tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54402872679100075622024-02-20T13:30:02.005+05:30Torn CanvasPhantom footprints,Rough-shod feet, and deferred silences.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-75958537617325531492013-09-29T01:41:00.000+05:302013-09-29T01:41:03.651+05:30I have often reflected on the parallels between reading a book and being a friend, and on being an "open book" easily read and comprehended.. Every book has a darker deeper mind which is seething with secrets, a mind so unfathomable that you will be excluded from it even after a million re-readings. Our knowledge of our friends is formed not just from the events of their life that we witness first hand, but also from their stories and silences, pages in a book that deceive us into an intimacy ephemeral and fractional.<div>
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Self-knowledge is a quest equally fraught with traps though we are the best chroniclers of our own lives. Were I given an indefinite amount of time in a hypothetical afterlife, to put down in writing everything I know about the life I have led so far, I would spend an eternity with pen and paper even if my lifetime spans 25 years. The impossibility of relying on memory to understand a mind, even if it is my own, is as difficult to resign oneself to as an author's assumed familiarity with his own writing, that fails him when he encounters a sentence that he does not recognize as words flowing from his own hand. </div>
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We love the books that filled our childhood fantasies even when we cannot recollect its contents in their entirety just as we love old friends whose birthdays we have forgotten. We know them in spite of not being a part of their lives just as we know a story which has left the pages in a book to continue its existence in an alternate universe, just as we notice water dripping from the rooftop in the morning to be assured that it has rained at night. </div>
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ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-5852575470756112712011-12-31T22:55:00.000+05:302011-12-31T22:55:10.563+05:30<div class="MsoNormal"> Believe my voice to be brimming with secrets even if they speak only in clumsy common-place tongues to you, its sleep-sweetening notes borrowed from a distant clock striking midnight. Believe a song to live within every sentence, songs set to music by a window on a rainy evening. Not for you are words stripped from forgotten garlands or the flowers blooming on neglected hedges. Believe it to be always in pursuit of the perfect word, the blue flower from a stranger’s dream that I want to offer you. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Believe my eyes to be frozen in a permanently backward glance to the moment I first gazed upon you. Believe them to be casting about their glance a foot or two away from yours fixing on a passing pair of feet, an empty chair, a clean pane of glass, anything that douses the insanity the sight of you ignites. You send me cowering to dark corners still damp with dreams; to nights rife with premonition when sleep-replenished silence fills me with reproach me for every half-glance. Believe them to covet every smile you bestow upon eyes that aren’t mine, smiles that flit from face to face till it rests on mine for a single starving second. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Believe my heart to stop in high solitary places where all ceases but remembrance of you, breathing and yet not breathing like a sky grown old shooting stars unto eternity, burning and yet not burning like a candlewick that outlives all to tell the tale of a flickering flame drunk on its own light.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Believe my feet to be in quest of what the stars, the sun and the sky have long despaired of finding. The night shames the stars for cloaking you in a purple that does not justice to the nobility of that makes meeting your gaze a baptism by fire. The sun never wearies of weaving and unweaving raiment after golden raiment till perchance you wear a summer’s day as a ribbon upon your tresses dawn and unknot it at dusk. None can pay tribute to a beauty so innocent it would scarcely recognize itself in a mirror. Or paint a grey girlhood, its frozen frailty left intact by a reverent time, a beauty straight as a sunray, so straight that my poem dies sighing, not wishing to bend it into rainbows of subtleties. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Should you believe, stars would multiply in a multitude of births that leaves the sky no blue but only everlasting memory to burn. </div>ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-82987887906849678082011-09-04T09:39:00.002+05:302011-09-04T09:39:24.464+05:30I do not call you by name<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">I do not call you by name, not even in narrow solitary vaults that tempt sorrows into utterance, not even among those to whom I might feign possession, not even when you’re walking away and I stutter into a silence that mysteriously stuns you into turning around.<span> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">I’m closest to you when you’re at a distance that fills my gaze with a searching that sears, closest when your face spins into sight from afar, like a distant star, cold and pale with everlasting light, entrapped within a telescope rim.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span> </span>Nights like these keep my doors swinging with a song-shushing wind, a rain-emptied that sets leaves aflutter with ghosts. The moon has chosen other windowsills for frames and I fall asleep under a sky bare as a newly vacated house, pungent with the varnish of hope and hollow with the disappearance of familiar starchart-biding footsteps. I dream, like Greek heroes of old, of choosing between two doors, one that hides death within and another you. But wakefulness falls upon me like a sword before I choose.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">And when you speak to me with the dust of others’ smiles upon your brow, the crumpled flower of another’s homage around your wrists, your feet awash with the shadows of strangers, I want to say your name aloud. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">When I’m gone, will he memorize the delicious cadences your wordless “hmm-uh-hmm” sentences as note-perfectly as I have, sentences that bubble with meanings of my own making, or measure with tender half-glances that tilt of your head that forebodes refusal, or will he know by the floating fireflies in your eyes that you’re keeping a smile within check. When I’m gone, will he love the sung-to-shreds syllables of an almost-musical name enough to set it to yet another song? </span></div>ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-83069473267612838382011-05-22T21:23:00.001+05:302011-05-22T21:24:17.776+05:30We met<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;">She looked like she had a nodding acquaintance with death, somebody who had looked it in the face plenty of times but never too closely and never in the eye. It did not happen to me at first sight, the catch in the breath, the knife in the heart, the words that tumbled out of my long-silent throat gift-wrapped and brand-new at her command. