Category: Poems

My mother asks, “For whom you write?
Your aunt who loves your poetry,
Was laughing with your other aunts,
Who say you are the claypot black
That darkens Father’s memory.
And who’s to say your friends who claim
To love your daily drumming lines
Are not so laughing at you too?
Perhaps you need to kill that part,
So rest of you may thrive again?”

I slurp the claypot-slow-cooked daal,
The bland, “no onion-garlic” daal,
And say, “You haven’t lost your touch.
It’s just as good as used to be.
If this is what the claypot gives,
I’m happy as its underside
That singes to the biting flames.
The black is proof I help to turn
Inert ingredients in them
Into a nourishment they need.
And say I kill that part of me
And bury it with Father’s urn,
The grass that grows above it will
Be sweetest-smelling come the rains.
The rest of me will stink like guests
Who overstay their welcome, Ma.”

She shakes her head and sighs again.
“Denial is addictive, son.
Your poems are denial cooked.
The black is washed.
The grass is mowed.
And look at you so miserable.
If write you must, then write with pride.
Go write like writing means something.
Don’t write so safe. Such limpid lines.
You’re more than you are rising to.
And if you can’t, or if you won’t,
Just end this daily overdose.”

I used to be an optimist.
A little fever was a joke.
I lay and dreamed of everything
I’d do the moment fever goes.
I hardly did a third of that,
Though that is not the point at all.
The point is I could see a life
Beyond the downing fevered days.
But now I lay and do not dream.
I simply say, “This too shall pass.”
Accipere (not amor) fati.
“Or you shall pass,” a voice replies,
Though all there is is temperature.

She never stays indoors to rest.
Especially on days of flu.
If she has fever, so do they.
And they will spill in fevered zeal
The gossip they don’t want to spill.

They only need a caring voice.
“I’m here for you,” as if to say,
“I’m here when no one else is here.”
“I’m here, though I am sick myself.”

They only need a hmn, a nod.
They need to know they have been right.
“You did the only thing you could.”
And that is when it all comes out.
The helpless righteous need to share
Their helplessness, their righteousness.
And she provides the willing ears.

And those occasional, well-timed prompts.
“It must have been so hard for you.”
“I couldn’t do what you have done.”
“You shouldn’t have regrets at all.”
“With time, perhaps, they’ll come around?”

And when the prompts no longer milk,
She reaches in her saree folds
And pulls a story from the ‘hood.
“Her kids have also left her broke.”
“Her husband’s brother brings her gifts.”
“Her nephew tumbles with her girl.”
“Her husband doesn’t pay her bills.”
For nothing flames a victim like
Another victim’s sorrier tale.

The tea, the tears, the pills for flu,
The extra bonus tops her day.
The day that started with her call:
“I’m sick. I cannot work today.”

He waited for me everyday
For almost two weeks at the fair,
Where I had given him a shirt
As part of a donation drive.

He found me on his thirteenth day –
He swore he knew I’d come that day,
He’d said the same thing everyday –
And asked me to extend my hand.

I saw no reason not to, though
The men around me said he’s mad.
I did recall the local news
About infected needle jabs.

Before I could withdraw my hand,
He’d pressed something into my palm.
It was a paper folded neat –
Like corner-matching-corner neat.

Inside, it had my father’s hand –
The shaky, feathered alphabet
He wrote towards the very end –
Some poem lines, familiar lines.

“Good, good, you did not wash the shirt.”
Good, good, I could not wash the shirt.

Love, like War, is a dinner plate
Of steaming rice in steaming dal.
You burn your fingers when you dip
Directly in the middle of it.

Instead, you have to pick at it
A bit by bit around the edge:
To touch with deeds before your lips;
To plant a smile before a kiss.

He saw upon my desk my Ulysses,
The Students’ Annotated Ulysses,

And dubbed the tome a “Trojan Elephant”,
A “mansplained, condescending Ulysses.”

“Oh, gee! the OG Homeric hero
Who so rejoiced in Joyce’s Ulysses,

Would lose his timeless, withering wits,
Emasculated by this Ulysses.

Embark, unaided, on an odyssey
Through Joyce’s oceanic Ulysses

To stand the slightest chance to comprehend
The incomprehensible Ulysses.”

I nodded, nudged him back to where we were,
Before distracted by this Ulysses,

Explaining, annotating legalese
Less comprehensible than Ulysses.

The Latin humor means “a dampness”;
Humorous means “dampening”.
So when you dubbed me “Damperfuck”
And walked into the balcony,
I thought you found my humour sexy,
Wanted me to follow you
Beyond the drunken reach of friends
Still caught up in the hullahoo
Of partygoing foolery.

And when you washed me with your wine,
Which swirling, you had sniffed and choked,
I thought you were quite funny too,
Though no one got that final joke
And simply hawwed and gawked at us,
As I stood dampened, “laughing” at
Your ridens pun in “Good riddance!”

Funiculì, funiculà.
You roll below to pull me up,
And then I do the same for you,
For we are tied together to.

Funiculì, funiculà.
We go our ways, but never far.
You share my load, and I do yours.
Together, we are quite the force.

A message from me to my Life:
No matter what you throw at me,
No matter what you throw me at,
There’s one thing I have in my hands,
The one thing you can’t take from me
So long you leave my consciousness
To suffer through your vagaries.

It isn’t just some daily lines.
It’s where I make my final stand.
Today and every next today,
It’s where I make my final stand.

He trudged in sweat and sweat and sweat,
And grudged the neem its bitter shade.
But still, he never let us leave
His proud paternal palisade.

He trudged in debt and debt and debt
That nudged the wood all screeching night,
But never clawed our fate or food,
Because he kept us locked inside.

He trudged in set and set and set
In moral masculinity
Of firewalking ‘Bachchan’ lines
He read to us in dignity.