here again.

These are the hills that I know

Rising and falling

In front and surround and mass.

Green into blue – and then into purple

And a stream through a shingled white cast.

These are the hills that I know

Of caked brown footsteps by rainshine

Down-paths and up-paths in fog

Where the thunder of crickets match the thunder of water

Not seen – just felt – in fall.

These are the hills that I know

Mountains and forests

That shrug into white-feathered sky.

Highland and lowland and rushes of green land

Bowing to green-whiskered I

These are the hills that I know

White browed memories of autumn

Tooth and warmth in jagged lines of mist.

First born to snow and last born to winter

Sleepy low lines of purple to kiss.

These are the hills that I know

A touch of smoky steaming

Brushing by eyelashes dim

Muffled and soaked in mudpaper cloaked

A little path with a wood-peckered rim.

These are the hills that I know

And a little window calling

Into drowning foraging sky

And the first bird that wakes – and the last bird that calls

And the sun that blows the peep by.

These are the hills that I know

A faraway yearning

Growing smaller as they fade beneath the sky

A wheel in a storm – and some hush-hushed forms

Of music – and fried-egg goodbyes.

waiting for the evening

I remember where we were.

The cold red floor and the soft drip-drip-drip of the last remnants of the afternoon’s rain from the damp yellow windows beyond.

Me on the tattered sofa that had somehow become yours since they’d brought it over from the house that was being sold.

And you – a half-closed eye in a dream, off running through wild grasses on some strangely coloured hill against some strangely coloured sky.

I remember how loud it was – the sound of the clock from the next room – the clock that always ran late because everyone forgot to wind it – the clock that was always so loud when everything else fell silent. Most evenings when it was just me and you and an empty floor.

A book between us and you were always only waiting for the evening.

Sometimes the fan would be working – that huge hulky fan that drowned out the clock and conjured the old ghosts under the cupboards. And under the desk – and the table – but never under the beds – because they knew where you were.

We’d leave the room and go off wandering now and then – your soft footfalls treading through the house like some sleek searching spirit of wakefulness. And mine, trudging through the grime of some unnamed hill after Charlemagne’ s army. And when we’d return, yanked back to the room by various entities, we’d listen for a while, for each other’s presence, to be comforted by a special kind of quiet silence that was ours.

In some strange miscalculation of time, we’re still there.

In that cool quiet room brimming with ghosts and words.

Perhaps it’s wrong to tie you down with it, the red floor and the fan that never works now. Wrong to tie you down – you of the strangely coloured hills and the strangely coloured sky.

But that quiet silence is tied to that room – and it drowns the clock, now that the fan doesn’t work anymore. And you will always be in my quiet silence, even though your footfalls are free now, on that strangely coloured hill, against that strangely coloured sky.

And all of those colours break in through the yellow windows and spill across the words. And the ghosts. And the tattered sofa. And that shadow by the bookcase.

Where we still are. You - the half-open eye in a dream, waiting for your evening. And me on the tattered sofa that will somehow always be yours.

Fragment

And she went so far out to sea

That she couldn’t see the rain

The wind there was like the sea itself

Dark and deep and wild

Like mountains that moved with the storm.

 

And every fog she touched

Was like her own breath

Whistled towards a long-lost coast

Lost and lost again

With each passing mist that wreathed her.

 

And each passing day that left her

Washed by another salty crest

Another salty breath

Of a certain sort of yearning

That is born only in the stormy sea.

 

Where grey hills rise and fall

And stretch to the edge of the world

In one giant circle that trembles

Beneath one giant sphere

Swirling grey – and grey – spiraling into each other.

footsteps

Blind Mrs. Mitra sat by the iron-barred window and listened to the rain. Drip, drip, it went, on the brick tiles of the roof and splash, against the aluminium frame of the window, newly installed, because the wood, a hundred years old, had been eaten away by time. She could feel the city outside – the air felt grainy, like the air in front of the grinding mills at home, a long time ago – but colder, and harsher.

The sound of the city was lulled by the rain – and the metal sounds of Pratima, her daughter-in-law, washing the dishes in the little kitchen next door. The sound of the dishes reminded her of her knitting – she felt the cold steel of the needles in her palm and sighed. Clickety-clack, they would go – with the rain – but she felt like remembering, now.

Ajay had presented her the knitting needles – Ajay, her brother’s son, orphaned as a child of four months. The same day, it was, that Ajay and Prashant, her own son, had graduated from the military academy together – two smiles, so similar, so indistinguishable – she had felt them with her old wrinkled fingers on their lips, a foot above her head. Prashant had gifted her the aluminium window frames. Pratima had laughed, but she hadn’t found it funny – cold, instead, as if Prashant didn’t know how to love.

Splash – and thump – boots in the street. Then footsteps came loudly, and slowly, up the stairs and stopped in front of the door. Mrs. Mitra turned her head towards the doorway – it was open, she knew – it was always open. She wondered who it was – those boots were heavy on the red-cemented floor – a raincoat? Or was it a jacket?

“Pratima!” she called. “Look and see – someone is here. See what they want!”

There was a clash of metal, again, from the kitchen.