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But even in the beginning I was interested. In her greys and how she had got them, in her eyes and how their gaze had been sketched into face as if within a comic-book frame, never looking out of windows, never eyeing strangers, never sparing second glances. I was interested in the piece of paper that lay crumpled in her fist like a bad lie, in the circle of darkness that followed her steps, a spotlight of black that only I saw. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew that she wept under the cover of trees that cast shadows still, even under a neon ceiling of a scalded city sky. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew the places rife with our meeting, the playgrounds of the young and where the songs of peddlers rung loud. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew that she woke up sometimes at midnight, with the thirst of May hot on her tongue and saw that light still clung to the summer night like traces of rubbed out chalk on a slate. And was awoken by the lament of a dripping tap that seeks the sleepless ear. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I spoke to her slowly, with words that hadn’t yet been used up in prayers for her presence, words yet unuttered in the night when I dreamt of her to the exclusion of every other dream, words that touched her with feverish hands in places seething with old wounds, words that might have propped up may a lie but had slunk to her instead, hungry children waiting to be fed. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But they stiffened like laundry hung out on a line, and she folded them out of sight, the ones that did not flee with the southerly breeze or flap damply, despairingly. </div>ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-19429534645933814132011-04-22T23:24:00.000+05:302011-04-22T23:24:08.535+05:30Your feetWhen I look at you, I don’t look at your face which is old as your feet are young but at your toenails which glimmer like hidden diamonds between the thinning copper of nailpolish smears.<br />
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An invisible carpet of air conspires with your semi-heeled shoes to save you from the waddling gait of short women. You float instead, an enchanted mermaid on a quest ashore, hover footlessly weightlessly soundlessly over us all. I like to see you hoist yourself onto a chair as if it were a wall, your dangling feet a good six inches above ground. The skin of your heels are pink and whole yet as it will be for feet that will be forever foreigner on any soil. I wonder if the pain of unjourneyed miles finds their way to your legs at night, if you’ll always deny the earth a taste of your feet, content to watch ships come and go, banners flutter and fall, heralds go up in song and return in silence.<br />
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My own feet have been carved with knife-cuts of too many miles, soils not of my choosing breathe within these holes. Braving thistle and thawed ground, bleeding over every stone in creation, once again would I stake the yet unehealed wounds of my feet in search of flowers to lay at yours.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-4053531765028078052011-04-13T11:48:00.000+05:302011-04-13T11:48:15.985+05:30I want you to see meI want you to see me at a scrabble board when my mind frog-leaps from one consonant tile to another.<br />
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I want you to see me in a single premonition, brush stroke by brush stroke, the self portrait I’d like to paint of myself.<br />
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I want you to see prophesies of my sleep writ large between the cantos of the next poem you’ll read.<br />
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I want to be seen when you awaken to the noises of your children’s play because the invisible inheritances of blood may be mislaid but cannot be lost altogether. <br />
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I want to be seen amidst words that you want to set to music and in the music you want to pry words out of to devour it distilled and dead.<br />
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I want to be seen at dusk when sudden darkness and purple skies incite smiles that eluded every playful word that was said to you in the day. <br />
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Most importantly of all see me when we walk together at night, our solitudes ripening separately in the shade of the same trees. <br />
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See me in secret sideways glances, taking care not to shatter the equilibrium that scarcely keeps us an unclasped arm’s length apart. A fatal distance that forbids me from stepping closer, a distance like the light years that keeps worlds from smashing headlong into another, like silent afterthoughts that hide within tongue and teeth long after words have passed, like the uncharted darkness between stars.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-82016042163283467332011-04-05T20:14:00.002+05:302011-04-05T20:14:55.296+05:30Too much coffeeThe appam-stew was worth it. Worth the half-hour auto-ride that bounced her all the way through beach road to the grand bay. Worth braving auto drivers who cast her glances that threatened to break out into a hindi conversation, much before she could say “inox, an innocuous telugu-free phrase that wouldn’t betray her to them cheat her out of twenty five bucks. <br />
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The road began steep and rollicking in empty stretches where the sea lay bare and blue and flattened out as the warships and sailboats improved the view. Today the surf was white, too white as if an amateur artist had dabbed white poster paint in too many places on his seaside landscape. White in all the wrong places, the places where the sea slept with its legs folded. <br />
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She couldn’t think in the hours beween eleven and one. It was as if her thoughts had been short-circuited, words had been lost heart mid-wave and had washed ashore in half-sentences. That’s why she found writing so difficult. For her it was an act of memory, putting down words that were already fully formed in her head, an effort to speak in a gentler tongue than she did in her own head. Mostly effortless except on the days she drank too much coffee. <br />
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She was led to the same table every time by the steward. The serving staff wore angavastrams and maroon sherwanis, a sight that provoked less and less laughter with every visit repeated. A pair of stone elephants waited at the garden the table faced. She noticed that they were growing younger with every visit, the chiselled frowns, three parallel stripes on their grey foreheads eroded by gust after gust of sea salted air. The protuberances on skulls where light and shadow played hide and seek were softening from a grave carven look into an infantile roundness. Freshly sprouted shoots of grey flourished on her scalp, the same shade of grey as the elephants that were growing younger. <br />
