The gulmohar in the middle of the road

A 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

On missing the bus

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.

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. 

Neither happened today.

 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.

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.

Neither happened today.

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.

"Your bus has left, madam." The boy told me as he handed me the tea. "Yes. It has." I smiled at him. 

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.

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.  

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.

I had missed the bus today. And every day I hadn't I had missed these mornings moulting to life.

That kind of night

Appa 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.’

“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.

“Yeah.A cobra. A big one.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.