Remembering Kamala

I have seen you Kamala, I do not know where.

Maybe in those women,

Who cover their face while they walk causally out of the durga in O.TC road.

I have seen you in some glass cage,

On the cover of a book.

I have seen you in the eyes of a girl who pinched my bare chest.

I have seen you in lost in Neelambari Raga.

I have seen you in women who wear glass bangles.

Red and brown. Black my favorite.

In the craving for love I have seen you. I have touched you.

In Kanyakumari I have seen you. Marveling the horizon.

Just like me, wondering about dreams of the flowers that bloom by dawn.

I have seen you Kamala in a language. The one in which you dreamed.

I was there when the sparrow died in your room.

I have seen you in the warmth of a thigh.

Profound were those moments.

I have preserved them in them in a history house.

Inside a ceramic pot.

The Caretaker

When despair starts running homeward,
Do not worry.
I will be at your side. With sweet cow dung taste.
I will take care of you for a night,
will take you for a ride.
When the city sleeps together we will have neon colored dreams,
Or white.
Do not worry dear, the moment you put me to your lips,
I will burn for you. Like an incense stick giving peace to a yogi.
Nothing would touch you other than your beautiful hands.
Faliure would be the new rejoice.

I will be there.

To A Teacher

You killed my faith with your clumsy words.
You tortured my beauty with your vulgar knowledge.
You try to define truth for me. When I try to transcend all the norms.
You shape history for me when I could have understood it the way I want.
Why do you exert on singing in rhythm, let me find my own voice, my own rhythm.

Do not trample my temple with hammers of iron clauses.
Lets my ravishing idols remain untouched by the tinge of your stagnant horizons.
Let me live with a streak of hope.
I too, like everyone posses my gods, my love, my beauty.
To a teacher who killed my faith with his clumsy words on a dreary afternoon.

The Invisible

Gaze upon me, you may find nothing other than a stern look,
A negotiable smile, a smirk or even calmness of a silent desert.
Never has, what you gaze upon, given up or made up a look.
The mirror hates me for what I am, you hate me for what I am.
So I am invisible.

I cant sing, but that is no crime. My sound is neither faint nor harsh,
But does that make me a eunuch to be avoided ? Understand dear ones,
It is not the wood that creates the music, but the air that passes.
But without the wood, air is just air. Now tell me, what I am.
The wood, the air or the music.

I am always there, you know that. I gape at you as a fool.
You pass right through my salty flesh which is just like yours.
I am not painted in white, black or red nor do I have masks of vanity.
I am not asking you to be with me. I ask you to remind me what I am.
Soul, body or a name.

You don’t know the answer. You don’t because you don’t know me.
I am every thing that is invisible. I am death , the new hope.
I am what lies beyond the horizon, I am the zenith. I am the stench.
I am what you are not. You may have questions about what I am,
Not even god can answer them.

Talking About Small Things

They never talked about the world.
Poverty and famine, death or destruction,
It never crossed their mind.
They never talked about fallen monarchs,
Slums or empires, queens and kings. They never wanted it.
They stuck to small things.

To their world of a river. Ants and ant bites.
About a little dying spider and of night.
They talked about smell and taste.
The last of the river in the hollow of a navel.
They stuck to small things.
To a small world.

I came to their realm once, while wandering in search of boundaries.
I saw the mangosteen tree, where the boundaries dissolved for them.
I rested under that tree, looking at the river. It was placid.
The world of small things.
As I travelled back to my world of monarchs, death, queens and slums,
I wished I too could be one of them, to talk of small things.

( The side effects of a journey.
A journey to the setting of the novel God of Small Things, Aymanam Village)

Naked

I Stand.
I stand naked in front of you.
Losing everything I had.
My Shame. My Knowledge. My Pretences.
My Skin. My flesh. My Bones.
See through me now.
Pity Me.
Yes I will die in the gush of your breath.
Having shown you I have nothing special,
I want you to love me, love me for what I am.
Yes, Love me for what I am.
Never more, never less.

Hope :- The Window

I found a window in my room.
It changes its shape every time I look for it.
Now, it is veiled by white curtains.
But now, it has dirty strong iron bars.
And yet sometimes, it is nothing but a hole in the wall.

The window,
Bare. It wants nothing. It is just there.
Wondering whether someone would come.
To look through it. To find wonders.
To dream of reaching out and touch a spirit never known before.
It sparkles a flame in the soul of the traveller who craves for the road.
Bare, it is. It wants nothing. It is just there.

The window,
It snows through that window,
Night rain squeezes its hand through.
A beam of yellow light.
A thick forest or a single tree.
Mountains and rivers, straits and oceans.

I, a fool, mesmerized by the revelations through that window,
Dreamt of pursuing of snow caped mountains and oceans.
Fell in love with rain and rare flowers of a garden.
It was late I understood that, the window was the hope in me.
It showed me what I wanted to see.
Torn by defeat, devastated by doom
I shut that window and never looked for it again.
And it never appeared.