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Behind her a group of seven couples stood waiting for chairs to be rearranged. She didn’t want to turn back for a better look at them because she already knew what they would look like, the old rich of vizag who lunched at the grand bay on Sundays talking about daughters who lived across the bay of Bengal in Singapore and sons who waited for their term to get over at the university of texas. Sentences that fell silent drifted half-formed to her ears but she brushed them away. She knew their as well as he knew the playlist at Dakshin, always the same set of carnatic instrumental CDs. She knew it right down to the unerring transition from violin to saxophone to the veena. <br />
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The glass walls were crisscrossed with bamboo logs that stood clustered outside like khaki-trousered legs of men sharing cigarettes. The scaffolding gave her a sensation being caged within. She wasn’t sure what the scaffolding was made out. Once the bark was chipped away every tree limb looked the same, wooden logs squatting together in a mass of twine knots. <br />
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A solitary guest was never unwelcome at a restaurant, she mused. When you overlooked what apparently looked like a wasteful seating arrangement of a single person at a 4-seater, you noticed other advantages. A solitary guest never tarries over orders unlike large groups where menu is debated lip-bitingly for half-hour lengths and orders and parried back and forth between, covering the notepad with squiggles of dishes that might have been. A single guest often names her order instantly sometimes even before the menu is presented. And she always tipped generously.<br />
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The coffee was not one of the restaurant’s strong points. That was the only thing she insisted upon, “Please make it strong.” She would tell them again and again. But the tall silver tumbler, its flaring rim a thin-lipped pout always, disappointed. What lay within was neither fragrant nor tingled with flavour that made you discover taste buds on the roof of your mouth. It was the watery kind of dregs-of-the-decoction cup that one might be invited to at an average home at madras, the kind that wouldn’t even elicit the perfunctory “Nice coffee” compliment. But it was one of the three places in Andhra Pradesh, her own apartment in Hyderabad excepted where the coffee transported her to madras if only between long deep sips that slid under her tongue and told tales. <br />
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You could taste good coffee a long time on your lips, sweet and thick, like a kiss. Sometimes it would stay in your mouth long after a couple of glasses of water had put it out. Here it slunk away untasted and cold like a stranger you ran into on the road. <br />
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She wanted to buy dolls from Vizag for the golu . September was six months away. Bur she had had her eye on that particular piece for a long time, a wooden carving of Krishna and radha with faces bleached and then painted ivory. What she liked best about the dolls was the complete absence of divinity in the identical almond-eyes both the cowherd and his companion the milkmaid. The flute sat lazily outside the corners of his lips as if he had just whistled out a dreamy tune and was considering a long nap in the shade of a gulmohar. They didn’t look like god and amour, just like any boy and girl chasing cows across a pasture. Their feet rose together from a wooden base naturally like lithe tree trunks, the awkwardly jointed ankles vanishing beneath purple silk that had bend draped over them.<br />
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The Tribes India store on beach road sold wares of traditional artisans. The doll looked like it could have been whittled by fingers Rajasthani, Oriya, Bengali, even Chattisgarhi. But when it sat among older papier-mâché dolls on one of the seven stainless tell rows, her mother would say “Oh that one! Ramya bought it from Vizag.” She had let the secret of its origins rest with the salesman, biting back the question that would have turned it into one of her breed, a visitor to the city waiting to flee to faraway places<br />
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She wanted the doll to be nothing else but a Vizag doll, she needed to add to her mother’s golu hoard something ransomed from her itinerant life and her navaratri absences. By carrying it away home she might be carrying a bit of the city back, the city that had been many places to her at once Pilani by winter, Madras by summer but forever a city that would hold her captive, healing her like a hometown and hiding her well like a lair . <br />
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It was the coffee, too much coffee every time. She never managed to stave off coffee cravings that begged her to douse the aftertastes of meal with its uniform foam of bitterness. If she skipped the coffee she would have been able to take an afternoon nap. If she drank it she sank into a trance that permitted neither pointed thought nor drifting repose. <br />
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The plastic pouch popped with a squeak when she stepped on it, right at the throat of the packet so that it spat water at her toes. She stepped around dead fishes that lay flat and silvery against the ground glimmering like lost coins under the full moon. The entire stretch of road was fragrant with fish that had been left to dry on the pavement. People stepped around her carefully on the sidewalk as if trying to keep their soles clear of a smelly liquid that was spreading slowly on the ground beneath them. Vizag cast mourning robes on her, maiming her with limp of a sorrow that invited second glances from passers by who guessed at its cause but daren’t stop her and ask. <br />
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It was such an easy city to walk around in. Coastal cities always are. Landlocked at Hyderabad where the sky was spread over them like a blue polythene sheet over a hutment, she’d wander in circles waiting for that explosion of open skies that never came. Here was a road that had called up a city into existence from its four-metre breadth, the road that was laid by south-bound voyagers who had merely wanted to flee a plundered kingdom but had been charmed by this flatland between the ghats and had stayed back. <br />
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Teneti park was the closest she could get to being back at elliot’s. There were fishermen about squatting atop upturned catamarans with gouged eyes that wouldn’t ever set out to sea again, singing fishermen who sat at their polysester nets that kept up a drumbeat with their fingers in accompaniment to their songs. <br />
