The Severity of Injustice

Only injustice could have brought forth prose -- romance hasn't ever been enough. Of the many things the world has taken into its comfortable stride, one stubborn reason remains injustice. It is alarming how steep the rates of injustice met out to the deserving are, and even more alarming, how quietly we are accustomed to take it soulfully and silently in. Like injustice were nothing more than a really steaming cup of tea.

It has been my fault, and mine completely, that I have accepted everything with detachment and disinterest. And I have not even spoken of revolt. The mere accepting nature, is as disbelieving as disbelief of the injustice itself. I live in a world where it is criminal to be slightly intelligent, or be intellectually intelligent. The world takes in like a quicksand the fervor of talent. And it celebrates the intelligence of oil-applying, hen-pecked, headless, insensitive morons, who have never known a mother from a mother-fucker.

Yes, you have rightly understood my anger. It is handpicked and exquisite. I could scream, and burn down a building and I could compete with the summer sun in doing it. The life of the moneyed are so beautifully carpeted with the asses of those headless pricks that I am in hollow tears about what this once beautiful world has expanded to.

The problem is in plenty -- I do not have it in my broken back to act. Like most intellectual poorists, I too talk. In my case, write. And yes, this is the reason I have no books to my name -- an ode to the dumbfucks who do not have it in them to understand a pun. They who desperately scratch their heads looking for the joke. And no severity in my life could become greater than this injustice -- that my fate lies in their buying power.

Calling out to all those who spell "Mam," look within for the joke.

Daughter of Winter

A delayed birth,
Should have announced,
The wildflower birth
Of a procrastinator.
Curling into the blankets
Of welcome warmth,
How she defied
All of winter.

Uneven roads,
Unfaithful lights,
Unknown faces,
Unbearable plights.
The daughter of winter,
Heard whispers retold -
She outbattled it all,
Unfeeling and cold.

Now she stood
Many, many words old.
Of many excesses,
Reflections manifold.
Written loves,
Drunken souls,
No mercy was greater,
For the daughter of winter. 

Afternoon Lullaby

The afternoons in this office,
Call out aloud.
Cubicle against people,
Board against bored.
The yellow summer day,
Sweat outside.
As the remnants of
Shared lunchboxes,
Float inside.

The afternoons in this office,
Smell of lullabies,
Sang in nurseries,
And chambers alike.
There is a matron here too,
Not too musical,
Neither worth time,
Nor of respect.
Blabbers, demands,
Meaningless aspects.

The afternoons in this office,
Blossom on marble,
And blemish as hell.
Wooden cabinet like,
Stoic I sit,
Cubicle against cubicle,
Bored every bit.

The smell of a lullaby,
Descends loftily with a sigh.

Sightseeing

The wheels are rolling,
Straight and sharp,
Away from summer's
Laughing bark.
Filled with people,
Lurking tumor,
The car has stories
Ecstatic tremor.

The window rolls down,
Dusty dreams.
Did you count time?
Did you grin?

Milestones dissolve,
Swallowed,
By barren fields.
Dreams too,
In rivers green.

In the end,
The wheels roll,
Unyielding
To summer's toll.

The tumor gets us,
Not unlike,
The pretty rumor.

Roleplay

How I wish to be a star.

No, not silly on the sky.

A superstar.

A narcissist performer,

Show-stopper.

On my own,

Happy terms.

But I merely act.

If life were a play,

Would I stand a chance 

Solo?

Would my monologues remain 

Hollow?

Under the glory of heavy lights?

When I am shining bright.

Would you chance upon

My shredded soul?

Are you discussing my brilliance?

And how deep is my understanding

On shades of characters?

All of these,

Played by me.

Are you holding your partner's hands?

As you watch me, do you share too?

Did your attention waver?

Do you clap?

Do you boo?

Do you know my shadow shudders?

To think you would do,

A bad review?

Yet,

Alone, 

I am neither a performer,

Nor a show-stopper.

In fact,

I am nothing without you.

All That Makes Me

They say I sleep like an amoeba --
Spread everywhere.
I am full of my madness.
And particular about
The milk set to curd.
The vegetables arranged
In geometric patterns,
Inside the refrigerator.
These things, they make me.
Not the glorious full moon,
Supervising,
The clothes out to dry.

In the depth of my nights.
There is also a step-well,
Beautifully structured,
Each step closer to hell.
Grandiosely, it guards
Abstract nightmares.

There isn't any water,
To explain
The reflections.
Nor any air,
To justify the sound.
It is a mute sight,
Of a dark day.

In my senses,
I would not dare,
To take a step in.
My attempts to float out,
Rises from within.

