Ghodbunder Road

(Mira Bhayandar to Thane)

All through the way, we keep speaking,
raising the stakes, little by little,
every night creates possibilities, which
the morning breaks, little by little.

What will remain of this night, years from
now, is only an abstract wish,
his head on my arms, his hair in my fingers
- desire slakes, little by little.

Mario had told me the Portugese traded
Arabian horses here at the creek,
'Ghod' 'Bunder' - the port of the horses -
how history wakes, little by little.

On the radio, as Ananyaa sang, she pestled
the moon, dissolved the stars,
take heed, Akhil, she sings of our lives, it
gives and it takes, little by little.

In Shimla

it always rains twice,
once, from the sky,
then, when the pines drip.

The same with you, Lalita,
once, when you went,
then, as it hit.

Nishit Saran

Half way down the Lodhi Road,
the first day of rain,

those who come here often must
be held by you, and pain,

and memory must, like memory does,
hold them in its skein,

remembering you, like always, with
the summer in your veins.
 

Two memories, Delhi

I

Laxmi Nagar, Delhi
1997

I must have been twelve
when a grand-uncle was discovered
during a vacation in Delhi,

you don't know him? we'd told you, he's

nani's eldest brother,
(also from Sargodha, Pakistan)
I'd never met a grand-uncle.

In his Jamuna-paar house, he looked so frail
in his drawing-room that my twelve-year-oldness
was afraid to go near him.

He could not see. And, for me, then, his could-not-seeness
had sat in the middle of the room
but no one would mention it.

He spoke to us and I followed his closed eyelids
that kept egg-whites beneath them.

I tried to measure how much 
he could see of the snacks on the table,
of my fingers, of all of us talking,
of his own speaking-about-us-without-knowing-us,
as if of course I know you, you're my sister's grand...

After a while,
he asked Pinki (my mother's name
for those who knew her longer than I)
to let him see us.

We were made to get up and
stand in front of him.

I walked slowly, my bones
shaped like awkwardness.

He touched my face with his fingers,
frailness, moved them lightly over my nose,
my eyes (should I keep them closed? or open?)
and said, he's "nice-looking" in English,
and then let me go.

I bundled back
to my edge of the sofa,
to the edge of my mother,
near her, asking her to keep me
from her people, those who knew her
longer than I, grand-uncles whose egg-whites
roamed on walls and who saw people through fingers.

II

Jangpura Extension, Delhi
2016

Rohit, it has been about six years
since you left, and of-course-this-is-very-little-time,
especially-in-this-day-and-age,
but I thank my stars that sometimes I find it
difficult to remember
your face
fully.

It is surprising how much six years
without a facebook-friendship can do,
how they can blur the edges of cheek-bones,
make the nose go was-it-like-this?
and eyes, were-they-dark-brown-or-black?

Around the third year,
when this slow forgetting had started,
I found these little slipping-away's of details
to be a form of betrayal, like the final warrant of
now-nothing-can-start-again, like the final final, like
even his face now...

but when your going sunk in through the years,
this slipperiness of memory felt kinder,
this inability to remember no longer argued with me,
it sat on my lap and let me stroke
its chin, and loved me back,
if even his face can go, then surely...

but, sometimes, near the hours
that are no-longer-night an' not-yet-dawn,
when I lie just on this side of sleep, sometimes

not always, my hand takes the shape as if it is
holding you from the back,

and the fingers still hold the gossamer air
of the bedroom as if they touched your cheeks,

as if the small slant of your nose was there,
the graze of the stubble, the lemonness of hair,
the soft drip of your ear,

as if rememberance was a game
played by fingers on gossamer fields,

and, in those nights, I didn't need
memory's ability to see, I touched, and without
saying it to you, meant, like in
those nights, "nice-looking",

and saying it held off dawn, it held off the claim
of the next day, it held off who-told-you-to-go,
why-did-you-have-to-go, it held off
where-are-you-now...

??? ??? ??? ??

???? ????-?????? ?? ???? ??? ??,
??? ?????, ??????

Tonight

You're still glued to the bus-stop seat,
I pull you off it, "91 is here."

On Gray's Inn Road,
you again call the houses "so miniature,"
holding them between your finger and thumb.

