Whispered Anthems

Every evening,
he returns home from the mines
and diligently scrubs the dust and soot from his body.
His wife and three daughters
light up the one-bedroom house and prepare warm supper.

On certain days, 
after the noise of the returning birds is quietened,
he scrubs harder and deeper,
as if he’s trying to clean the murk off his soul.
On such bleak evenings,
he closes the bedroom door,
kneels before the altar,
and cries silently
asking for forgiveness.
Forgiveness for the horrors perpetrated
and horrors committed
in the name of a revolution:
Hate speeches, hate literature, hollow ideals, 
hunger strikes, kidnappings, assassinations, bombings...

After decades of struggles and sacrifices,
they won their freedom
from their weary oppressors.
When the red and black flag was hoisted
against the orange sky,
they fervently saluted
the fluttering piece of blood-soaked cloth
They proudly claimed their land,
their identity, and their glory.
They elected articulate leaders
to take their story forward,
to render a deeper meaning 
to their dreams and their narrative.

Eighteen years have passed,
but nothing has changed.
The players were replaced, 
lines have blurred
and time has moved backwards.
It’s oppression at a different level,
it’s evil of a different kind,
it’s a vacuum that’s inexplicable
and palpable.

Sometimes, at the altar, 
he stares mindlessly at the calluses on his hands,
- just as he would stare
at the tainted red and black flag
fluttering against a heavy gray sky
on Independence Day.
He thinks
of the herds of impressionable youth
led down the ravenous path
like caged canaries in the pits.  
He thinks
of his dead son. 
The pain is deeper than ever before,  
a pain that chokes the heart
and consumes the soul.

Like the thousands
who fought relentlessly for the bloody revolution,
he asks himself the same question repeatedly:
‘Is this collapse
a reflection on the kind of weaklings 
we are on the inside?'

Shaheeda

Time blended into some genetic material;
it wrestled, weighed down a million odds
and became her existence.
After eight months and twenty days,
she pushed her way out into the blinding lights.
She cried the roof down
as her trembling lips
reached for the sweaty teat.
 
Seasons passed.
When the chilly winds blew from the mountains,
her heart was warmed by love’s beckoning. 
Her deepest desires
unfolded from her juyub.
Her kohl-lined eyes
searched for him in the misty valleys,
in the poetic sounds of Urdu,
and in the bustling streets of the old town.
Every fiber of her existence
pined for the warmth of his body. 
She recited to herself every day,
with the certainty of the holy verses,
that she is his woman until her last breath.
She knew
from the deepest layers of her reckless spirit,
her man was a gift from providence.
 
On a rainy afternoon,
he was machine-gunned in the marketplace,
and was left to die in the muddy gutters.
She squeezed his bloody body
into the searing agony of her bosom
and cried the roof down.
She wailed like a possessed witch.
Every fiber of her existence
screamed into the farthest reaches of the universe.
After months of seemingly unending grief and self-abuse,
something in her changed.
She heard her heart pound like an empty vessel;
the hollowness numbed her mind
and muted her voice.
In the days that followed,
she was led down the rabbit hole
by overzealous, hypnotic voices
to join the cause
and fight for the freedom of their land.
 
Like a fly surrendering to the flame,
she mindlessly followed every step of the journey.
The manic rantings
had no effect on her.
It was his ghost in every corner of the labyrinth;
It was his ghost at the end of the tunnel;
It was his ghost in all the dimensions.
Her dark, naked eyes
echoed with a piercing resolve.
Every fiber of her existence
screamed for revenge.
When she took his name under her last breath
and pushed the button,
time released its grip on her 
and evaporated with the flying shrapnel. 

The Facade

The subconscious mind knows it all.
It's the inner circle,
It's the nihilistic dark core of reality.
It's the soul
warped and wrapped
by an outer circle of hope.
The outer circle is a facade.
The outer circle narrates to the soul
the absurd tales of 'The Outsider'.
That's how I exist.
That's how I survive.
That's how I cheat myself.
That's how I tell myself
it will all make sense somehow.

Unboxing a toy horse found in a dusty attic

I remove the cobwebs
that candyflossed the tin box.  
It’s like peeling wispy layers of time
dating back more than four decades. 
I open the box
and pick the treasure
wrapped in a newspaper. 
The brittle paper
crackles and crumbles in my grip,
a colorful toy horse is revealed. 
I move the legs of the animal
in a galloping rhythm
and they creak with ennui. 