These then,
Make me, me.
Not a rainy smile,
Nor a starry whim.
Would you now reiterate?
You are what you dream.

Contents of my Mailbox

My mailbox
Is a pile
Of accomplishment

I do not care about.

It contains
More rejection
Than I could ever flout.
It seldom says,
How it rejects faith,
How it also dissuades
Intellect,
Towards a longing wait.
My mailbox
Doesn't say,
How passionately
I sing,
And I
Sweat and I cry.
My mailbox
Certainly doesn't say,
How helplessly
I try.

My mailbox
Doesn't receive
Acceptances and awards,
It is a mostly misty sight,
Uncertainty towards.

Dry Wit

The air is cruel,
Dry and unfeeling,
Something more
Than a barren field.
More,
Than a disorder.
We sow and reap,
And sow and reap,
All day through.
Brick by brick
Of a stable future.
And the day ends
The cement sinks.
The sun trickles,
Down to the last
Edge of life.
Never gives up.
And here I wait,
Wondering
If I could take a bite
Off the sky.

Letters from a Wife

Dear Avnish,

Your tours give me time to myself. In the spare time I have, when like my friends, I do not have a job to badmouth about, over the tea made by the maid, I think about the fights we have. Are they really unnecessary? Or do they come from somewhere deeper? I think of the myths that my friends had warned would soon haunt me -- they had heard it from their young aunts -- clothes, cooking and cleaning. The cooking does not bother me, Shila does it well. The cleaning too is taken care of by Anita. The clothes, they are a character.

It is not a myth. They look up, dry from the sun, a hillock around me. Endless creases. What about them is so disapproving? They are quite obedient. You can bundle them for ironing, or fold them neatly. Like a well done sum, there is a sense of accomplishment when they are put back in categories. And while I am at it, senseless movies and conversations die quicker. Why do we fight? I thought about it.

Because I have time. And nothing to do with it. Almost out of nowhere, where I could have devoted it planning to rear children, I have an overbearing sense of guilt. Of being with you. And while my mister is next door, in his holy chamber of cure, I turn back to my stack of dried clothes. They are clean, and have cleaned me.

Yes, you are cherished, so I will keep this letter intact. Till your next tour, when I will have nowhere to go out to, I hope I do not have the whim to give it to you.

I eavesdrop on some of the symptoms of the patients in the next room. My mister is a nice man, Avnish. I wish I could give you this letter this time itself.

Oh I could die of you both.

Gayatri.

Backspace

If the wand of life

Offered you one,

One swish of a backspace,

What would you

Erase,

And perhaps

Redo?

That double bite of a melting brownie?

An ode to your bulging fat.

The drink you downed for a bet?

And lost mornings 

To dismantled fragments.

The indulgent kiss?

Another cloud,

Faintly wafting away.

Who would you have

Chosen as family,

As friend?

Would you alter lives

Altogether?

Barter,

The means of bread?

How different a route

Would you tread?

Seasons of sadness,

Would you unlive?

Or would you rather

Look at them,

Look of a warrior?

Do you have it in you,

In spite of your wishes,

To erase?

Would you? 

Pots, Pans & Pens

Pots, pans and pens,
I bring them to boil
On paper.
Ready and happy
To serve,
Spontaneously,
Or deliver,
As per order.

All day long,
I live in a song.
It goes,
"No work for me /
No work please /
All I want is a patron /
Royalty as is."

You get the pun?
Fully intended?
Royalty,
It is rare.
Unlike my heapful
Of servings,
Going out,
Everywhere.

I am a mere cook,
Not greater than my ware,
The song is sure to die,
If royalty isn't here.

Pots, pans and pens,
Dearer when on paper.
 

De/istress

What is this?
This despair?
Old, unwanted furniture
Old, unwanted roads.
Where is that youthful
Foolishness
Of hope?
Which said
Love is forever?

I wish you were away,
Off, like forgotten lovers
Off, like fearless desires.
You do not sit
Pretty on me,
Dear despair.
Why are you here?

Filling me up
Mercilessly,
Mindlessly,
Like pain-relief ointments do.

Get off me,
Freeze some other vein.
Be the tar on roads,
The termite on furniture.
Please yourself
With pitiful joys.
Get off me.

I am stronger than I seem.
I might carry you along,
Not in companionship.
You thought it was complete?
You filling me?

Sweetie,
My head is a place,
Which never knew
What satisfaction is. 

Echoes

Look around,
We aim, want, get
So much,
So much more.
Till we think
Achieving is pleasure.

Look around,
Wires, sticky-notes,
Little reminders
Of murdered dreams.
Towers of light,
Our goals,
Distant,
So distant.

