Poem for October

I am thinking about
winter with you:

film faded in the sun,
photographing grain
in the palm of a sweatshirt sleeve,

fog’s descent, through the city's parts we have seen together, already, in a different light

(like a picture I hadn't seen before that you showed me once, of a scene already familiar to Delhi and me, which is partly what I liked about it)

and the quiet city fits in your palm on a morning when fog has made it small and you even smaller inside it

and shorter days and longer nights, while we stay awake for the same amount of time, and there is something more intimate about darkness, anyway

(like the guessable, unreadable secrecy of photographs with not enough light)

everything I have just described is exactly like every other winter I've ever known except for you which is what makes it entirely different

(April film)

glimpse

there is a coal mine

inside your heart

with a single

rickety, narrow track

between steep darkness

on either side

and you, traveling on

a tilting cart

Companion to Daffodils

trigger

wherever I hear it

the siren of an ambulance is a lasso around my neck

Rewinding

tape rewinds erratically.

the machine is old,

but still works well.

a small cassette

goes inside the big one.

from which emerges a house

familiar of years,

seeming distant of late

though it isn't far, only five

minutes away-

down the road.

in the video,

we throw colour,

celebrate.

everyone is there.

happy, chubbier

than they look these days.

in the garden,

the hedge has not yet grown

the fences are bare

beyond them, no buildings:

openness,

sky.

the air seems clean.

the picture quality blurs.

we return

to the sharpness of our now

with this to know:

I keep

a small cassette

within me.

if you want us to throw stones back,

we could pick the entire planet apart.

if you want, we could raise our sticks over the walls of our fortresses
till they are piled so high with bricks that they crush the sky over our heads.
we could quench our thirst with each other’s blood
till all our rivers and veins run dry,
but listen, I can tell you this: in the face of our smiles,
in the sound of the laughs that we share, singing hand in hand,
there is something you cannot kill:
the only weapon we’ll wield,
this unbreakable joy
is the resistance in our peace

[For Ramjas]

Photograph: Prabhakar Duwarah

there was a red building with open lawns

and once these were graced with strains 
of a qawwali that came all the way 
from Karachi, and played for us 
just because they could, they’d been called, 
these were the kinds of things that happened within this building.
one year, I remember being told
about a lovely man who rolled up his sleeves
to show a new world to a roomful
of college kids, along with the bangles on his wrists, 
something they had never heard before.
but most days nobody had to be called,
it happened every day, the lectures 
that sometimes would launch a debate
of ideas that’d take shape or wing
and probe boundaries of definition as well
as the walls that made up the safe space 
where they could grow.
(red from the outside, peeling inside)
this is where it began, where
we had a thought to call
a man to speak, for whom so many had 
already spoken that it was over a year forgotten
what he originally ever had to say.
(tell me, will every idea that touches your ears
be like one emerging from your own head?
but how would children ever learn to speak if they didn’t listen as they grew?)
but this, what made it
magical, or enough at least to allow me
to romanticise it to some extent,
was where left and right and the rest could find
a voice to express themselves,
and hear, dissent, something beyond
boundaries that were built in our heads and on paper walls.
and sometimes dreams.
of pyaari pyaari azaadi:
what cannot be killed within these walls, 
what we demand from beyond as well
to preserve this sanctity