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The whiff of far-off places was always there like the soft call of a song that was playing at a forbidden place, a song playing within gates she daren’t pass. Ships stayed brightly lit, marking out the otherwise indiscernible line parting sky from sea. She counted them off from dolphin’s nose to the cliff that held her eyes back from straying further north. She wondered how many of the ships she had counted off in the afternoon had reached the harbour and how many anchors lay drooping and drooling rust at the same spot in the sea. <br />
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It was the coffee again The vendor at teneti park sold coffee that streamed from the tap of a steel drum that was slung around his shoulders, a steaming dragon bellyful of thick choclatey Andhra filter coffee. She always sought him out among the evening throng of the slow-treading elderly and harried parents giving their fleet-footed brood a breathless chase. Lately she had grown superstitious about her visits to the park, never leaving till she had caught sight of the old man. She would cut off mid-cry his hoarse chants of “coffee-tea” and exchange a five rupee coin for a Styrofoam cup. Half of its contents she would forfeit to the grass that lay burning on the way back to her stone seat. <br />
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She fingered the scab on her elbow, picking away at black corners of discarded skin that moulted with the ease of a gift wrapper. At the centre it swung stiffly on hinges like a padlock rattling painfully with a false key within, before breaking away in a burst of pus. The rest of it stayed glued to the sea of pink like dark unexplored continents on a map. <br />
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She had said her farewells to the city many times over only to find that she had to return again. She returned to find dark hills grow dense with a yellow hive of houselights that winked from rooftops, returned to roads that no longer abloom with an eight pm hush but wheezed with streetlit motes of dust raised by stragglers who refused to be bid good night, to find pristine shores hammered with footprints that didn’t fade, to find the coffee watered to light brown oblivion and yet craving it between hour to hour. <br />
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She looked at the sea again at the places where it no longer slept with its legs folded but writhed in a nightly serpentine dance. She saw the white daubs of poster paint had disappeared in the dusk making way for subtler blue-black brush strokes of the night and was happy.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-27381715909438475902011-02-27T20:56:00.001+05:302011-02-27T21:27:46.404+05:30The gulmohar in the middle of the roadA private breeze, like a whispered aside, stirs to life within its sudden shade, under the big gulmohar in the middle of the road. Its branches were outstretched like the arms of a tightrope artist grown long and taut on the wire. Had it been in bloom, one could have plucked its flowers off a first floor balcony on either side of the road. I don't remember seeing the gulmohar before these one and a half years though it is easily the biggest tree on this road. Maybe because it has never been in flower. Maybe because I haven't seen Hyderabad in spring.<br />
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At the throat of the tree where the branches lay knotted up in a thickly coiled rope of a trunk lay a dusty ganesh idol. Nameless weeds of algal aspect, dead green patches that filled the road median flinch at the periodic belch bikes. Forked yellow stalks split into wider Vs at every burst of smoke. Flowers like single silver sequins nodded their tiny heads at passing wheels tucking newer specks of dust among its silver strands. Some lay down wisely, with leaves pressed flat to the sand asleep as everyone else should be on a sunday afternoon.<br />
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You can read the sorrow of forsaken siestas on the haggard faces that spot the supermarket aisles. Sleepwalking feet trip over each other jut into billing queues with a toe surreptiously singing along with the radio, weary with waiting.<br />
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I have never looked upon her too keenly, only her nose is sharp with lines as if penciled and the insides of her eyes, deep and dry like a dead pond, fall upon my eyes like claws. <br />
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I wish she were a picture on a wall that has been gazed upon absently everyday. Her eyes I have never looked into. Like water in the hollows of flower vases they tempt slow perfumed deaths. <br />
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I slip out of the store into the road with the spell of denied sleep still upon me. A single handle of the plastic bag wrenches free of my thumb and eggshells shatter in a screaming sunburst of yolk upon a cloudy concrete road.<br />
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"Are you alright madam?" The guard at the store entry asks. My hand numb and cold from the air conditioning goes to my head where hair stands upright brown and sharp like autumn leaves waiting to be crushed underfoot. I wave a quick "I'm fine" wave and walk past the gulmohar tree where I ransom reason for hope again.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-57474334891412876282010-11-21T21:15:00.001+05:302010-11-21T21:17:05.585+05:30On missing the bus<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew it the minute I hit snooze the third time. Sometimes you wake up in that groggy grey zone where you're at risk of locking a yawning house behind you three two minutes but you brush your teeth with an unhurried thoroughness that shows that you've braved the risk too many times to bother hurrying. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Usually, it was the newspaper that held me back. Or the rare silences offered up by morning minutes when I can hear my heart out through screeching school buses and bikes honking school leather clad feet out of their way. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Neither happened today.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> I had learnt to leave the newspaper folded up in crisp tantrums outside my door till my sprint to the bus stop would begin, when I would first fasten my floaters, then pick it up and zip it shut into a backpack groaning with unread papers of the week. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Sometimes I got a two-seater section all to myself where I could spread it to its full grown double sheet breadth, my shoulders expanding with effort. People would turn back at me, annoyed at the creaks and scratches inner editorial pages played out at their ears. Sometimes it stayed shut in my bag. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Neither happened today.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew it the minute I could see the tea stall clearly, free of the blue cloud of company uniforms that usually held the smoke in a conspiratorial confinement. I could smell the tea today and having smelt it I couldn't understand why I had been saving all this for later, the tea, the winter that was making its way into the city like a drunken stranger, the newspaper.