On Diwali night,

strings of lights try to lift
the darkness, but they don’t mitigate it
quite as much as the smoke from the crackers
that makes the sky purple
and silvers the air
prematurely,
something about the way
the lights are hung up over houses
that doesn’t reveal
their sadness or happiness
reminds me of people,
bright stars of smiles
like facades decorated with rangoli powder,
that could scatter in a second
in a breath of wind
or lit with diyas burned out by tomorrow
and as we pass
on a road
filled with celebratory trash
winter air combined
with the ash we can’t cough out
for a year
there’s a house in the corner
that’s under construction,
uninhabited yet,
and on its side
is a jhuggi
like a forgotten child
that will never not be
under construction
that can’t keep out
the bitter ash in the air
but it’s lit as much as the house on the corner
and for one night
on a festival
both houses will light
a candle to their gods
pretending to smile
for
as long as the wick will burn. 

Newspaper Rain

the newspaper and rain arrived together today, 
one regular as always, the other unpredictable as ever  

“14 yr old dies after scuffle with two brothers” 

“man bludgeons wife, strangles child, kills self” 

–headlines that draw my eyes in first

though the articles, I choose not to read:  

what will one more act of violence be
but another prick to our collective conscience, 
another snag in the proud-flying flag, 
one more fester in the city’s flesh 
that for all their exploding frequency 
it will get sicker before it dies? 

instead, 

I read about the arguments 
between the central and state governments;
the PM skipped the president’s Iftar 
but will be going for talks to Mozambique. 
Maybe I will only realise the importance 
of these events in the future. 
so I plough through an editorial on the Brexit 
understanding about half 
and one on the latest cure for cancer 

in the obituaries,
a young soldier is remembered 

alongside a ninety year old man: 

the former for his service in the Kargil war, 
the latter by grandchildren 

newspapers 

like readers, 
are selective 
unlike rain, till it falls 
on roofs of plastic or of brick or 
under open sky. 

Monsoon in Goa / Delhi

From this vast half-mirror of sky
the world opens out.
ocean charges unleashed on to sand
to the tips of your toes
and takes you back 

into 

the eternal oxymoron:
its ever changing shifting state
a constant.
its unpredictability
predictable by the red flags.
It is beautiful and scary
and dirty and it washes
to, washes away, washes constantly,
(try to wash off sand
with sandy water of sea)
it is chaotic and vengeful and churns with rage,
it is calm and soothing and one with the still sky
and with you,
within you,
your eyes
when you watch.
sometimes the horizon seems to dissolve. 

The first day 

the flashing lights intrigued
combing over the submerged rocks
who we thought were beachcombers,
some strangely perseverant species who searched
day after day what the tide washed in:
wondrous treasures like the skeletons of rare fish
amid the black sand and debris
that we saw on the beach
and a syringe and a
dead rat.
but the second night it was explained that
they were catching crabs,
the big ones that come out only at night
when the tide is high
(which is the only time the humans go in–
crabs must be wise) 

high tide is rough 

but it will bring you home. 

but this, 

constant clashes of paradox –
on such a vast scale as the sea
is what makes for chaos of such a living kind:
paroxysms of waves break over waves
shatter upon rocks,
roar with such an intensity of rage, the shards lingering in the ebb,
liquid energy goes up in the spray of each turn that will
crash to release, like fissures of lightning, returned to the sky
after filling the ocean air
electric.
Flying back
I already missed the waves
but found a similar beauty in the expressiveness of clouds,
though much more still.
they made coastlines and waves washing on shores
then islands and ships floating at the tips of
the plane’s wing.
they were talking heads and screaming faces
that lapsed into silence as we passed them by. 

Landing, we were surrounded still 

by the magnificent grey elephants of sky
that had been there two days, we were told by the city,
had rampaged for two hours that morning
but were sleeping now.
water collected on the roads.
I thought of them as seeming
like Marquez’s angel:
cataclysms in repose
that will soon wake. 

 

Two people

can share a seat on the metro
and remain in worlds entirely separate 

how many worlds can a compartment hold 

before the lines collapse under their weight? 

