Minakhi Misra

Some letters are hard.
They loop too much.
Or worse, flourish.
They twist your wrist
Into positions
You’d rather not take.

Unnecessary, the need
To dot each i,
To cross each t,
Breaking the flow,
For custom’s sake.
The dots that matter most
Mark the ends. Periodically.
The crosses worth crossing
Run head to heart,
Shoulder to shoulder,
In prayers more sincere than
A grammarian’s remarks
Or her pencil’s red marks.

Some letters are not meant.
To be written or read.
To be sealed or opened.
To be blocked or cursive.
Some letters have no replies.
They end without ending.

No one talked of her red-red hands
When she finger-painted on the wall
Stick figures of Maa and Daa,
And later posed for Instagram.
But one fine day,
She sticks them into a table fan, and…

No one talked of his oily hands
When he sat his little sister down
To a head massage with herb oil
And later both inhaled his palms.
But one fine day,
He drops a neighbour’s chinaware, and…

No one talked of his hairy hands
When he flicked them on blanket wool
In the darkness of the night
To spark a joy for his little kid.
But one fine day,
He gets stuck on a velcro purse, and…

And what’s a joke if not a form
Of miniature poetry?
And what’s a poem other than
A cryptic tragicomedy?
Two, slowly cooked. Too quickly judged,
The moment readers have a taste.
Intelligent are poets who
Remember this and do not waste
Their prides defending poems when
The moment’s passed ignoring them.

Two stairways go to the temple door
Standing up on the lonely hill:
One from the east by the waterfall,
One from the north by the bathing pool.
She sits below the eastern steps.
He sits below the northern ones.
Each with sindoor in little heaps.
Each with a music in their hearts.
She sings the songs of hilltop Gods.
He strums the tunes on his Single-string.
And both call out to devotees
Who dare to climb the hundred steps:

“Bright red for the worthy Rama,
Vermillion for Sita Maa,
Deep red for brother Lakshman,
And Orange for Veer Hanumaan.”

They sell packets of rupees ten,
Coloured powder in paper white,
And barely make three hundred each
On the best of weekend rushes.

When the sun dives into the pool
And visitors into their cars,
They walk into the waterfall
And rub their colours on their cheeks
And laugh and do things couples do
And walk the long way back to home,
Where she lights up the candlesticks
And he washes the coloured clothes
And she cooks what all they could buy
And he does all the dishes then
And she brings out the silver cup
And he brings out their special drink
To celebrate another day.
And why not? They have such a life!
Every day is a Holi day.
Every night, a Diwali night.

They kicked him out of the house
When his mother finally died
And his father brought a woman
To birth a new child who wasn’t
So broken in the head.
They sent him to the outhouse
Which had once been a haystack,
Then a cowshed-cum-urinal,
Then a government-sponsored toilet,
And most recently a garbage dump.
They made him clear it out,
Which he didn’t mind a bit.
He didn’t mind much anyway.
Not his mother dying. “Free!”
Not his father remarrying. “Free!”
Not his house-ousting. “Free!”
Not his isolation. “Free!”
He just had a gap-toothed smile
And that solitary word: “Free!”

He climbed trees and ate fruits:
Guavas and berries and mangoes.
He climbed pipes and drank water:
Taps and tanks and balcony hoses.
He ran like the madman he was
When the kids chased him around.
He ran like the madman he was
When he chased the dogs around.
But when you asked him how he was,
He just had a gap-toothed smile
And that solitary word: “Free!”

He was useful too in certain ways.
When the bull from the Shiva temple
Got into heat and jumped on cows,
Only he had the ferocity to keep it off.
When the street’s drain choked
On the droppings of men and cows,
Only he had the generosity to clean it up.
But when you asked him how much,
He just had a gap-toothed smile
And that solitary word: “Free!”

So, when his father, drunkenly sick,
Caressed his hair and politely asked
If he could perhaps donate his liver,
He just had a gap-toothed smile
And that solitary word: “Free!”

Someone asked to see my poems
From early college days.
And though I looked up all my files,
A lot I could not trace.

A few were never digitised.
A few had been erased.
A few sat on a TB drive,
Which I have now misplaced.

I found the one I wrote for her,
Which never could I send.
And the one I wrote to her,
Which she didn’t comprehend.

Also the one I could not write
Until it wrote itself
On the wall with a pencil lead
Behind the wooden shelf:

“I hate my life outside my books.
In writing, I belong.
I want to be a writer now,
But what if I am wrong?”

I spent a day in Nature’s nose
Through which the breath of Beauty blows:
So cool and full of Life at first,
Then hot and Deathly and reversed.
I was a fowl from poultry farms:
So lost in wild, so in alarm.
I’d walked in as an urbanite
And felt the forest close in tight:
So twitchy as an itchy shawl.
It shot me like a cannonball
Into the sprawling chicken coop,
Into the falling pigeon poop
That’s sometimes called Society,
That’s mostly a variety
Of cancerous malignancy
Of humankind’s ascendancy.