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Your bus has left, madam." The boy told me as he handed me the tea. "Yes. It has." I smiled at him. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">He had a thin pleasant face, one I hadn't really looked at in one and a half years of boarding a bus at his doorstep. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I walked back, noticing every detail that had lain dead on my way to the bus stand, red sweaters skipping into buses on time, grateful for hot sour breaths of passing buses that snored past, flowers that fell into foreign hands and forayed into streets four away. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew I was working a way backward through wish lists, through , through life itself. I was staging my life in a way that would make sense in its retelling rather than in its living. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I had missed the bus today. And every day I hadn't I had missed these mornings moulting to life. </div>ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-68928313850132206872010-11-14T22:16:00.001+05:302010-11-14T22:16:33.892+05:30That kind of nightAppa didn’t even look up when I began to talk about the snake in Vizag. “It crossed the road about 100 metres ahead of me. Might have stepped on it had I walked faster. Could hardly see it in the sun.’<br />
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“Was it a cobra?’ He asked, with a voice still acutely normal with the absence of curiosity. After all he had spent hi childhood killing water snakes by a well and must have been bitten by six kinds of snakes.<br />
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“Yeah.A cobra. A big one.<br />
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“Oh.” My father’s response divested the incident of the drama it would have had in the eyes of my mother or my sister. They would have sighed, breathing an excitement bordering on panic, told me off for choosing a shorter road lined with suspicious shrubbery on both sides.<br />
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Rain hasn’t failed Chennai on a Diwali yet and this year had a storm forecast to go with the rain that doused half-lit flower pots, turned 1000 walas into an instant red pickle and softened the bombs into whimpering balls of fire. <br />
<br />
It was nice to fall asleep to babbling cloudbursts instead of stuffing my ears with cotton plugs that weren’t impervious to firecracker noise. I wished rain had volume knobs so that I could turn it up and down between silence and car noises.<br />
<br />
It was a calm orange sky, bearing sunset scars even at ten pm. Orange with a sunset that refused to leave or with a lurking dawn that still preferred disguise. Or maybe the rocket bombs that had sprayed the sky with graffiti of green orange and yellow sparks had rubbed off, like enamel paint.<br />
<br />
Amma and Aishu were far behind, amma’s elbow tucked in Aishu’s as she took step after fearful step, fearful of her hypoglycaemic fainting fits. Our efforts to flag down passing autos had met with frosty refusals. They would choose to rattle on emptily instead of the scant fare that this inconveniently short distance would dole out. <br />
<br />
So we walked back from the theatre, our feet dodging flights of coloured firework paper, paper that laughed in tiny gusts like fighting birds, paper that had fought off gunpowder smells aided by the rain. Some lay crushed in paper-maiche hills, others like dying butterfly wings making final bids at movement.<br />
<br />
We stopped at an auto, waving aside the black rubber rain curtains to rouse the driver. Two khaki-clad figures stumbled out of a strange embrace like twin checks cracking an eggshell open.<br />
<br />
“Don’t look.” My mother pulled us both forward by hand. “They were doing something dirty.” My sister and I stiffened our shoulders with swallowed laughter. It was that kind of night. <br />
<br />
“Don’t walk ahead of her, SK. Stay with Ramya in the dark.” My mother semi-shouted through the distance. My father waited for me near a snoozing fire engine that must have had a restive Diwali week. <br />
<br />
I caught up with him just as a 23C and 29C roaring past me with a perfunctory whoosh of air like the greeting of old friends left behind at an old school.<br />
<br />
We whipped out an umbrella and the wind turned it upside down immediately. The umbrella flapped furiously, its ribs exposed and dangling. I shook out old rain hiding within its black folds and readied it for battle with a rainless storm. It wasn’t raining yet, short bellows of thunder and intermittent drizzle hadn’t evolved into a full throated cyclone yet, a cyclone that bayed for leafless trees and had felled branches that lay inert at our feet. <br />
<br />
When we reached the gate, a cracker tittered defiantly and the clouds suddenly lit up yellow and laughing. The rain still made morse code knocks upon the earth but the storm went away sulking at the calm that lay shattered by the cracker before it could roar its arrival aloud. <br />
<br />
I could always hear the wind better in Madras. It shook out old rain clinging to the leaves still left behind, and it fell lukewarm like tap water, neither cool and light like night rain nor hot heavy and urgent like tears.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-2457968243637692292010-09-25T09:32:00.000+05:302010-09-25T09:32:50.509+05:30I could feel the two pieces through the blotted paper, cold and heavy.<br />
<br />
<br />
The bajjis were hot in bhimli. Yet, I paid my ten bucks and walked with a steadily soaking newspaper in my hand. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Finally I found my seat, empty in spite of the Sunday evening throng, and the sea finally made itself heard, I spite of everything. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-8376693821176730132010-08-26T22:51:00.003+05:302010-11-21T21:13:40.291+05:30What the wanderer does not knowThe wanderer knows not, that the striking down of wispy reluctant roots in strange soils is as purifying as a quest. <br />
<br />
<br />
If he stays long enough to speak of its plagues-to-come and time its monsoons in the native tongues.<br />
<br />
Long enough for streets to let off steam in dinner smells that sharpen his Spartan hunger and hasten his homeward way.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Long enough for its silent siesta afternoons to sweeten childhood songs and its cool to soothe blistered road-weary feet.<br />
<br />
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.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-50725646228122555822010-08-26T22:47:00.000+05:302010-08-26T22:47:42.966+05:30Every seat is takenEvery seat is taken. Lights lean unfairly towards fairer face and pretty trees are lost to painted corners. <br />
<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 .<br />
<br />
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.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-4203876151379970142010-07-07T13:47:00.003+05:302010-07-07T13:47:55.840+05:30Only you remainWhen 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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