They scoffed at the modern times.
What would they call this?
A rotation?
Mechanical rotation.

On and on,
This echo of repetition.
Look around,
This echo of repetition.

Lassitude

This overhauling boredom,
Belongs to all of us.
Me, certainly,
All the while,
Most of the time.
While I look at the wall,
And break the fall.

It is a familiar burden.
I meet it everytime,
With a greeting.
Dear old friend.
How often we speak,
Disciplined,
Like morning prayers.

And after we have spoken,
I feel spent,
Hardly evolved.
Ending where it began.

Here & Away

I am thinking,
In crisscrosses and bruises.
The images are pale
Alike and indistinguishable.
Unborn tears
Tastes like sea-breeze.

I saw the pink moon
In all its over-hyped glory.
Senses turn sour,
Ripe lemony.
Not the colours.

Not too far away,
In an unpleasant galaxy,
You make an incision.

And my vacuous heart bleeds.

Sonnet to Sleep

Intimacy is contagious, love
We take it for granted,
Think of our
Intently kind blanket,
Often punched pillow.
Close,
Like you.

Away, you seem to be sailing
In your ship of dreams.
Awake, alive in that ship
On daily roads.
Around, breathing deep.

We treat intimacy,
Too lightly.
Think of it without.

Where Summer Lives

Summers remind me
Of the ripe smell
Of hurriedly pulped mangoes,
I have now given up.
Of sudden showers
Suddenly gone.
And you.

You,
In your red jacket
And bulging muscles.
Your eyes,
Fiercely wandering,
Resting
All over my soul.
Like the remains of the rain,
On dried leaves.

You claimed
Mykonos would be prettier
With me.
You stated
Peace was here,
In this subtlety.
With the pace
Of a snail,
You kissed.
Till like a creeper,
They grew
Further, deeper.

Summer is here,
And autumn and you,
Far, far away.
Your vision now travels
Beyond my soul,
Dying burning wood,
Once during winters,
They were happy.

You live in the summers,
Given up,
Hurriedly.
Gone, suddenly,
Showers and smoke
Alike.
Leaves of autumn,
Live more rested
Than your eyes.

You Too?

You asked me to fly,
To work,
Harder,
And then you asked me to
Rest,
See a doctor,
Seeing me in a different way,
As if I were two.

You asked me to fly,
To lands, seas,
To return,
Stay.
And then you added,
I was fat
Because I was sad,
And vice-versa.

Where did my prose go,
You asked.
You tried to find me
In such verse.
I was worse, you said.
And you asked,
What was I afraid of.

I am afraid of everything,
And everyone.
The short days, the long nights,
The cold water,
Hot with electricity.
Of death,
Mine, others',
Inevitable, I know.
Of sweetened coffee,
And desperate inks.

I cannot fly,
I cannot answer you.
I shut myself down
To find if you were correct
Am I two?

The Distance with Your Shadow

In that sleepy coffee town
Of tourists and tin-shacks,
You barged in with your backpack,
Armed with your camera.
Leaving behind
As you stood
For the perfect shot,
Rows of other cameras held
In less perfect hands.

Behind you also,
Heads, unglamorous,
Fading in the mist,
And below,
Many feet of unknown terrain.
Used tea-cups,
Cigarette ends.

We sat
Thinking over them,
The next morning.
Remember?
Who could have held them,
Where could they
Further land.

They have lost their colour
From where I see them now.
Distant than the green, the brown
That would gobble them then.

The mist crowned us.
You said I was an angel
In your dream.
We flew over a sleepy town,
As in Chagall's canvasses,
They who fly, do.

We had wished
To return,
To those dreams.

Look now,
How I stand over
That endless brown.
While all that's left of you
Is a mere shadow,
In that sleepy coffee town.

The Vacation

This is the place,
White, in summer.
A seaside decked in
Wedding lights,
A mountain clad
In happy woolens.
This is the place,
A vacation
On my desk.

Afternoon stars come alive,
With deep whiskey.
When was it?
Two, three, four years ago?

To think of it,
There were friendly kites too,
With them stars.
We had laughed aloud
From our green grass bed.

And there were women
On terraces,
Rearranging sun-dried pulses,
Like brushstrokes.
There were peddlers,
Screaming their wares.
Calling for plastic,
Selling ice-candies.
And we.

Behind shut windows,
Listening,
Seeing.
We never knew it would all too soon
Become a memory.
A festival of nostalgia
To be celebrated annually,
In poems,
Sometimes,
In newer
Vacations.

Alas it comes
On my desk.