The first time I saw an elephant
Was in 1996 when into our street
Marched Mahanta the ‘Megik Mahout’
With his ‘Mejestick Manikantaka.’

To my five-year-old height and weight,
The beast was almost a dinosaur.
Yes, I had already seen Jurassic Park
In the theatre by the swampy lake.
Yes, I was the kid who cried aloud
And denied his Zoologist mother
The best scenes of the movie
She had fought with her in-laws
To come and watch with her kids.
And yes, to this day that day’s sin
Is slapped on the bargaining table
When Mom and I contest in earnest
The possession of the TV remote.

There weren’t any overhead cables then.
So, Mejestick Manikantaka walked tall,
Flaunting its tattooed forehead and trunk
Of sandal, turmeric, and vermillion paste
That matched the elephantine garland
Of jasmine, marigold, and rose flowers
Adorning his royally upraised neck.
His tuskers shined Colgate white
Casting doubt upon the Odia proverb
That elephants never brush their teeth.
His nails had painted lotus buds and leaves,
His tail had a mehndi-dyed brush of hair,
And his back had a mandala of intricacy
That shamed the women of sixty years
Who had been drawing jhoti-chita doodles
Daily on their doorsteps.

When all had come out to marvel at him,
When all eyes and fingers were on him,
Manikantaka listened to the Mejik whispers
Of the Mejik Mahout in his flapping ears
And edged to the side of the muddy street
To our pride and joy, the open drain.
He turned around once more to face
The appreciative crowd gathering about,
Raised his tattooed trunk up high,
Lowered his mandalaed rump down low,
And performed the trick our street performed
Every morning while I walked to school.
The trumpeting of the trunk matched
The trumpeting of the ample rump,
And it stank like someone’s septic tank
And looked like peeled coconut coir.
The most fitting salute I’ve ever seen
To our street’s historic notoriety.

Today, in 2021, living on the same street,
As I surrender the TV remote to Mom,
Dad emerges from his battlefield
With arms raised and fists pumped,
Declaring, “Manikantaka!”
And I add a row to the scoreboard:
Dad – 1, Constipation – 0.

It fell on a drop of dew
To fall on me and break through
The fog of rue I’d made home,
Within which I’d roam and roam.

The dew had dropped from a leaf
That now was jumping in relief,
Shrugging off the water weight,
Which had seemed its rooted fate.

They dropped their plastic bat and ball
And ran full-speed after the orphan kite
Penduluming down the January sky,
Threatening to fall into an open drain.
One was six years old. The other, nine.
Nine was naturally faster than Six,
So he reached the kite first and caught it.
He raised it above his head to one side
Like the World Cup picture of Kapil Dev
That his father had stuck to the mirror
All those years before he was born.
Six came panting and jumped up to grab,
But Nine kept lifting it out of his reach.
Then both stood still and laughed out
The laughter that only kids can laugh.

I caught it, said Nine. So, it’s mine.
I saw it, said Six, and so, it’s mine.
But I ran, Nine pointed out.
After I pointed, Six ran at him.
Okay-okay, said Nine. Half-half?
How half-half? It will tear, no?
I keep the kite. You keep the string.
What? Not fair at all. It’s all mine.
You get the string, or nothing at all.
What? What will I do with the string?
Here, let me show. Come come.
Okay. I will hold the kite meanwhile.
Nice try. Shut up and come with me.

Nine cut the string from the kite
And ran back to their bat and ball.
He wound the string around the ball:
Twice top-to-bottom, twice across,
Twice top-to-bottom, twice across,
And one last time, just to be safe.
Tying the loose end back to the string,
He hurled the ball over a branch
Of the guava tree in the yard,
And caught it again as it swung down.
Then he let it pendulum and smiled.

Cadet! Attention!
Left, right, left. At ease!
This is your training ball now.
Nine gave the string a bit more slack
Till the ball descended to Six’s waist,
And tied the other end of the string
Just once around the guava trunk.
Attention! Take arms!
Six took the plastic bat from Nine.
Cadet! Right Turn! And hit for six!
Cadet Six took his position,
Took in a sharp breath and swung.
Nine nodded at the arc made by the ball
And said Six had lived up to his name.
Cadet! Another Six! Higher this time!
Cadet Six took his position again,
Took in a sharp breath and swung.
The ball went higher than before
And came down faster than before
And Six turned at the last moment
So the ball crashed into his bum.
Then both stood still and laughed out
The laughter that only kids can laugh.

Half-half, fair? Half-half, fair.

Six is now Sixteen (plus GST)
And still hits a leather ball
Penduluming from the guava tree.
He almost made it to the State team.
Just miss. Or so he tells everyone.
Nine decided against double-digits.
He fell off the terrace flying his kite.