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.