Dissembling

From the tiger country marshes we had come
Here on the road to night, a lone policeman
Whistling at lack of people at such an hour.
Our scholarly tomes are on ecology conserving
But we are more on ferreting out spy secrets
Of skull-digging neighbor country spy outfits
For interior ministers who speak to us in secret.

We looked at ourselves versus enemy spies
Always after us in far off cities , to cause hurt
To our body, afraid of its quietly spilling beans
We knew when all those beans were to spill
On the empty roads of night, with no crowds.

All our life we believed we were some body else
Not a history man, a doctor of letters from far .
We dissembled a child who cried while laughing
Fancying ourselves as keeper of state secrets.
We therefore had to keep up several pretenses
About our being a conservation man at night.
It is so tiring to pretend you are somebody else.

Now we know we are somebody else in the dark
Back in the green room for donning a new role
Where we no longer need to dissemble or fidget
Wearing rusted masks that do not fit our face.

(About a schizophrenic relative of mine who died recently when his dissembling had become too much to bear)

The re-touched woman of Eve Arnold

The woman stands duly re-touched.
Lack of eye-liner hides vacant eyes
From wet fear welling up in corners.

Heck , no eyes, only bare fingers
Holding on to the insides of body,
Just re-touching a woman’s body
Lest it not go away from the dress.

(A haunting photograph of an Afro- Carribean mental patient in Haiti by Eve Arnold , the famous Magnum photographer who passed away recently at the age of 99)

The year-end

Our change will happen not at the midnight
Of cakes and candles,loud claps and crackers
But in doorways, each time we pass them
Like ghosts, room to room, under flowers
Delicately painted on their frames on yellow.

The doorway is not inside nor there in space
But just hanging on time, as we hop and skip
Holding our hems from paint sticking to them.
The year-end is a doorway that will disappear
in the dusty lane and in the dust we can’t recall
What ghosts we were in the room left behind.

The spectacle case

A plastic with soft contours , it stares
At my eyes ,balefully from its existence,
Its pride, outcome of seeing too much.

Eyes are love , drooping an ego’s fall
On the pillar of a nose, with two extra
Eyes seeming duplication but not so.

Custodian of seeing ,often a little proud,
It encases glasses roundly, just in case,
Luckily not making a spectacle of itself.

The rope of fire

A man sits in a tiny kiosk like a bird chick
Confined to a roosting nest, reaching out
Only for worms in its triangular baby beak.
A turban he wears and a red hue on his lips
With the tongued accent of a riverside city
Where you go to die to live for ever in heaven.

A white stuff on leaves makes clients redder
In dancing mouths with a gluey paste on leaf.
All they need is a white stick of fire in mouths
To keep their business going, at constant debt.

The man has a coconut rope with a fiery end
Tied to an electric pole, burning slowly like debt.
Its fire is enough to light white sticks all night.
No need to see faces by the light of a match.

The hospital

The hospital is warm space, a pearl-white place
Of healed wounds, buzzing flies and white legs.
The wounds come here for a warm breeze to blow
From loving mouths, from hanging tails in necks
From quick beating chests of knowledge and love.

The hospital has turned a warm and a fiery place
Its white light now licked by purple tongues of fire,
Its efficient silence shattered by loud dying sounds.

(Two days ago, in Kolkata, a massive fire started by an electrical short circuit killed eighty five patients of the Amri hospital)

Immortality

We were looking for a fine movie for our worn out minds
Hanging selves, drooping shoulders, head held forward
In our hands, tired of the music of flesh and short years.
Our stills were to be sweet sickly music of flowing years.

This man sings because he has to sing for our happiness
The other man plays as he cannot but play a happy drum
But they are driven out by villagers due to their bad music
Together they would sing and play drum as listener turns
A stone of flesh, a standing stone with no moving fingers.

Only ghosts do not turn into stone, being eerie in music.
Nor crooked magicians who can make you twenty-younger
But cannot become immortal due to their greed for stones
If only one turned a stone by music and remained that way.

(Watching a classic Bengali movie : Goopi Bagha Fire Elo (1991)

The glass casket

He had risen in the air, to roof and the sky above
From a lumpen body , a mind of crackling paper
A sleeping giant of ego, make-believer of world
Mother-dependent and woman- loved by a wife
From a race whose fiery ancestors had come
From far off seas, in skull-caps, worshiping fire.

He lay sprawled in the hall in a glass casket
Like history’s old bodies ,under mummification
He might have studied , in his younger days,
Waiting to be unraveled for future mysteries.

He will commune with crackling fires under trees
Following his wife’s ancient custom of fire-worship
And would duly embrace it in deference and faith.
His dust may or may not flow with his faith’s river.

(On the passing away of a relative ,a man of promise, a maverick who did not fit into a formalist society and tragically died at an early age of 44 )

Garbage

Three city women went missing
Under a garbage being foraged.
Their dusty death is suspected.
A hand juts out in the camera
Poking directly into your eyes.

Death is not fragrant ashes of incense
And mumbled prayers on tremulous lips .
Death enters your eyes as a dust particle,
As a hand that accuses, cries and sleeps.

(News:Three women went missing yesterday under the mounds of garbage in the Jawaharnagar dumpyard in Hyderabad)

The Greek tragedy

I say beware of the Greeks bearing gifts
Of knowledge,in a poetry of unspeakable
Horrors that had lifted the veil of secrecy
From our lack of humanity, bodies rotting
Of cynics in churchyard, in the trees bare
And smoky, in morning fog of early ghosts,
Hellenism of word and thought, largeness
of vision, mere words, pulsating with light.

Beware of Greek poetry in early science.
Beware of people ruling people’s minds,
Of men who wear long robes of thought,
Mixing religion and politics, marrying soul
With intellect, science with exquisite art
And barbarians masquerading as nobles.

And beware of the shadows that now loom
On the acropolis, of shrunk bodies of men
Their paper monies growing in their shadows
On trees brooding on a history of betrayals.

(Greece is one of the largest shadow economies
of the world.The oligarchs are becoming fatter by the day
but the country is on the brink of bankruptcy)