On the double-decker,
you're still dozing off on the back seat,
asking me to wake you up when we get there.

As we get out, I'm still telling you to
"wrap yourself well, it's always colder
near the river."

As we walk below the Waterloo Bridge
and you turn to look at me, I am still
one-part longing, one-part fear,

wishing, tonight, that you were here.


(thanks to Daniel Titz and Dorian Lebh)

When I die

bury me
only in your eyes.

All those years we dated,

it remained 'complicated,'
so what I don't get is this -
why do I remember them as 'bliss'.

A Language of Forgetting

tr. from Rajesh Joshi's '????? ?? ????'

A river brushed against me
in the language of water,

and suddenly, in the language
of flight, the birds
moved below the clouds,

on trees written in a hieroglyphic script,
leaves stirred together, and in their movement
was the language of rustling -

it felt as if you are somewhere close,
drawing near in the language of the body

and whispering a language of forgetting
to those you could not.

The first time has

never been easy for me,

the one in which lightness
is supposed to do the work -
I am only thinking

and there's no room for thinking
not in the walk,
not in the hands,
not on the bed, the first time,

I never had the ease
of talking, of letting talking,
of letting kiss, of letting a bed,
of letting it happen,
I never had the ease,

I will probably never have
the ease

and so these past years
I take care
and make myself unlovable,

'coz we never talked,
'coz I never talked,
an' then I just figured an' figured
an' we never talked,
and I never said, and you never talked,
an' I didn't ask, we didn't say, an' I figured
without you, I figured that I did not know,
and we never talked
then, or later,

and after that so much of me changed
so suddenly, I feared

being recognized.

Beds

- there've been many,
and I've sworn all of them to secrecy,
hoping mattresses keep their promise.

The one in Stokey

in the house behind the
Abney Park Cemetery

to which my mother, calling from Lucknow,
had said - "When you sleep, do not lie
facing the cemetery,"

though, often
in the evenings

I'd look at our backyard fence
running against the 18th century graves

- where an angel, an urn, a lion,
all contracted in cement, kept
an Anglican hymn-maker, kept 17 year old
world-war veterans, kept a girl who
"left us so suddenly and so irrevocably
in grief" -

and I did not think it was anything
particularly serious to be
facing them while
I slept.

My German and Greek room-mates
often partied, "facing the cemetery."


A year later, the single-bed in King's Cross,

on the fifth floor,
floated above police sirens
and bus horns,

and was stuck to the right wall of
the room that I'd expressly asked "should. face. outside."

the hostel warden - this nice white guy - was surprised,
"you're the first one to ask for a room facing the road,"
"I like the noise," I said. I did not say I'm from a bigger city,
 I'd sooner die than face the "serene," that
little patch of green for more than a day.

He smirked but let me have my choice.

That bed afforded the view
 of Constable churches, of a Punjabi grocer,
a car rental and a Tesco,

and it was on this bed
where we managed to do it
for the first time,

using face-cream as lube.

Sometime that year,
the bed in your downtown house
near Battery Park,

that I knew only for a night
while visiting New York,

where I made plans which were
(presciently) smaller than my hands,

where I looked down into your city

where even
the parking-lot at mid-night
seemed unbelievable to me,

where the bed, holding my knees,
and your umber skin, as you slept,
told me that the tense of desire
is always the future,

one in which no plan survives,
no suture holds,
no love keeps,

one in which you leave me, always,
so suddenly and so irrevocably
in grief

that night after night
beds now
are of a kind,

that have very little to do
with sleeping.

And one day

"from beating,
my heart will stop,"

and no turn
will ever take me,

no iron will
melt into the streets

and the night
 - between Raspail
and Vaugirard -
will forsake me,

one day,
all memory will
be water

and long walks
would not do the trick,

need will no longer be
a shirt to wear at will,

and then, when I'll need-like-breathing,
no one will be on the fringes

folks will matter

even a passer-by will
inflict

little colours
washing up in the city,
little rivers sinking
into skin,

people, willing,
unwilling,

and I wouldn't know what to do

except to take to my heart
every thing they say,

one day.


