Winter,
My grandparents in
January
on a garden swing
discuss old friends from
the parliamentary session, chrysanthemums,
an electricity bill.
In the shadows, I
eavesdrop,
eighth grandchild, peripheral, half-forgotten,
enveloped carelessly
by the great winter shawl of their affection.
Our dissensions
are ceremonial.
I growl obligingly
when he speaks of a Hindu nation,
he waves a dismissive hand
when I threaten romance with a Pakistani
cricketer.
But there is more
that connects us
than speech spiked with the tartness of old
curd
that links me fleetingly to her,
and a blurry outline of nose
that links me to him,
and there is more that connects us
than their daughter who birthed me.
I ask for no more.
Irreplaceable, I
belong here
like I never will again,
my credentials never in question,
my tertiary nook in a gnarled family tree
non-negotiable.
And we both know
they will never need me
as much as I, them.
The inequality is
comforting.
From On Cleaning Bookshelves, Allied Publishers,
Mumbai, 2001
Recycled
Driving through
the Trossachs I see
the picture I drew as a five-year-old
in
with two square windows,
isosceles roof, smoking chimney,
and girl with yellow hair
standing in the driveway,
flanked by two flower pots.
And there is
comfort in knowing
what we are so often told,
that fancy has wings
and dreams come true,
even if it takes years
for them to take root
in some corner
of a foreign land
that is forever
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai,
2005
Class Photograph
It’s always the
girl in the middle row
in school photographs of Class Two --
the one with two plaits, gaze as vacant
as a chorus, the one whose name
is on the tip of your tongue,
as you leaf through old albums
on weekend afternoons, a name that never
quite
manages to emerge from that muddle
of almost and not quite, until
one day someone casually mentions
she died ten years ago
and then the click
of epiphany –
blue water-bottle
school-bus regular
monopoliser of seesaws
Ami Modi, more vivid and centre-stage
in the mind’s proscenium
than ever before
and you believe the details
must mean something, add up
to some vital clue
and you almost know what
but the knowledge remains poised
on the tip of the tongue
awaiting another nudge,
another infinitesimal lurch
into the bigger picture.
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai,
2005
Things
There are times
when form resists touch,
refuses to yield
to coercion or command --
an obstinate conspiracy
between self-perpetuating
coffee cups and the frantic
bushfire of books, laundry, Chinese restaurants,
and everywhere
the great Indian middle class
bloating steadily
on duty-free.
A rabid wilderness
of matter slurps
up absences, ransacks space,
an insurgent cardiogram
serrating the skyline
eclipsing the moon.
This is the end of
the world
you should have anticipated –
the unstoppable garrulity of things.
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai,
2005
First Draft
It’s just old
fashioned, they say,
to use pen and paper for first drafts
but I still need
the early shiver of ink
in a white February wind --
the blue slope and curve
of letter
bursting
into stream
the smudge of blind alley
the retraced step, the groove
of old caravan routes, the slow thaw
of glacier, the chasm that cannot be forded
by image.
And I need
reprieve, perhaps a whole season,
before I arrive at that first inevitable chill
when a page I dreamt piecemeal
in some many-voiced moon-shadowed thicket
flickers back at me
in Everyman’s handwriting
filaments of smell and sight
cleanly amputated –
Times
New Roman, font size fourteen.
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai,
2005
Another Way
To swing yourself
from moment to moment,
weave a clause
that leaves room
for reminiscence and surprise,
that breathes,
welcomes commas,
dips and soars
through air-pockets of vowel,
lingers over the granularity of consonant,
never racing to the full-stop,
content sometimes
with the question mark,
even if it’s the oldest one in the book.
To stand
in the vast howling rain-gouged
openness of a page
asking the question
that has been asked before,
knowing the gale of a thousand libraries
will whip it into the dark.
To leave no
footprints
in the warm alluvium,
no Dolby echoes
to reverberate through prayer halls,
no epitaphs,
no saffron flags.
This was also a
way
of keeping the faith.
From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai,
2005
On Cleaning Bookshelves
Begin by
respecting the logic
that governed earlier conjunctions –
respect the hauteur
of the book not journeyed,
the complicit camouflage
of the borrowed paperback,
the frowning grandeur of the Russian classics,
upper shelf, upper caste,
lost in the austerities of a glacial tapas,
the sly tight-lipped smile
of the coffee-table volume,
lusciously swathed,
venerable geisha,
and the amber geniality
of the leatherbound
coterie,
still fragrant with the smoke
of old cheroots
from colonial living rooms.
Then trace the
occult insignia of silverfish
on paper that crumbles at a touch
into dragonfly-wingdust.
Rediscover the
flyleaf inscription
of a lover’s ex-lover,
damply intimate,
and rising somewhere
the crushed
azalea scent
of
Manderley…
Tumbling
unexpectedly
out of the swirling mists of mothball
and nostalgia, a world
of lighthouses off the
and dungeons stuffed with precious ingots –
embrace the lost world of Enid Blyton,
blessed Blyton,
beloved reactionary.
Now comes the chance to intervene,
to orchestrate incongruity
to bridge synapses,
allow Kerouac
to nudge familiarly
at
Mirabai at Sappho,
watch Nietzsche sniff suspiciously
at Krishnamurti.
And listen close,
as Ghalib in the
back row
murmurs drowsily
to Keats.
Open trunks.
Allow the musk
of a buried adolescence to surface
as Kahlil Gibran and Swinburne return
to claim their share
of daylight and liberty
with all the dust and truculence
of the unjustly exiled.
And amid the
rising whispers
of reunion and discovery,
the hum of interrupted conversations
resumed after centuries,
know that it is time
to turn away.
And accept
finiteness.
Accept exclusion.
From On Cleaning Bookshelves, Allied
Publishers, Mumbai, 2001
Back Soon
Some mornings
you know you’ve had enough
of standing sentry,
shutting windows, doors,
checking the bolt and safety-latch,
against the great blind buffalo strength
of a world of consequence
running its own course.
You give up
feverishly policing
fragile ecosystems of hope and conversation and
memory
against tectonic plates, heaving and grumbling
according to some primitive factory logic
of geology and vengeance.
Some mornings
you know you’ve had enough.
You wander into a
dusty hinterland,
leaving gates open, outposts unmanned,
so when the world arrives, gurgling
in imperial anticipation,
or even when some capricious divinity
comes a-knocking,
you’re too far in,
too far gone
to care.
My god,
I’ve watched and
waited,
listened and nodded,
murmured and clucked and smiled.
Now permit me
idiosyncrasy.
From On Cleaning Bookshelves, Allied
Publishers, Mumbai, 2001