THE TREE THAT SURRENDERED TO A HUMAN GARLAND

Oh, this is too big
And a Buddha
Or a Jew
Could have sat beneath it
And the chameleon paints itself
In vivid colours
As we go about
With our little hands
Susannah , Nafiza, little baldie man,
Women in the red apparel and a green umbrella
The one with the friendly wink
Oldies and goldies
Fag-hags and menu-purses
Put-ins and facials
And a regime of lawless love
And the spirit of youth.


The one with Zedane, Inca, Jimmie Durham, Chimamanda
Beckham blows a whistle
This time
Is Derrida
Dislocated and properly
Dismantled?
The loud and hearty voices
That the tiny spaces fail to satisfy or contain
The temperament
Of a huge tree
Around which there is some
Merry going around
And crows,
Carrying bread
That  have been broken.

The girl in her wet dhothee
Peering in
Am I party to this?
Obviously, when you hug a tree
In this swan song.

I felt lost in an umbrella of saffron or red
Of military juntas that reigned the world
Of promotions and demotions
In this Stalinist den
Where the din of plates in friendly hands
Would serve even Hitler a dish or two
While a Jewish woman
Or a Muslim, or Sikh
Maynot be able to makeout
What all this meant.

And Bali before whom
A Ram would run for cover
Shooting a barrage of innuendos,
He want someone to help him kill
Ravan to whom Seetha has escaped
And the independence
Of Bali wouldn't do
Like the servitude of a Sugreeva
A Jew, a Muslim, a Jain
Bahubali from the first Gujarati text,

Mahabali, whose regime was famous for its sense of equality
And egalitarianism
Or Ottamala amma and Chelakkompu mooppan
Liberators of entrapped women.
And even a Kashmiri
With a ledge to stand on
And a kiss to share,
Anywhere on earth’s ledges
With a glass of wine in between.
Indi-go fields
In the Indus
Suffocated by strangling hands
And unreal pyres
Of the Bhrigu's  and Manus
And injunctions to step-well
Within your bounds
And the baths and the dam in jamnagar
Where the water was laid stagnant
And was ordered
Into non- existence.

In this land
Where Nimbu plants
When you planted
Gave good yield
And no trouble
And women excelled
In ‘witchever’ form
They would choose
And where bounty-full
But the Aryan orange
Failing to mix 
Being proud
Of great use and pedigree
Was no more deemed fit
For the soil
And where the bael treeis unto itselff
With the empty lore that went around.
Do you wanna ban your travels
With a ban-yan or pad your stomachs
Or make them bad?


A kadamba tree
Blossoms in the backyard
A wild Amba
Shakes its branches and sings out aloud.
The parasite weeds that dry up every branch
Succumb to their fate
And become self reliant
Since the people are now
Well aware of the men who loot every bit
And pleases themselves
On climbing to their shoulders
Calling themselves kings or Masters.

THE BABY LOAN SYSTEM

The baby loan system takes a kid away
And cries out as if its own is lost!
The new child cannot be withered away
She resists
And takes to task the empty one
When the infinite plays its game
Every child's memory holds on to Ra
And the rail, the road and the air has 'ra' in them
And a raven flies about his Lanka
Where the empty ghost songs of Ram
No more reverberate..

ELDORADO

ELDORADO

(A poem written and published in Vidyasangrah,1986, annual journal of C.M.S.College, Kottayam, of which i was the student editor)

Walking up eldorado lanes

Busy

Golden gleam

Sunset

Walking

Never casting

That side-ward glance

Twinklings

Laughs stifled

Walking across

Eldorado lanes

Full plates

Smells

Pizza... Walking past

Eldorado lanes

Way down

Hungry

Crazy smells

Past

Eldorado lanes

Walking.

A CONDUCTOR FROM NOWHERE (FROM ALL THE FOUR SIDES, MAYBE!)

On the bus
Nadia- a conductor from nowhere
Rising still like another angel
Brushing by
With a touch of the horizons
With lines that stay clear
On her face
Deep lines that painters
Would love to touch-
A painter, herself

With the brush
I am at the squirrel’s tail
Standing up in danger
Oh nadi(river/ actress) ya!
The way you pass by
The little whirl winds
That you leave inside me
The bristles on my hand
Searching out
Kinetic-
Are you a good conductor?
To the music of this crowd, yes!

The inches by which  
Your lip misses her
The back of your hand
Against which she presses
A painter herself
Opening the bus
Through its middle
Revealing a journey of care and freedom
And a ticket and a thicket
Taking you somewhere
You still do not know.
Maybe the world brushes by
As you move about
And maybe
My brush waits for you
In the thicket
As we part.

Do I conduct myself, my dear?

 

ZERO

Suresh, a colleague of mine
At the university
Told me some time back
“When it is eight
You can cut it and get
Two perfect circles,
But I am seven
And has no way to go.”

“Oh!” I replied
“When you are at zero,
You roll.”
But the prospect of having
Two zeros
Either side by side
Or connected together
Locked into each other
Did not please me at all
Because
Though Indians wax proud about
Having invented it
I didn’t enjoy it at all
And if you need a wheel
We already have a better one.”

But the zero laughed
When you see me
I am but zero
And not ‘x’ or ‘y’
Among chromosomes
But something without value
And yet every time
You place me beside somebody
My value changes
And I am there
Not to please you
But to tell you
That when you are at zero
The ice forms or breaks
And a copy of ‘x’
Can easily be made.