(thanks to Jacques Dutronc)

I can't even remember what he looks like, he's now

a wink, a shrug,
a sound, a hug,
a waiting,

a look, a shirt,
a scent, a hurt
abating,

a kiss, a sneeze,
a bunch'of memories
still inundating

but now not a trace
of the eyes, the face
that
did
the
real
baiting.

????? ?? ???? ??? ?? ?? "???,"

????? ?? ?? ??? ?? "???"
?? ????? ???? ??? ?? ??? ???? ??,
????? ?? ???? ?? ??? ?? ?? "??? ??????? ????? ???? ?????,"
????? ?? ?? ?? ??? ?? ?? "??? ??????? ????? ???? ?????,"
?? ??? ??? ?? ?? ??? ?? ?? ??? ??,
????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ?? ?? "?? ?? ????? ?? ???? ????,"
????? ?? ?? ???? ??? ?? ?? "?? ?? ????? ?? ???? ????,"
?? ????? ???? ??, ????? ?? ???, ?? ?????? ??

I didn�t say �go,�

I said �go,� 
and you took me at my word,
I din�t say �I don�t want to see you anymore,'
I�d said �I don�t want to see you anymore,�
and you got what I said,
I didn�t say �I can�t do this,�
I had only said �I can�t do this,�
and you listened, like always, to the words.

On reading Jerry Pinto's translation of Sachin Kundalkar

No
I don't
have you

but sometimes
I have the exact descriptions
of how I feel without you
and that ought to count
for something.

No reading or writing is
no where close to love
but it breaks breath
just the same,
and some lines
are just as hard,
some, as light,

and yes
the guy that I write about
is not much like
you, when you were here,
or how you must be now,
but
that's
not
because
I am some doe-eyed-mush-monster,
making you sound better
than you were, but because
memory's a crafty-ass thing,
filigreeing the past, some bits
refuse to go, some turn into a blur,
and as it is - I'm not lying -
you were damn sweet, when you were.

Such a pity, the years,

such a pity, the silences,
the explosions on the sun, 
the dust of all the memories, 
such a pity this our being past
forgiving, these shores, such a
pity, this keeping on without you,
years away outnumbering the
years on the run, such a pity, 
all the fun, and that my hands
were small like Mercury and
that you were always the sun.

In the 1.4 MB floppy disk

I used to gift you two or three photographs,
(.jpeg's were smaller than .bmp's),
of us standing on the Gomti embankment,
or of you at the Chota Imambara
next to the portrait of the fat Asaf-ud-Daula,
or of our school Principal (after doing
vulgar things to him on MS Paint).

Then, along with those,
I gave you songs - one .mp3
(could be Bombay, 'Humma Humma'
or Dil To Pagal Hai, 'Chak Dhoom Dhoom'
or that 'Dance of Envy' where Shiamak Davar
was thinking what-was-he-thinking, and
Karishma Kapoor was dancing wtf-is-that-dance.)

Then, to fit them in, I gave you two more songs
but these were .rm, not even half an MB,
where even Lata didi sounded real,
like someone's grazed her throat
with sandpaper and
fed her pickles
for a month.

Then, after these (because
1.4 MB never felt small, then, stowing
all I wanted to give) I added three .ttf's,
font files, as special gifts, one of which even
had a middle-finger-symbol, which you then used
in almost every subject-line that year
1999.

Now people see me as grown-up;

at university, they ask me questions and
put me into �committees�, my land-lady
asks me to give tuitions to her sons, and
now, when I see those kids, I think of them
as �kids�. Now people see me as grown-up
and they steal half my sky; when they talk,
they have that suspicion or matter-of-factness
reserved for adults, and it eats into me that
I still think of people my own age as always
somehow older. Even my anger is now so
grown-up, it's edge does not wash away
easily as it used to, and regret vinegars
many evenings. But all this is so odd, it is
so insane, �coz in my head I am still 19,
flying for the first time & fumbling with my
seat-belt on the plane, and, in my head, I
still don't know love & there�re yellow stripes
on my sweater, and I don�t know any better.

Though my memory might be dim,

but I remember, the bar, the
walk back, him. I remember his
middle name spelled in gin, &
the evening moving on a whim.
And where the Caledonian Road
turned like a river, where the
lights of King's Cross limned
his black jacket, his short hair,
and his eyes as brown as sin.