When my lute is unstrung and the songsters turn quiet, only you remain- memory’s ever sweet song that is never heard.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
When rain falls hot and silent, waiting to be seen not heard, only you remain- a brazen butterfly parabola.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
When the last line leaves my pen and my heart is gladdens at a filled page, only you remain- the vengeance of tardy truths.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-53818919900678578852010-05-31T22:14:00.001+05:302010-05-31T22:14:57.419+05:30Not for me...Not for me are people with ever craning necks who glide up snakes of stairs without ever being deceived in a ladder. <br />
<br />
Those who never fall backwards over a winding word, tongue thick and loose with warring syllables.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
Those who might see the last of a ship sail or the homeward road without coughing back a tear.<br />
<br />
Those who haven’t <span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background: #ffffff;">spittled</span> 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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
Not for me are those souls from which fluid passions don’t ooze.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-55607334978509855262010-05-22T19:54:00.001+05:302010-05-22T19:56:28.696+05:30This 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 <span style="background-color: white;"><span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat;">purpling</span> </span>horizon, signboards that stabbed me with their familiar names.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
There is a kind of love wherein you <span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background: #ffffff;">daren't</span> 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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-48911671214165174462010-05-15T22:37:00.003+05:302010-05-15T22:37:12.815+05:30ForgettingTossed 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<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-12116454885848805672010-05-03T23:53:00.003+05:302010-05-03T23:58:14.901+05:30Chronic pains don't beget poemsMy fingernails threatened to grow longer the closer my hands grew to hers on the table. They lurked under bent knuckles, impudent as an eavesdropper’s foot at the door. I had sat next to her instead of across, convinced that a sideways view could buy me back composure. But it wasn’t to be. She, sensing my discomfort never held back those polite queries that falsely reassure the questioner that all is well with the recipient.<br />
<br />
“Are your parents moving to Hyderabad?” she began, stumbling I suppose upon the only remnant of our previous conversation residing in her memory. “Err. Yeah, my mother is.” I replied after a desperate dash at swallowing the final remnant on my tongue.<br />
<br />
And then, overcome by a garrulous impulse, I plunged on, heedless of how each word would make me pay by way of replays that made me flinch. “It isn’t a pleasant prospect.” I confessed. “I have to watch my old routine get broken down and new ones thrust in their place.” I pushed my plate away, my hunger had scampered away shamefacedly at the ineptness of my fingers. I couldn’t lift the spoon to my mouth for fear of spilling it mid-way or bringing it back to the tray with a clang. I couldn’t stand the taste of a full mouth, it had turned into an ugly chomping mob that neither permitted me to say the one thing that might stall further conversation nor to eat with indifferent panache. <br />
<br />
She smiled and then started out on an anecdote, something seeking to put maternal paranoia in its proper perspective. “And then when I returned at eight, a search party was already out…”<br />
<br />
By then, I’d discovered that her father too, was a bank employee and that she has shifted too many schools to belong anywhere. ‘I was always the new girl.’ She mused. “And by the time I made friends, we would have to move again.”<br />
<br />
My left hand was banished to my lap, safely out of sight while the latest honour killing played musical chairs with the usual roundabout marriage v. career argument and the virtues of marrying househusbands in their conversation. <br />
<br />
When she was around, my heart played ventriquolist with the whole of my body, it was an effort to hold my elbows still on the table (ill-manneredly, I added to myself later) so loudly could I feel my heart thud there. <br />
We walked companionably out of the canteen, the three of us, one waiting for another through mid-queue conversations and washroom crowds. Lunch table fealty is a precious feeling, however brief the encounter. We went up just in time to watch the first raindrop getting mopped off the floor. “I wish this weather doesn’t last too long.” I said glumly, all too aware that I had spoiled it for her, the silent homage that the first rains of the day pay the sun-shunning ones. <br />
<br />
Later I made my way into the library with that moment secreted away in a pocket like a stolen flower, its petals could be unfurled like a torn scroll, there was fragrance yet that could be salvaged from its puckered stalk.<br />
<br />
I could float back now to the scene without getting drowned in the remembrances of follies that had long despaired of my forgiveness. I looked at my nails again, its corners still flecked yellow with the dal we had both licked clean, and tore them out one by one.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-49722393443302503882010-03-31T21:51:00.000+05:302010-03-31T21:51:01.483+05:30A Trick of LightEverything slips out of sight in sunlight- <br />
Names give up claims to a <br />
Hoary white fame on granite plaques, <br />
Sea-licked sweat spreads an invisible shroud <br />
A broken heart ties its hair up and gets to work<br />
A parched throat sings out aloud. <br />
<br />
Everything grows bright in streetlight- <br />
Homeward feet kick up a golden dust <br />
Haloes happy faces and softens mouths drawn tight, <br />
Red-eyed foursomes of wheels fall into line <br />
Bouncing beads eased down a blinking twine,<br />
Mealtime windows, lighted pinpricks<br />
Incandescent rectangles flash past like card tricks <br />
. <br />
Everything is a plaint in the starlight- <br />
Ghee-wicked hopes cry out for repose,<br />
Piligrim palms have long doused earthen vows<br />
Ship decks pour down rippling tributes of gold <br />
Wait their illusive turn at the port hold, <br />
Tree shade lays a heavy hand on my shoulder,<br />
And in degrees its consolation grows colder. <br />
<br />
Everything disbelieves at night- <br />
Longing blinks to life and lifts a sneaky eyebrow<br />
When in crimson warning the blankets glow,<br />
Wrapt in the quilted scab of sleep, <br />
I cannot tell from whither these serpents creep<br />
Love’s first winnings and dice of delusions yet unrolled. <br />
