I could feel the two pieces through the blotted paper, cold and heavy.


The bajjis were hot in bhimli. Yet, I paid my ten bucks and walked with a steadily soaking newspaper in my hand.

The walk to the park had felt noisy. Two temples set up competing wails of prayer on opposing sides of the road. There had been an interminable sawtooth of cricket chirps, hacking a way through the sounds of traffic and loudspeakers.

Finally I found my seat, empty in spite of the Sunday evening throng, and the sea finally made itself heard, I spite of everything.

It was six thrity pm and an awkward hunger that always follows an afternoon nap close at its heels made me finish them fast. It was difficult to eat thus, amidst a pounding flux of feet that cast wayward shadows in the patch of grass in front of me.

I wanted coffee. I had a front row seat to the shore, it was a terraced cliff with a step-wise descent into the sea that stopped abruptly at a rough wooden fence that zigzagged the precipice of the park. Yet, I did not look at the sea, counting off ships to the harbour. The old man who wove between lounging legs swinging a shabby jute bag full of thermos flasks did not come visiting. I looked backward instead of forward, scanning groups of people with legs stretched, some flat on their backs on the freshly rin-dried grass, groped through popping glares of phone camera flashes for a shabby jute bag and rubber slippers. I attracted quite a few looks of annoyance in return. Many faces, especially those in pairs turned angrily upon me as if I had been staring at them.

I glared back briefly, shrugging away any momentary interest I might have felt in them. I too am a private person but mine is an inoffensive privacy that does not grudge a noisy tread, a long glance or a phone conversation conducted within close quarters.

I could not keep my eyes on the sea for very long. Hallucinogenic cries of “Coffee tea. Coffee tea” rang through my ears at intervals when the buzz of the blaring road and the play of children stopped awhile to catch its breath.

White figures still sat upon elevated bits of rock that dotted the shore, braving swerves of salty splashes and the thickening tar of dusk. I both envied and feared for them. The fragile fence, a leg’s length away from me was merely a line of two parallel wooden bars reinforced every metre or so with inverted horseshoes of wood. Children sometimes leaned over the fence that was swathed with overgrown bushes from the other side. Some hung bravely till they were whisked away under scolding arms, others scuttled back frightened by the howling black mass and the thorny bouncing fall that the height threatened.

Two boyish feet skidded within an inch mine. I looked up startled to see tow children holding a collection tin each. “change akaa?” The jingled it earnestly. I dropped a five rupee coin in one and two two rupee coins in another’s. Only twenty rupees remained in my wallet.

One never noticed beggars in Vizag. For all the silvery skinned boys that roamed its beaches, one never felt the slightest disgust at dropping them a coin. Healthy, well fed, shod feet prowling the sands in search of “change”. A much better picture. Not miserable malnourished faces with mangy red hair setting loose a slack-jawed lament of hunger at clogged claustrophobic traffic signals that made one cough and inch away deeper into the auto.

At length I walked upto the road under the pretext of crushing the oiled paper, onions intact into a dustbin. I found him at the margin between the road and the park, a footpath choc-a-bloc with ice cream vendors. “Coffee.” I almost shouted in relief of finding him there. It was almost as if the sea and its shiplit waters wouldn’t return to sight unless I drank his coffee. It was past lukewarm , cold even, but it still had that pleasantly chocolaty tang that I liked Andhra filter coffee for.

I returned to my seat with the cup still to the brim, no mean task for I could have tripped over many times on the way. The park was denser than ever with shuffling feet in search of seats but by a miracle mine lay waiting for me.

The white figures on the rocks swam back to my notice. So did the cobwebbed skein of spent white foam that glistened under a moonless sky for an instant before receding into a gutter-like purple pool.

The people who were at the heart of the silent skirmish between rock and water, weren’t they afraid of the darkness. The moved like silver pawns on a chessboard of grey and black, among the tar-like sea and the blurring black outlines of the rocks that kept them safe. Maybe it didn’t seem so dark down there as it did to me. If I swallowed my fear and followed them there perhaps I found find lights that didn’t make its way upstairs where prudence kept sea sounds at bay.

What the wanderer does not know

The wanderer knows not, that the striking down of wispy reluctant roots in strange soils is as purifying as a quest.


If he stays long enough to speak of its plagues-to-come and time its monsoons in the native tongues.

Long enough for streets to let off steam in dinner smells that sharpen his Spartan hunger and hasten his homeward way.

Long enough for him to leave behind a dress size at a shop counter, an entry in its credit register, to own a complimentary calendar bearing a corner shop’s names on leaves that to keep beat with time that slowly pulls.

Long enough to believe that the city, like its semi-circular shorelines and mountains that slink behind each other’s shoulders, each a ghostly replica of the other, paler with mist and more distant with thickening cloud, have never changed. And never will.

Long enough to wend a streetlit way in darkening alleys by trusting to a strange pair of feet that march on towards the light unheeding of his own lost ones.

Long enough for its silent siesta afternoons to sweeten childhood songs and its cool to soothe blistered road-weary feet.

The wanderer knows not that if he stays long enough to learn the legends that the name of the city hides, a many-headed serpent with stories in the roofs of its mouths, to sing along when the city goes up in song during , ships’ departing sirens and the night time breeze from the sea will not haunt his repose any longer.