My Credentials

I lost my name
When I called myself
A poet.
A poet? No.
I corrected,
An encompassing
Writer.

I filled life,
I filled graves with lives,
And lives with lies.

I could pack people
In paragraphs.

I lost my name,
Healing.
Scratching,
Yawning.

The people in the paragraphs
Now bathe me
In their fame.

While I stand corrected,
Their writer,
I lost my name.

The Fury of Wisdom

While I write newer rhymes,
I am exhausted being a woman.

The sun beats down outside,
Bouncing off the roads.
People are in terrible pain,
And look they cry not aloud,
Their legs, burnt,
Their hands, burnt,
Their faces, eyes, heads,
Severely burnt.
I think of the pyre,
So generous to take it all in.
So unassuming
To the life
It takes in between.

Sadness, anxiety,
Everything is tedious.

I'd rather look outside,
On the road,
As I make myself
A drink.
While I write newer rhymes,
Exhausted as a human,
Exhausted of rejection,
I look out at the fury,
And feel it within.

So unassuming,
This life
In between.

Letter to Daughter XX

Munchkinny pumpkinny sweetest C,

Today was one of the most "levelling" days of my life -- seeing you spellbound. It has elevated me to a different sense of happiness. While mothers have had a history of challenge when disciplining their children with the TV, and while I have had a fair share of being on either side of the mother-graph, nothing could ever come close to the completeness I felt on seeing you engrossed outside of your cartoons.

The TV, as opposed to whatever people blame it to be, has always found a place of optimum respect in my life. Till you came along and till I had to become conscious about its ab/use. I secretly loved to catch the maid midway, in a stance of stillness, between pulling the sofa from the corner and the dialogue of an anti-hero shouting curses at the hero. I silently love the disbelief on other intellectual friends around, and the inevitable pull with which they too get sucked into it. And I love the utter honesty with which the TV has nothing but friendship to offer to me -- in all its contents. When I failed to stick to dear Tom & Jerry, and those horrid animated voices made way into our house, I was becoming paranoid too.

Until this beautiful Sunday morning, when His open arms, butter-spread on screen, spread out to your cheeks too! I couldn't contain myself when the cultural nostalgia of growing up with His dimples sowed its seed in you too, and you, in your broken Hindi were humming along and moving your waist while cupped in the sofa to His songs. We love SRK, together.

We are now an official, family of fangirl team! And one day sweets, when you too say that you agree with your Momie about her best teacher, Momie couldn't be prouder! The TV, the cinemas, the shows, all feel so much better with you.

 Let the stars shine upon you, love.
 Momie.

A Commissioned Tale

The overhead lights coming out of the seasoned white ceiling glared into her laptop screen, haloing around the ruthless numbers of the excel sheets, as in stark summers greedy children look at mangoes -- constantly. It is in human nature to not live in the present, and neither did Rumaani. As soon as she looked at herself as a pale silhouette spread over the numbers, she clicked on a social media tab. Vibrant colours of pleasant meaninglessness came alive. She had seven hours left to find it, the deadline was 6 pm.

Years of compliments fell apart as Rumaani failed miserably. Inside her notebook, she doodled ugly doodles with displeasing words like "Depressed", "Can't", "Unable", "Dying", "Lost". Finally, irritated with her ball point pen oozing enormous amounts of gory ink, she tore off the paper and tried to return to her earlier sketches. They seemed particularly composed -- starry skies, wavey rivers, kohld'd eyes and blank spaces. She closed it and turned back to the screen. There were unnecessary lists and uninteresting quizzes taking up all of it and somewhere squeezed in between, a distinctly forgettable looking poetry page reading, "Best Lines of English Poetry of All Time." Having read some of it Rumaani had decided that there wasn't much help in it as the lines were way too well-known. So she came back to the word document where she had typed some lines: "Like the pause in dialogues. For the love of chicken skin. There stood the indomitable monument, old and dusty. Out came a crushed chit from the pencil-holder. Love chimed with wedding bells." None of them seemed to make any impact, worth a celebration like birthdays are in a year.

Rumaani completed her submission on time. Commissioned entries never quite made creative outpourings. A sentence from a status and a opinion from a comment, a dialogue from a story and a line from an essay. She was spent.

Rumaani stole them all and weaved them back into a poisonous necklace of guilt. She knew better how short-lived the glitter of a win was. In contrast, the entry reproached her, and nothing could cleanse her of the sin she now lived with.

Spent, she earned this day of having to tell the commissioned tale.

Such are Scribbles

there are days

when the pen writes so well

that it matters not

what i write.

days of thunderbird,

days of shining edge.

and the night wears

the deep silence

of darkness.

dreaming daring daydreams