Are entwined in their sweet spiral strangleholdramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-59501176433428517422010-02-21T20:39:00.002+05:302010-02-21T20:39:13.524+05:30When old friends set on me allusions free of the stain of you, I turn back and look for you among lost years. I realize there was a time when river maps were only blue leafless branches on a white sheet that rendered the sea colourless as well, that the map would never change no matter how many rivers died on their way to a sea of vengeful hue. <br />
<br />
At ten years, I was allowed to swap my pencil for a fountain pen. I was tired of dreams vanishing in clouds of eraser dust, and in the bloodshed of spilled ink and struck out words I made sense of them. <br />
<br />
Were you the last blank page at the end of a story book, the page left intentionally blank as if inviting an alien pen to a happier ending? Were you waiting for that final flip of the page, the fingerprint of a goodbye kiss, the kiss that is the beginning of a yellow and musty end din a dusty glass prison? <br />
Were you that extra drop water that caused the paint off my brushstrokes to seep outside pencilled edges? <br />
Were you the unfamiliar word that worked slowly out of a tunnel in the slow-descending light of adulthood and meanings? <br />
Were you among the feet that rubbed the finish line out of when mine was the second last pair of legs to heed the whistle?<br />
Where were you till the day I finally remembered to turn my pockets out before my clothes disappeared into a tumble-dry ordeal only to find it empty? Not one candy wrapper whizzes out of invisible dustbin, not a single stolen coin, secrets have given up n me. <br />
What were you doing before you led me up hilltops in strange lands where sunsets forced down love upon me, another credulous traveller?ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-55547946054959412402010-02-11T23:43:00.000+05:302010-02-11T23:43:19.024+05:30An Open SecretGone are my faint faltering sentences, yours is a story I tell with deliberation, my eyes turned resolutely away from my confidant as if you were a falsehood and my words a signboard artist nailing letters of fraudulent promise in straight effortless lines.<br />
<br />
Maybe you should have stayed bitten back, sulking in the corners of my lips but utterance is irresistible. I delight in you as much as in a beautiful word that swims into speech unthinkingly and fits into sentences perfectly with the self-possession of rhyming poetry. I delight in you as I do in wisdom that is hoarded for long and in silence like a breath and then wasted in a solitary scream against the injustice that pitts the invisible flower against a yet unopened one. I delight in you as freely as my despotic impulse for truth stops my words short and curves my mouth into a smile of defeat. <br />
<br />
I used to take an uneasy pride in concealment, uneasy because it drips like a tear down the cheeks of a weeping child in the midst of an insensible throng. Uneasy because it reddens like a face that has passed notice under an unsmiling unseeing friend. Uneasy because long silences don’t flutter like standards that cut through battle lines. <br />
<br />
At the end, I say “Don’t tell anybody.” And I know that the lamp has been rubbed and the genie summoned and that veils can’t buy you beauty any longer.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-30460560723828589072010-02-04T23:37:00.000+05:302010-02-04T23:37:28.877+05:30Just as time strings cobwebbed garlands around my house faster than it does in others, love slips soon into my dreams of longing sooner than for most. My mother used to say that waking dreams come true.<br />
<br />
Even when I rub my eyes open, he stays behind like the memory of a Sunday fair on a Monday morning, a dream that dreams on in the corners of my eyes till sunlight shoos him away. <br />
<br />
“Rewrite” - the red marks fill my notebooks but the writing is not of my hand, grown fickle and fake with cursive copy writing impositions but the shapely strokes and parallel lines of his own steady hand. <br />
<br />
Language forfeited, he sinks fast like foam following scuttling crabs into sand secrets. His face has sworn to taunt me namelessly like the waves that punish my feet for not having stayed longer for one more wave. And when I want to call him back to me when he’s at the water’s edge, I will forget his name and one more dream will have banished him to anonymity. <br />
<br />
In the balcony of my childhood home, I can hear the temple drums again; the dream drums out the hymn note-perfect as Ganesh leaves one sanctum for another in a palanquin. It might be hymn to him for he too has leapt from dream to dream braving sphinxes at the mouth of a labyrinthine sleep, not in a palanquin but in a pall, his name dying on my lips. People who die in your dreams live forever, my mother used to say but people who never die swap their mortality for memory. He will not remember my dreams, remember that he has crept into each of my pubescent peephole tears only to turn his face away from a past where pain has been spray dried over walls of time like the afterthought of a vandal. <br />
<br />
The stream wouldn’t glisten with fallen sunbeams the way it did if the wind didn’t send the swan’s wings aflutter and if the swans didn’t make rippling silver stripes in the lake. <br />
Soon, the rains will scrub names off epitaphs and tipple flowers off gravestones - when he refuses to leave at the clang of the school bell, before the door bolt jams, prior to the first word of a confession, he won’t leave when the eye of my sorrow is still wet. And will they have leave to die if he dreams with me only to unearth the ruins of a love long-deceased?ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-63141263793391985742010-01-24T17:02:00.000+05:302010-01-24T17:02:04.536+05:30The phone reduces him to one-handed left-handedness. Throughout the call, the right hand stays upright as if carrying the weight of the conversation on its palms, and the fingers fight through flying hair to glue the handset to the ears.<br />
<br />
But his left hand is animated enough for two, he waves it around like a baton in a traffic cop’s hand, the words wouldn’t grind to a halt as long as he keeps waving them onward. <br />
<br />
He bends forwards, a little stupidly, neck tilted downwards so that his whispers warn off the ants that fall one by one into the strangulated burrs of his socks. He takes care to walk in the shade but the sunbeams seeks him out from behind the trees to shoo off the music in his ears and the words from his throat until he hears nothing, sees nothing, till he is freed of that white hot blindfold.<br />
<br />
Admitting defeat, he walks a suddenly splay-legged walk, hands-in pocket kicking his feet forward as if he is sending the very air that is filled with his voice heavenward with a prayer. <br />
<br />
A slower gait that carries the dread of silence in each step appears when sentences start all over again, trying vainly to jump over every inarticulate attempt, when the pause that breathes with weariness grows longer between words that mask them, when time threatens to gnash its teeth and prompt a glance at the clock. <br />
<br />
And he will walk faster when a sudden exclamation, a promising turn of phrase, a confession in the garb of a story steps in redeem him. <br />