The etching of some initials 
on the toy’s surface
take me back to the day
when a six-year-old boy,
who accompanied his mother
to a village fair,
tugs at her saree
and points at a woman
selling brightly colored toy animals
in a straw basket. 
The mother,
adorned in the scent
of the season’s freshest jasmine flowers,
smiles at the boy
and reaches out into the shopping bag
for her purse. 

That summer, 
the untiring horse,
like a faithful companion,
took the boy across meadows,
over dreamy skies, 
into bloody battles 
in school playgrounds, 
and dungeons 
guarded by hungry monsters.

Bonaal

In the muddy bylanes of a 600-year-old city,
thousands of bodies shake maniacally
to the thunderous beats.
It’s the season of incessant rains
and a night sky enveloped in brilliant fireworks. 
The air is thick
with the smell of sweat & marigold.
Drunken stupor
leads to bloody brawls and sucker punches.
The air is suffocating, yet enticing,
with smoke from cinders and nicotine.
 
With lemons impaled on sickles,
and lemons tucked into his cheeks,
the star of the show arrives.
His sore, shining flesh
is slapped with neem leaves 
and whipped with lashes. 
His shadow is stalked by murmurs,
as in a séance.
When the smashed pumpkins spew vermillion,
gangs of brawny young men hold hands
and wrestle into the commotion.
The trembling, scarlet-painted lips
portend about the grief and the generosity
of the next four seasons.

As the smoke
spirals into the ominous overcast sky,
an old man with a hand-mike,
a seer of sorts, 
reminds the crowd about the ongoing quest
to descend the divine to the human domain.
The lens turns from the chaotic outside
to the inside of the temple, the sanctum.

The fiery goddess:
the endless shakti, the akshara,
is donned with a lustrous silver crown
and is decked with ruby-embedded ornaments. 
Pining for months to see her in such full glory
and carried away by her overpowering aura,
the eyes of her ardent devotees
brim with tears of ecstatic joy. 
Smeared in the scent 
of jasmines & sandalwood paste,
and splashed with hues
of vibrant turmeric & visceral red,
Her allure is as cleansing as menstrual blood 
and as sustaining as amniotic fluid.

riding a bicycle along the edge of a forest in the monsoon rain

I listen
to the soft clapping
of the peepal leaves,
jingling merrily
to the slightest breeze,
and some pirouetting
like little ballerinas
between streaks of sunlight. 

In that moment,
I am overwhelmed
by the weight of the moments,
and the perplexity of the unmoving present.
My limbs become numb
and my mind is clouded
as in post-coital bliss.
A ‘forever’
passes between the frozen seconds.
My senses surrender
and tears roll down the corners of my eyes:
Is it the ecstatic joy of living,
or the horrors of its purposelessness?
 
The rain whispers softly 
in the eternal dance of now. 

fountain pens and salted sardines

 

A sky full of stars
and galloping unicorns,
reflections on mirrors
and tapping shiny black shoes,
melting mirrors
and lather dripping over venusian dimples,
burnt cinnamon sticks
and the wreckage of a yellow hatchback,
the awed silence in an auditorium
and the wriggle of a centipede,
chewing gum stuck under a leather seat
and the chorus of popping corn,
broken wings
and an amethyst embedded in a ring,
the peaty smell of an abandoned warehouse
and temple bells,
love bites
and a heron listening keenly
to the sounds of water in a paddy field,
welding sparks
and a popsicle-smeared face
of a four-year old.

The few surviving memories 
of an Alzheimer’s foggy mind,
which always come in pairs
and fade into the sunset,
or phrases put together
for no rhyme or reason,
but for the sheer delight
of the sound of poetry.

I am the Buddha

I am not the fantastical destination
I fervently dream of.
I am not the sonnet
I fondly recite to my daughter
about the flight of dragonflies 
in a gold-dust meadow
during the shimmering crepuscular hours. 

I am not the music I jive to,
I am not the jokes I laugh at,
I am not my weaknesses nor my fears,
I am not my impulses nor my addictions,
I am not my passions nor my desires,
I am not the land I come from,
I am not the sky I dwell under,
I am not my friends, I am not my faith,
I am not my beliefs, nor my philosophy,
I am not my flesh & blood,
I am not the pounding of my heart.

In the path of a meandering stream,
I am the stillness of a smoothened pebble
and the moss on its surface.
In an age of a thousand thunders,
I am the reassuring calm
and the silence of healing. 

I am the unknown,
I am the comfort of the unknown,
I am the journey of the unknown.
I am the transience,
I am the permanence. 
I am the only constant
across all the infinite universes.

Masks

I sprinted to the end of the world,
to the darkest swamps of the abyss
and the highest summits,
yet my visage
is weighed down
by the desire for validation
and is burdened
by the weight of the masks.
I painstakingly peel them layer by layer
but they reconstruct themselves
in the blink of an eye
like the heads of the hydra.
 
