The Broken House

The house is not same anymore

After mother is gone,

It smells of emptiness and a strange abandonment,

That surrounds a temple,

When the idol is stolen

by some miscreant.

Children are going back to 

Their lives of everything that makes

One forget the lost, the family and the business of life that must go on.  Father has risen

Like a phoenix

From twelve days long fire 

and normalcy has gripped him

in its resilient arms.

Fghting for a dead mother is far more difficult 

Than a living one, deads lack the presence to assert their rights,

The single daughter looks on through the window and tries

To bear the pain of 

the dismantling of a  home, the gradual disappearance of it, 

And the strange purposelessness

of living without a mother.

MOTHER AND DEATH

Mother and Death

People say your time had come,

you died the best way

without troubling anybody

Without much suffering

You were fine the night before,

Talked to daughters and 

had your medicines

Your kind of death is a much aspired and coveted one, 

people get paralyzed and grow immobile, people suffer and make others suffer.

With a mother, logic and theories

hardly work, I only thought that

I will never see that beloved face again,

coming home, nobody will ask 

me to eat my food fast and then grow finicky over a shabby house

nobody will call 

me five times to come back soon

from the market,nobody will ask me to 

get blouses, pain balm, ear drop and

slippers for her, I will not know 

how to live,

without fighting for a sacrificing and

suicidal mother,who had become silent at some point of time longing for love and care,and growing indifferent

to life ,knowing that nobody had time 

and heart enough to love her.

The Twelfth Day

The Twelfth Day

It is late evening,

The maid has run away screaming

Rain rain, 

something inside, 

that lay parched, 

looks in anticipation,

The known aroma steams off

the warm earth and rushes 

to the interiors,

It is raining.

The first time mother is not there

when it is raining,

There is none anymore 

to tell joyfully, Maa, it is raining.

The house seemed very quiet 

in the day today

pronouncing that someone 

kept the air thick with her presence

despite disease, pain and dejection,

Silence tries to embrace the house

with its frozen stiff hands.

She,who came and sat 

and talked of dead people in the parental village,the tantrum of maids,

small home details, new ailments and daily quota of disappointments, Who refused to give in,

to diseases and heartbreaks,

The diseases ate her blood 

and marrow

and slowly kept feeding on her 

stressed heart.

There is an inaudible cry

that turns into sobs off and on

A guilt that gnaws at the psyche

that we never returned love for love

and allowed her to hurt and get sick

in silence, 

Of our negligence and nonchalance,

so much so that,

whom we call God 

could not bear it anymore,

and devised a way to take her back home in the name of

a stroke.

The Carrying

You see, the words do not come easy
As before, though the magic of the scenes
Never expires, its varied spectacles 
Travel along and across the running paths.

Who never calls? Yet the expectancy
Lingers over the sea and the clouds
And looks into the half-lit labyrinths
Of the undiscovered forests and by the
River banks when the day starts
descending into darkness,
The mundane hours eat up the unborn
Words and never permit a birth.

Still walking in the twilight streets alone,
The longing is borne in the mystic soul,
To convulse and shake, until the unconscious
Lines spout themselves out, unremittingly,
And pull one back into calm, static restfulness.

Journeys

         

                -1-

Stretch your limbs on a hard earned
Lower berth, smell the fresh white sheet,
Close your eyes and swing leisurely
With the rhythms of the land boat,

There is no question of being lonely,
Three people may come and sit beside your prostrated body, and indulge in talk, domestic chatter, Indian economy, the latest android, and atrocities on women.
You can shrink your legs or stay put,
Or get up and jump into the convergence,
Company is assured.

Chaiwalas will wake you up in the morning, or the breakfast sellers,
As you lazily look into the day,
The changing scenes amaze you
With new terrain and novel architecture.
Inside and outside, you will feel fulfilled,
Quite a journey it has been.

                           -2-

As you near the giant structure
Made of glass and sophistication,
You feel your stomach revolting,
As a fear equal to an approaching examination grips you, and you go through this and that, and another this born from that, like a machine, watching others, trying to learn new lessons.

Waiting, you can get to see
A small universe, walking up and down the tiled floors, amazed at the
Ideas matching in panorama, faces, clothes, voices and scenes.
Nobody budges a lot, inside, except
Monotonous voices of the uniformed attendants, babies only howl a couple of times, and expensive eatables come on carts to persecute the travellers with zombie smiles, the task gets done,

There is no sky sometimes,
You look for things in the ether for sometime and doze, after desperate efforts to see backwards and front, to see human faces, an oppressive silence
Hangs in the confined and neat space,
As if all wait for a trial and the upcoming results, or for an impending disaster that does not happen.

The journey does not end on the ground,
It stretches further till you get your baggages and walk out of the path
And walk into life,
But here, if you stay around,
It gets lonelier.

This New Summer

Things came sitting
On time' s wing,
Noiselessly stole the poetry of
The summer afternoons,
Stole the aloneness and the lingering
Thoughts that often stretched
From nowhere to nowhere
And got pregnant with songs.

There was a search that
Had neither end nor intermission,
A joy waited expectantly to jump into
The humid moments of unbearable Loneliness, 

It waited without a hint
Of anyone' s arrival or appearance.

The evenings came, dull,warm and not
So cheerless, yet spoke of hope,
That hanged unto dreams of
The real and the unreal.

All that is left of the summer
Is webs of entangled
Conversations, words that get lost in the air afterwards, and a weird
Barrenness, that has come
To stay here, forever.

The Sculptor

The disciples were at work,

And the sculptor stood among the scattered half-built sculptures,

The gods, the erotic dancers and the excited peacocks,

Gesturing commands and hints

His eyes minutely scanning each one, for deficiencies.

The creations were easy to fall in love with,

To posses,, sometimes I thought

How the master was inspiring art,

And thinking of shifting to another house at the same time,

Five months it had been,

And the rents were pending,

How he infused beauty and finesse, how breathed in life

And vitality into piece of stone, I wondered,

When I saw his unhappy wife

Dragging his six year old chubby-faced son

To the bus stop and pushing him into the school bus,

And coming back to a house of darkness and wants.

Yet I always saw, in a quick glance,

That the disciples and the sculptures grew in number

And beauty, no matter what,

And the master was ubiquitous with his shining face,

His thick moustache and folded loincloth,

The god of creation shining in his afternoon face.