We could be so great
if only we could sit or
stand in the same room together.
We could drop the 'silent' bit
and try a chat or hug for reassurance.
One chaos after another it seems;
life takes its toll I try to stay ahead
but I seem to always be one step behind you.
Did you see the sky?
Cremated...
The Dark Brooding Clouds
They Surround
The sun
extinguished by leaping flames
dips down & disappears
All this Crimson
drips into my Soul
Absorbed by my pores
Lays bare my Soul
My skin it bristles
The Heat makes it, prickle
Tis' the other side of Dawn
& I wait there alone and forlorn.
With its venom
Irresistable
and bittersweet
that loosener
of limbs LOVE
reptile - like
strikes me down
I stare,
transfixed, in
starry eyed surprise...
The hoopoe that used to tap its long digger beak on the windowpane has flown away; it isn’t there to cock its brown crest sharply, to warn me where the next attack of fate may come from. Half the day wasted on an idle game of chess and now I walk briskly past mansions whose owners have disappeared, empty houses that have wilted and collapsed to the dusty, yellowed grass at the edge of the watercourse where a river once flowed. Only the signs remain.
**
Something of the defeatism of these dead houses enters my soul. Blood straining at bone, half phantom and half stubborn desire to keep going. I stagger up the long shadows that the streets throw at me. Keep to the right and look out for rogue drivers, even a sleep walker cannot break the law, even as he staggers up those tilted shadows all the way into the sun at the end of the square.
**
This now is high noon. All this and a bell tower that launches itself from a red – tiled roof. The wind flings a rain of silver coins through a crab apple tree that has squeezed what water it could from this earth and now makes its last stand.
When you lie alone with yourself, as I have over many a summer, it isn’t surprising that only first things and last things should come to matter. Over all that intervenes, a discrete veil is drawn.
A whirr of helicopters, the harsh sound ripping through the prudent clauses of history. And a burst of bugles that strums the tangled telegraph wires.
Curious signals from the future but not a crow in sight
**
With age you lose your gift of prophecy and cannot predict the future from the patterns that form in the red sands of time. It’s a sacrifice, which I accept, with stoic grace. Now you can no longer predict which way the two headed god of time will point.
A principle of growth: as you age, your needs grow fewer and fewer. Or they should, but I won’t moralize, it’s never been my custom nor do I have the authority to coin precepts for others.
**
The year was 1985.
It was as Dickens so magnificiently put it: the best of times: it was the fairly OK of times.
It was the age of the communist collapse; it was the age of Sridevi on top. It was the time of Vespa scooters arriving in India, it was the time of Priya Pickles going global, It was the age of NTR taking up sanyas (and then changing his mind to marry a young woman), it was the time of The Ambanis and their love for Tina Munim.
It was the time of the Indian Cricket Team under Sunil Gavaskar being crowned WORLD CHAMPIONS in Australia and Ravi Shastri being crowned the CHAMPION of CHAMPIONS and driving his AUDI all over the cricket ground in a totally Indian Manner with people on the bonnet and some team members spilling out of the open Doors....
It was as always, the age of fiery summers and fond, freaky monsoons in India.
It was the time of of the beloved *(few) and that of the reviled (many). It was as it always seems to be in India,
The age of blinking HOPE mingled with remarkable resilience. It was the the age of 'just the same'.
Yet change was just around the corner waiting to pounce.
And finally it was the time when I, my mother and my brother spent a glorious one year in GOA and we went to school on the Miramar Beach (panjim) at Sharda Mandir...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I get all nostalgic thinking back to that time when we left Delhi behind for a year and ended up never returning (at least for my parents) and my four years of vanvas before making a somewhat triumphant return to the city where I was born.
When paradise is no longer fit for you to live in
And your adolescent dreams are gone
Through the days you feel a little used up
And you don't know where your energy's gone wrong
It's just your soul feelin' a little downhearted
Sometimes life is too ridiculous to live
You count your friends all on one finger
I know it sounds crazy just the way that we live.
Rich as you are
Death will finish
you: afterwords no
one will remember
or want you: you
have no share in
the white roses
You will flitter
invisible among
the indistinct dead
in Hell's palace
darting fitfully