Every seat is taken

Every seat is taken. Lights lean unfairly towards fairer face and pretty trees are lost to painted corners.


Every seat is taken. Your voice, a gravelly voice of many coloured stones, a voice that has always resisted definition staggers, swoops falls out of step with a crowd-kindled chorus.

Every seat is taken. They know not that your speech runs amok with guessed at meanings where it once ambled, not a word out of place along .

Every seat is taken. Your grief refuses beige letter paper and origami shapes but butts into bland shoeboxes that are never thrown away even after the shoebites heal.

Only you remain

When the last flower is plucked for prayer and when the shrine is swept clean of foot prints and the floral dead, only you remain- my despair’s choice poison.

When the departing throng jiggles change in its pockets and clamour for food sours both sweat and fatigued limb, only you remain- the bitter fruit of my day’s striving.

When green hills blacken in the fumes of night, leaving a dusk-bled sky, only you remain- my house on the hill slope with its unsleeping lamps.

When books are shut with dog ears cocked and unread pages still protesting, only you remain- my scant store of native wisdom more ancient than alphabet.

When my lute is unstrung and the songsters turn quiet, only you remain- memory’s ever sweet song that is never heard.

When the quest ends and its spoils sorted among account books of the lost and the found, when treasures and staked and won back in the blink of an eye, only you remain- my poem that fell by the roadside.

When rain falls hot and silent, waiting to be seen not heard, only you remain- a brazen butterfly parabola.

When the plates are wiped clean and the roar of toasts are quelled by wine-kissed stupor, only you remain- my wait for the guest who never arrives.

When the last line leaves my pen and my heart is gladdens at a filled page, only you remain- the vengeance of tardy truths.

Not for me...

Not for me are people with ever craning necks who glide up snakes of stairs without ever being deceived in a ladder.

Those who never fall backwards over a winding word, tongue thick and loose with warring syllables.

Those who dine ever so carefully with kings without heaving themselves off the table with a concluding burp, a lip licked wet or a deep rumbling breath.

Those who daren’t utter a foolish word or even an insane one, or shout over hordes of heads in gilded halls in hoarse tones.

Those who might see the last of a ship sail or the homeward road without coughing back a tear.

Those who haven’t spittled apart a sentence, sneezed shut a silence, who walk through rain splattered roads with hems of skirts still white and the soles of shoes clean and dry.

Not for me are the sophisticated dead, those who can’t see past a midday sun at a whitening lake and a diamond within, past dancing leaves that burn but shed no shadows.

Not for me are those souls from which fluid passions don’t ooze.

This black eye of a sky told me quite plainly that dusk had played a treacherous hand. Shops had turned their lights on in connivance with it, it had snuffed out a sunset and devoured the hours between four and seven in a single mouthful.I walked back home, bathed in neon starlight, dodging the sight of signboards that had staked out claims to a rapidly purpling horizon, signboards that stabbed me with their familiar names.

There are people who've been tossed into the wishing well of my life whose names I could recall correctly only on our fourth meeting. Or the fifth. Later on, when these names quickly fill up the hours preceding a roaring dawn, when the milk cooker whistle shoots the night dead, I toss about in bed suffering the knell of names, ruing my memory.

There is a kind of love wherein you daren't take your eyes off your beloved for the fear of going blind. And a kind where your eyes erect schemes of unseeing rudeness to keep tears at bay. A kind where you find yourself wishing in turns for an apocalyptic disappearance, for the rest of the world to bleed out of sight until only you remain.

Best is the kind, I thought to myself as I crossed a road that was already was the kind that you made you want to offer yourself to grinding noises, dripping taps, yellow wheels and die right there.

The entire power of my vision I would bequeath to the corners of me eyes for they have given me all i have wanted a glimpse of. To die with a stranger's name on my life, to die, sighing over a poem that refuses to grant me audience, to die burning with the unsaid is no disgrace.

Forgetting

Tossed from a jealous jailor of a bed to a street roaring with weekend rapture, I walk with a head still heavy with the ache of dreamless sleep. Uncertain, I bob left to right, my feet, sliding off one unwelcoming doorway onto another, dodging the trot of screeching wheels are afraid to break into a run

The feet of children, unlike mine, are unmindful of the rude thump of oversized slippers, they don’t fear the sideways slips that ask no questions but dispense sudden deaths.

It matters not that hands are still held under tree shade when the moon is up, full-bosomed and smiling paternally. Our full moon trysts will not return (for we were eternally meeting under a full moon), we will not weep together in the moonlight anymore, you with eyes turned into a silent listening stone, I in infantile fashion, head upon your shoulder, your fingers thick with tears.

It matters not that a bounced off reflection of a distant pair of glasses can still recall you to life. There are things that ought not to fade- the last words you ever spoke, those ten digits that tied me to my phone, your smile when I broke the first long silence, and the colour of the leaves when I looked away from your eyes to the tree above, my lips still wet with yours.

It matters not that I can out sing loud now, with doors and windows fearless and open. I no longer feign ignorance of certain erudite words that used to hurt merely because they had been birthed under your pen.

It matters not that I no longer look anxiously like a child comparing the size of bruises across two knees, from my tattered heart to yours, vexed that yours might beat mine to forgetting. I know that I have died out of sight and with sheets unchanged, dying without protest under these stars as quietly as I have died within your solitude.