RAINY WEATHER IS THE MOST POETIC

There’s that moment before the sky falls down: 

wait and watch the clouds swell
And then, like explorers from another world
tentative, the drops begin to fall,
It sounds like cities being destroyed in the sky.
I listen to the water trickle in, sly
from an upstairs window; across the road
a woman carries in clothes hung to dry
In a slum, worldly possessions are soaked. 

Rainy mornings are the freshest to wake to; 

rising, I step outside and meet
the scent of earth, soaking wet
the clean sky, laundered and left to air
the paper – so drenched I can hardly read
the news of fifty farmers’ deaths. 

On hearing about the lawsuit against Led Zeppelin

Jimmy, 

you built me a stairway to heaven, for someone 
who never thought it a place worth going, you built it
in guitar riffs that twist insides, that lift to the sky that
crush you under the weight of the spell, 
you built a stairway to heaven that didn’t have to be climbed, but float, 
left on top stranded soaring, the fall like angelwings, 
Robert, you carved it with the star grit of voice, summoned like with burning knives
heaven is your hair in the limelight, no angel
ever had such a halo, no angel made a sound like what stirs from your torso when you grip 
the mic and howl like from the depths of a hell where you were cast down 
but you built a stairway to heaven out: 
in a dim lit basement in industrial Gurgaon, 
in dark rooms world over, built stairways to epiphany,  
connecting souls, the soundtrack of lives, over forty years, 
through grips of death, love beginning, through heartbreak and loss, lives 
changed forever, I can’t count how many stairways you built, 
how many heavens you spun, can’t measure what you did to me
the first time I truly heard the sound of 
heaven 
is not
a place
but a song, and I thought I heard it 
in you:
and now
I almost cannot believe 
that everything bright and beautiful and true boiled down becomes 
something else, becomes another dissection, a lawyer’s defence, 
becomes a dead man’s estate splitting profits in half, they found ways 
to measure what seemed an infinite stairway– brought down to earth,
an inconceivable crash, and now the only sound I hear 
is of breaking. 

Flying over buildings

makes you think about their insides,
the way being below them
makes them disappear into sky. 

there’s a moment 

between
construction and destruction
where they could be either,
balanced on the threshold
between half-worlds.
they might stay there
forever, or
you never know
how long they have already stood
like that. 

– and they might not be 

as barren as they seem,
I bet there’s a group
of old men in one corner
chewing paan in a circle
passing hours and bets.
or in the cool shade
a pack of dogs
you hear howling those nights
when the thunder comes. 

And this moment 

a businessman dirties his shoes–
cement-dust clouding Italian leather–
stepping out of his car
to inspect if the builders
have managed to build him
his dreams, yet.
–(forty rupees for theirs
at one day’s end) 

they start from 

right where the mountains were beat down,
where trees themselves
can hardly grow.
settlement upon settlement house upon house
grow into glitzy modern towers
(slums sprawl beside, closer to ground) 

what does an earthquake in the Hindukush look like? 

ranges buckling like breaking a back with bricks?
If mountains cannot withstand
earth’s fits of rage
nothing can.
we ought to own up. 

T I M E

You’ve tried this one before–
it’s late and the lights are bright
In front of you are eyes, bleary, upon themselves
half-shut against confrontation,
face to face with your reflection
It’s just you in the mirror
same as you always are,
familiar face in a familiar place 
You’ve looked at it often enough,
though your description would be least accurate of all
the way that strangers sometimes see you best– 
but we should know by now, right?  
and it all starts to shift like candlewax,
swirling subtly, strangely–
you’ve looked a little too long,
it sharpens like stone into faces of gargoyles on tower walls,
and now the eyes that you look out of
seem unreal
Shardlike, they pierce through
the fabric
of your dimension.

snap
        out

you start, and the room returns
settling down, so very still
that it starts to sink through itself
and things begin to slip
before your very eyes, 
transforming, distorting– 

Time makes everything  u  n  c  e  r  t  a  i  n 

like 

when you were so sure of the path
that was laid out for you, not by something abstract like life –
you didn’t need to know what
because it was a simple series of steps, school college work
that you’d take more easily than your legs had yet learned.
At some point the train seemed to be derailing
because the tracks had all flown into the sky
but then you realised it’s more like an ocean, anyway
With an imaginary shore. 

