Your feet

When 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.


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.

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.

I want you to see me

I want you to see me at a scrabble board when my mind frog-leaps from one consonant tile to another.


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.

I want you to see prophesies of my sleep writ large between the cantos of the next poem you’ll read.

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.

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.

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.

Most importantly of all see me when we walk together at night, our solitudes ripening separately in the shade of the same trees.

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.

Too much coffee

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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


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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.