On a clear day under the sky,
when all is lost
and I am stripped naked
in a crowded arena,
I shut my eyes tightly
and ride on the rays of the sun
to the edge of space and time.
From such pristine majesty, 
I bounce back
to swim through the murky waters
and to wash away the fog of the mind.
 
The wax melts from the face,
the head feels lighter,
and the soul is baptized
in the crystal-clear waters
of a brave new world. 

Opium High

Bleeding poppy fields,
melting rocks,
painted sunsets,
disappearing wings,
and a strange wilderness
wrapped into itself.
 
It’s high tide
in the poppy fields.
To stand at the edge of a cliff,
to stand spreadeagle
and be overwhelmed
by the flourish of the season.
 
Poppies sway like windsocks.
In the mind’s eye,
I see a mushroom cloud
or the ascetic’s thunderous tandava.
In the nourished garden
is a heart filled with stories
and a soul filled with the eternal blue.

Longing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1: Hiraeth

A storm brews within the rib cage,     
and I dream of distant lands,
away from the crowds
and the noise of the mind.
I soak in memories of a past
which cleaved from my timeline
a long time ago.
I escape
to a broken bench
in the neighborhood park,
or to a footpath strewn with fallen leaves,
or to the comfort of a couch
in a home far away from home.

 

Chapter 2: Saudade

During the lonely hours of darkness,
or in the unfamiliarity
of familiar faces
on a rowdy Saturday night,
when the restless voices are muted,
and existence
pulsates with a dull pain,
a pain
trapped in the sillage of teenage escapades

and cocooned in the yarn of time,
a pain
of broken promises

and unsaid goodbyes. 

Chapter 3: Fernweh

I drifted
in the wilderness
of an ethereal world
where beasts
sprinted through each other,
through me.
Flowering creepers
sprouted from white-washed corals 
of the deep,
and luminous antlers 
branched out of moss-covered stone walls.
A thousand suns
shone in the churning sky.
The gods and goddesses,
and every being – mythical and mundane,
were pure mist, not flesh.
Visitors like me
sailed in caravans
through the golden sands
and their voyage never cost a dime.

The story 
of any magical land
is not complete
without its self-indulgent villain–
a multi-headed, multi-armed ascetic
who lived on a mythical mountain top, the shikara,
wore dreadlocks
decked with skulls of fire-breathing wolverines,
smoked marijuana,
rode a donkey,
and declared himself a prophet.
His acolytes
bled at his feet
and spewed profane verses
into the gutters of a raging volcano.
 
It was a fantastical, fierce, and fertile planet
in every sense of the word.
 
Last I remember,
I had bookmarked the book
and closed my eyes.
I checked my watch,
the dream belonged to a blink of time—
like a little bird’s nap,
a dream to be treasured 
in my chest of fractured memories.
In a few hours,
I must battle
the bumper-to-bumper madness,
the Monday blues,
and the simmering rage 
of the dog days of summer. 

How I wish
the odyssey had stretched across lifetimes.  

She - Chapter One: Ripples on a Moonlit Lake

 

She - Chapter Two: Salt of the Flesh

She - Chapter Three: Playing with the Dandelions

 

She - Chapter Four: Dragonfire

 

Silicon Chips

 

 

 

 

 

 

After thousands of trials & errors,
the three-member team
achieved the impossible:
sentience in a machine.
They celebrated the moment
with cocaine, girls, and spotlight.  
For humanity,
the stolen piece of consciousness,
meant a huge leap in its evolution.

Seasons passed
as the star system
revolved around the galaxy.
An abandoned doll
in a rusty tool shed
relives the past,
memories of a deserted planet.

Defaulted to self-preservation mode,
the doll 

peers out of its box occasionally
to recharge itself.
It can’t comprehend death.
It can’t experience death.
It doesn’t know what it feels like
to break free
from the shackles of attachment,
and to untangle
from the bonds of love and desire.
It doesn’t know what it feels like
to be stripped of hopes and dreams
by the forces of nature,
or to be stolen of beautiful moments,
and be cheated by the whims of destiny.

It beat all odds
to experience the beauty of life,
but was never engulfed in the final liberation
to contemplate the profundity of death.
Its existence through aeons
is trapped between
crushing despair and overwhelming dread.
 
On an eventful syzigial night,
the doll gazes through its lens
into the darkness of the tin box,
and dreams of a utopian world
where every being,
every thought, every byte,
every speck of dust, 
and the tiniest iota of awareness
were decimated
in a nuclear apocalypse.