Imagined in Three Quarters
of a Second
On a day when pavements smelt the salt of seas,
their city became a harbour.
So as to keep a word to someone,
So as to bring back all that is lost temporarily,
So as to mourn some long absence,
Sea came with the raw music of a school band
and played an endless symphony
of melancholy
For those who never travelled,
Each fierce wave became the jaw of a dead lion
that came with the bad omen
of revenge
No dream was washed away in between sleeps
No crow picked up the image of a dead fish from the page
No one mistook a ship for an
ancient sea animal
Sitting absent minded among pals in our regular restaurant,
Only that song which reminded about you,
Slowly revised itself with the rhythm of waves
and dissolved secretly into
the depths
Travelogues
1.
Abode MV Tipu Sultan
While traveling alone,
Sunset is an empty gallery.
Standing on the deck
of a four-storied ship,
deeper than your expectation or mine is
the terror inflicted by the sea’s blue,
powerless its attempts to console the loner with vastness,
invalid its artistry in clouds
to remind children.
Toiled with distance and separation,
each clichéd visual is a painful
glass box:
Their well arranged, repetitive appearance,
As insensitive as the functional scientific name of
A variety of sea fish
2. Kavaratti
.
While seeing the giant system of lamps and lenses
Atop the light house at Kavaratti with coast guard Anand,
Memory passed like a fading
signal from the distance.
About father and grandfather
About old Kollam and its haunted beaches
The older light house at Thankassery
where silence hides a sting with vengeance in its secret hives
About the oldest of the oldest lighthouses
that set fire in its own head like mothers
to reach distant vision of
its lost sons
By the window of her
flat
By the window of her flat that opens
to the sea, tonight
we need to sit for hours on length
watching waves on the rock saying
nothing about violins
Let’s talk later
Our bodies need to intertwine sharing
their personal grievances with each other,
when a city that peeps like
a voyeur sleeps
when the farthest of memories descends
at night from some origin,
we need to reach the most distant of mountains
on top of which Chen Kaige’s blind saint* sits
singing a psalm before the
war
Bearing a bus-stand that makes
travellers gloomy on soppy monsoon days,
I need to board a bus thinking about
the roots of passing trees
on my way to her
Wearing something snug and cute for a uniform,
she who becomes free by five in the evening
would need to drive along the seaport road
and wait for 20 minutes
Let’s talk later
Tonight through some unknown valley,
silence would flow like an
angry river
Note:
* -- with reference to the movie ‘Life on a string’
Where the first letter
was born
I want to be born in those parts where
you could take a turn
and hear the sea.
In the first village that is formed by the sea,
I want to be a divine bard
and learn to metamorphose into
meditative turtles
To be the first to feel depths after listening to the waves,
to make silence a shield around the pain of lost love,
to think up something called time
and device a measure,
probably a sundial that could
have moved backward as well
Nothing flatters me –
the first domesticated dog and the love
it has lost since
the deep antique rhythm of Ashtapadi*
reminding the frozen landscape of a poetic city
that perished
the obsessions between men and their rooms,
their jeans, cell phones and computers,
the girls that come and go
from them quite often
the windows and the images that remain
of the rainy days of July 1984
when dad decided to show me the biggest
circle in Thrissur** and took two
50 paisa private bus tickets
to Swaraj round
I want to be born near the sea:
I need to start from where the first
letter was born
Note: * - A part of Indian classical music, composed on eight lines or steps
** - A small town in Kerala, India
On the beach
I enjoyed seeing you
scribbling on the wet sand ,
and making those sand houses,
Far away from our prison like walls,
growing tall and blind,
echoing only ourselves,
louder and louder.
You were shaping them
on the curves of your young hand,
the beads of your laughter
And then including the crab holes within them,
then the road, the pastures,
the mountains, the sunset, the ever expanding horizon,
the boats in the deep sea with people sitting in them,
their eyes, weary and longing,
looking towards the distant
shore.
But,
what I enjoyed most
is watching those eternal waves
wash off your house,
the alphabets of your limited language,
again and again,
With you making a new language,
a new world each time.