Sometimes

at least,
time tells  

like 

meeting someone that seems just right
you could maybe write a whole novel
and with every little bit they give you,
the pages wilt –
hardcover biography, to paperback, to magazine
in which the images are all pretend, and dead leaves on the roadside
say more than those words could ever mean
if you don’t step on them first –
because the closer you get, the further you drift
and with every door you open,
another world chasms between you
voids you’ll never bridge. 

but that’s alright, 

because by now you already know
that it gets harder the longer you hold on,
it’s easy to say
get a grip
to your reflection in the middle of the night, 
catch the catatonia before it catches you
you might have to say it
several times before I hear you,
get a grip
get a grip
get

        a
  
                     g
                                r
                                           i
                                                       p




But say it too many times 
and the words won’t make sense anymore. 

Reminder for poets

Remember 

that even the best
have ripped out their hair in frustration.
Thrown out or hidden with shame
the unworthy, half-born carcasses
that turned out
too ugly to ever be revealed. 

I wonder how deep they had to dig 

till they found
a poem worth keeping.
if there were fifty
or five hundred others
that paved or blocked its way  
if there was a rarer gem
disguised in dirt or blood
that got discarded too, 
like flowers dried to stones
wilting
before they could bloom. 

Not every poem 

will be iridescent, I know,
when it feels like all I can spin
is apathy
masquerading as poems– 
I know I should not forget.
but I just can’t imagine 
if Bukowski’s worst work
looked anything like this,  
how long
he waited or wrote
till something good came along.
maybe
he never thought it did. 
maybe
you never 

do. 

“I am searching for the person in this photograph”

It is worn, tattered on the corners: a drawing 

silhouette of pen-strokes, looking over
its shoulder. Face lost in the artscapes of stories- too many, lined up like a century of wrinkles, that almost obscure. Turning around mid-walk as if called, looking back, but never intending to stop. 

“But this is a drawing” 

–No doubt about that, the paper is rough 

to touch, no glossy film
of photographic prints– like the scraping sand of a familiar beard.
you can feel the indentations left by the pen-tip
where they make an impression from the artist’s hand
that left no fingerprints but perhaps something else
too raw – a stain of soul. which once spilled,
has no remedy to be rid of it – something like mango
but not yellow like that. only children are that colour,
when they start out. 

“I know 

but can’t you trace the shutterspeed
in all the moments that got trapped in it? 

“see here 

a ghost of the flash that went out
an exposure set just a little too low
enough to capture the realness of it. 

“and the frame 

of this mind this second this place–
captured. The most beautiful portraits
are the ones where the eyes
open into the soul. a kind of a
raw vulnerability
caught unprotected, comes out off guard,
sharper than daggers
to you who views.  

“That is what I am searching for” 

History

It’s not as revealing as it should be,
holding history in your hands–
There’s something that pages and pages
of tiny black and white print can’t tell,
can’t quite convey the essence of it, like
if I tried to explain a person to you by showing you their bones–
it’s not a novel, after all.  
There are numbers, though, to help you
paint a picture inside your head,
names, photographs of leaders, and which side
claimed more dead. But it’s not a picture that paints
the blood that truly did flow,
the realness of exploding bombs when they say
the air force was involved,
How easy to write that a movement began–
less so to begin it, to find
that dissenting feeling among thousands,
voice it, bring it out, and embark
upon a fight to death to defend it?
Sometimes the year is a clue–
I try to place people, my parents,
grandfather; that uncle that lived in the hills
when the insurgence began.
Sometimes they have stories, like
walking two hours through a silent city
to reach home after an assassination–
that was when I understood what they meant
when they say the country came to a halt that night.
I try to grasp the enormity
of the words I must remember,
infiltration, rebellion, independence
when it was a dream to die for, and not the title of a day.
And then I think of when tomorrow’s children will ask
what happened to Palestine, and
where did all those refugees end up,
and of the time when the word secular was a guarantee
And I wonder what they will have to hear.