The neighbourhood
has changed too
with bricks and new
tenancy.
There are no
shadows here
that take me into
their arms.
A temple of
recollections
and repose, living
stones,
circled a well
inhabited by
pigeons
invaded by banyan
saplings
devouring its
rough, red belly.
The well’s green
water was familiar,
as sure as
day-night cycles,
a mirage of
recollections
running deep into a
few hundred feet
and my childhood.
Darkness resided in
that cylinder
of green coolness,
monsoon-traps
of sadness and
rodents
and rare kraits
we found within its
curling secrets.
That must have been
after I started
talking
for I was alone
in that sunlit
evening
throwing pebbles
into ripples.
I even had a name
for stones that
descended into that tunnel:
“Vellaarangallu”;
its smooth texture
remains a living
association
of my
mother-tongue’s rolling affection.
Rain clouds
gathered stories
scampering on
rooftop
I was eager to
hear.
In the soft rustle
of running water
in a narrow lane
which bridged my house
to world of men, I
watched
those stories build
up to a climax
of tender grass
struggling to breathe
through white sand
cocoons
held together, by
lickspittle gathered
around small
granite stones.
Stones that
gathered around my waiting.
They disappeared
every day like genies,
the tender grass,
bending
in a light drizzle
pattering on my
mother’s umbrella
and my
chocolate-coloured school van.
They retreat to our
home with Mother
while a wind
whistled me into the school van
with smell of
children, socks
and childhood
leather.
White egrets
tip-toe on green
weighed down by a
bull-frog’s
incessant monsoon
chants;
cicadas hum
into slow arrival
of sunset.
Lengthening shadows
of the monkey-god
flicker with the
oil lamp; my mind
is caught between
school work
and daydreams. Did
the rain
hiss and knock on
my window,
a slice of world
fractured by wooden panes
and rusted metal,
through which I
ponder
the vicissitudes of
boyhood?
Ten
was the age
between the first
breach,
the first sounds
and this pull of
the window.
Each year
was a horde of
shadows,
bright fables that
lingered on,
surviving recall of
that house
built on memories
of rain,
tender grass,
self-talk,
daydreams.
When we moved away
into a larger
mansion
of shadows and
greater width
girdled by real
stones,
away from the red
rapture
of Ashoka
flowers and my birth,
rains came along
with us,
but not the pebbles
or the stories
scampering on the rooftop
or the monkey-god’s
lengthening shadows.
They stayed with
the Ashoka,
old friends,
fossils of my boyhood.
Why does the past
knock on this window,
a distant city’s
glass,
scratching my
vision with raindrops?
I woke up to smell
of sardines
and fisherman’s
“kooo”
disturbing
stillness of crows
watching Mother at
work.
Dance of crimson
hosted by
snake-like wooden
resistance,
stubborn roots beyond
a red-soiled verandah
in which we played
cricket
and greeted old
relatives.
That was the season
of pickled smells
and salamanders
caught napping
beside the well’s
mossy parapet
and tongues bitten
by dreams
bleeding into
mornings
while darkness
pounded wetness
with slow
lightning, and hormones,
heart’s thundering
search for life
and frivolous,
failed imaginings.
World’s crafted
news
had just entered
our house
in grayscale
montages,
the idiot-box
antenna
was a slithery
creature of steel
standing on our
rooftop.
From the bedroom, I
watch
its spine dangling
from a magical sky
gone awry in the
invasion of monsoons.
I cry into awkward
song of sunrise
and the large
silence
waiting for this
day.
A wooden staircase
and smell of white Paala
flowers
bring me to earth
below
and first meanings
of day’s routine
I cannot ignore.
Incense sticks. A
quick bath.
The last smells of
socks
and childhood
leather.
WATERMELON JUICE
Fruit blood,
frothing with longing,
lightly fomented
taste or pasty remains
of what is left of
fibrous, colonial hubris.
Melon of our myth,
our casual youth,
enchanted fable’s
foreign pumpkin,
striped thirst
condensed
into red meat of
sweetness bracketed amid brittle seeds.
Where the tired
river, Bharatapuzha,
abandons its
flailing arms of shallow water
and abundant moss
to flirt with April’s tropical sun,
the melon arises,
a parable of
planets and spheres winding through sands
of our white,
sunlit memories. Near
nodding by the
highway chatting with sunflowers,
faintly gleaming
docility
reminiscent of
toothless witch doctors,
their stripes a
white harder to reconcile with the banded greens,
a smoother visage
of tempting touch
and masked
clairvoyance. Myth; fruit blood;
enchanted fable’s
foreign pumpkin
feeding thirst of
my soul, lightly
induced fomented
taste. Remains of hubris in my throat,
voice of unguent
sweetness, fruit blood.