<br />
He has wept over a million lines of verse but they stay only long enough to desert him when a dry throat seeks to make them his own.<br />
<br />
His voice hadn’t music enough for poetry and his memory hadn’t tricks enough to wrestle down silence and pin it flat in submission. He hadn’t the art of painting the happenings of a day in anecdotal colours and say, “Guess what happened” and really make her guess.<br />
<br />
His fingers grip a low-slung branch and pulls it downward like a slingshot, scarcely noticing the fleeing butterfly, the cloud burst of leaves, the bare-headed agony of the branch when it swings back into a sunless place. <br />
<br />
The world walks past him, shaking its head at his unmoving intent one, the length of grass that has been trod read in the marks of his shoe soles the distance he has travelled. <br />
<br />
And when a merciful tower snaps its fingers in disgust, his right arm will ache itself back to existence. Blinking like a man who’s been reborn, he looks at the number that briefly flashes on the screen before fading out regretfully. He has been dead for thirty nine minutes and twenty three seconds.<br />
<br />
Each of the seams of his pocket insides writhe with the unspent change of speech, he sighs before fishing out the phone and dialling again.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-71859562832439992252010-01-04T20:52:00.003+05:302010-01-04T20:53:17.144+05:30Too old to weepFew places can stand on their own, without ever swallowing the snub of being directed to by calling forth a bigger or older or a more celebrated building or road that acquires the halo of a “landmark” for reasons that appear arbitary to the outsider. <br />
<br />
I used to live in such a “You can’t miss it” place, Pizza boys and courier deliveries could make it without a thousand instructive phone calls. But RBI Quarters had taken second place, many a time to a school of dance, a prominent church or a society of theosophy. But we knew that even as we began a disbelieving explanation to an ignorant pizza “Do you know Velankanni Church, ours lies on the way.” We would take it good naturedly enough because others said “You know RBI Quarters, we live right across the road.” <br />
<br />
Funny how one memory draws others to itself and claims them for its own just as a landmark does an entire neighbourhood. This queen bee of a memory lives quietly enough among a clutter of less painful ones, with a heart still tearless though struck white hot with pain everyday, as if were a gong to keep time with the pendulum of grief. <br />
<br />
Today might not have been such a day but I know where the memory of it will strike root. This like everything else that happened this year belongs to Pilani. <br />
<br />
I’m too old to weep, I thought, when I got onto the bus to work, too old to weep like a child who avoids the accusing red eyes of a corrected answer sheet on the first day of school. Too old to feel post-vacation blues, too old to lose sleep over a fading love, too old to lie awake after passing over the reins of my love into the hands of the unknown only to realize there aren’t any reins. Too old for the gleeful smiles that pay for window seats. Too old to lean out of the window and believe that the day is new in spite of the dubious sheen of its resealable resalable packing. Too old to notice how prettily the leaf hugged the window bars in fright when the branch broke away from the tree at the bidding of the bus. Too old to weep for the leaf when a callous wind breaks the embrace and sends the leaf flying away from an imprudent entanglement. Too old to remember to weep for the window. <br />
<br />
Dutiful chimes of “Happy New year” resounded dully at every reunion. I was congratulated on wrangling a 10 day break. I in turn, congratulated them in return for getting rip-roaringly drunk so cheap by staying, while telling myself that they were exchanging one form of drunkenness for another. <br />
<br />
Too old to weep for the promises I’ve kept waiting for a decade, for the dreams that took ten years to settle down into a sediment of someday suffixes. Too old to seize somebody by hand and cry without restraint, and tell them, “This is what I’d wanted to stake my life on, but I have so little of it left.” <br />
<br />
I find it less embarrassing to ask for money than for a kind word, a split-second caress of an elbow that wants to say “See you tomorrow” leaves me warm for hours but I won’t trust myself to slip my hand into another’s if only feel a little less alone. <br />
<br />
And just when I thought I’d grown too old to weep, I heard the very words that condone an infantile unrestrained bawling, and kiss its imaginary bruises away- <br />
<br />
“Relax. You’re just a kid.”ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5440287267910007562.post-28372927156930545542009-12-21T21:31:00.002+05:302009-12-21T21:31:50.868+05:30Telling timeWhen I look into the mirror, I like to catch sight of my watch dial, the large blue three grins at me, pleased at having the whole of the dial to itself, as if it were making its solitary way through a personal pa pizza. Lone numeral that it is, it gets people to stare at a watch that guards the secret of the time of the day so cryptically. It is not a watch that you can snatch the time out of in a quick glance from far away that you can pass off as uninterested. You’d have to catch my eye and ask me, I who have come closest to reading it, what the time is. Then I’d flick my wrists, trying hard not to say “Three’ o’clock” and divine the position of the minute hand (I’ve never managed to get it exactly right on this blank white dial) and labour through the “by five’ multiplication” to give it to you. <br />
<br />
<br />
While I walk through these streets at three’ o’clock, it will tick out of step with my sluggish stride as if it were unwilling to travel along side me through an afternoon nap. Why, it would sigh, as shuttered shops slumbered on, as salesmen linger over a late lunch away from their counters, the rare passer by exchanges glances with me in solidarity, one more who has forsaken the semi-darkness of a curtained bedroom for this heatless heartless glare of this winter afternoon. <br />
<br />
And it would sigh again when I step out again into the night this time, waiting for lights to pop up in my head, like streetlamps flickering over the angry buzz of surprised moths. <br />
<br />
And when I return , you’ll say, look at your eyes, you haven’t slept. I want to tell you that they have always been dark, those eyes under my eyes that see you clearest. How much do you really hear? You’re a valley away, mistaking echoes for speech and missing every new word that drowns in an old wave of bouncing sounds. <br />
<br />
This isn’t exile for you, but a return from exile, for you have been away from where you ought to have been all along. You’re dangerous, a man who has neither a spiritual nor a geographical conception of home and wanders in circles like that minute hand of mine over an unsteady pulse, cornering me into a dishonest approximation.ramya kumarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03453228804031122727noreply@blogger.com1