“Ask them, Ma – I’ll be a minute.”

The boot stepped into the room – thud, it went, a duller, softer thud, lulled by the water it carried from the world outside. The step startled the blind woman, sitting so placidly by the window across the room.

“Ajay?” she cried, half-croaking, half-whispering – and ran across, into the man’s arms. She lifted her old worn hands up to his face – the funny lumpy cheeks and the lips – so similar, so indistinguishable.

“You’re home? From the war? Why? When? Why didn’t you write – my darling –”

She stopped suddenly. A whimper – soft and yet so unbearably loud in the room. A small wet spherical circle dropped onto her outstretched fingers. Plip – louder than the loudest whiplash of rain outside.

She tore away and looked back – “Prashant?” Her voice was steady. “Has Prashant been killed?”

The man opposite her broke into horrible heart-wrenching sobs. Pratima hurried in from the kitchen, her footsteps hard on the cold floor.

“Prashant!” she screamed – “You’re home!”

Footsteps rushed across to the man. The blind woman collapsed to the floor. A quiet thump.

“No –“ she whispered.

“What’s wrong?” Pratima was saying. “Ajay? Is he hurt?”

The man rushed blindly across to the blind woman – flaying her arms about her, searching, searching – for those cold steel needles – so full of love.

He handed them to her and hugged her, sobbing.

“I’m so sorry – Ma –”

But Mrs. Mitra raised her head, surprised. She had felt love in that embrace. The needles felt cold and distant in her fingers, like they were saying goodbye. She had felt love in those arms. In the wrong arms – but love, nevertheless – so similar, so indistinguishable.

playing pretend

            She was a little older than I was – about twelve. Her braids hung loosely over the low garden wall as she leant over it, smiling at me with a strange pair of liquid brown eyes – which dazzled red when they caught the sun.

            “How old are you?” she asked me, and I blinked, because her lips hadn’t moved.

            “Ten,” I replied and her eyes widened.

            “I think I can read minds,” she said.

            It was a funny way to begin a friendship, but she crossed the wall and entered our garden, landing on the tulip bed. I pulled her away hurriedly: my mother was extremely sensitive about the flowers.

            We were children and it was easy to believe. She spoke to me always with her mind, and projected what she read in others’ minds into mine, so that I could share. We learnt many things about the world that way, and it was frightening sometimes.

            One night my mother came home from work crying. She pretended her eyes were dry, but we could always tell.

            “How are you today?” she smiled, before she went upstairs. That wasn’t the sort of thing she usually said. She gave me a strange look before she went, a half-hungry, yearning look of despair that lasted a second before she turned away.

            My friend looked at me. Both our eyes were brimming with tears. And both of us knew why.

            “I’m sorry,” she broke down. “I didn’t want you to know.”

            And she ran out of the room.

            I stood there, unable to move. My mother was going to die. She knew – she hadn’t wanted to tell me. But I knew. And it was terrible. Every day after that was forced. I couldn’t talk to my mother – every word I said, every look I gave her was unnatural. And this made her sad. She couldn’t tell me and she didn’t know why I wasn’t myself. Every hour of everyday went by just as before – a little strained, neither of us knowing what to do, but both knowing what shouldn’t be known.

            Sometimes not knowing can be a good thing, I told my friend. Knowledge can be terrible. And sad. She never wanted to do it again. She hated her ability. Ever time I met her, there was something in the way she talked that told me that what we had discovered had affected her so much that she’d forgotten how to live. She was older and it was my mother. There are some secrets that should not come in the way of love, she told me, sounding wiser than her years. I didn’t understand. She had grown older.

            “I have to tell you something,” she began. I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the sun, just about to be covered by a massive cloud, grey and huge – like some huge hungry monster of the future. And the sunrays were struggling. It gave me peace, somehow.

            “I can’t really,” she said again.

            “Can’t what?” I asked.

            “I can’t read minds.”

            I looked around and stared at her through my eyes. Hypnotizing apple-green eyes – my mother used to say. I just found them somehow frightening in the mirror.

            “It’s true,” she said. “I have never been able to do it alone. It’s all you. You’re the one who can read minds. I was just pretending it was me.”

            I turned back towards the sun.

            “I know,” I said.

From a little bit of April

This is where I was. On a bad-worded Sunday evening in a paper-boat hat off the east end of Hebbal.

It was Easter. Almost.

But the words never went. They ran ink – in the untimely April rain. Ran ink like the open wound would never heal. Ran ink as if the summer couldn’t suck it dry in its dusty incomplete swell.

But I knew it could.

I knew it had.

But the ink still ran – into little gullets in the newly laid pitch. That swelled and bubbled where the sun’s rough touch played it into sticky tar. The kind that trapped boots. And heels. And other things that feet liked to kiss.

Like the earth beneath it. And grass that disappeared every second Thursday of the month. Magicked away by April-ness. That wouldn’t be there in May.

And the little white world of ink and things that I’d thought I’d left behind eased gently out of my fingers in the tugging wind and floated away in a gust of some more April-ness to a faraway island I couldn’t reach.

The barbed wire winked at me in the sun. Something about April flashed in the clouds overhead before disappearing over a smoke-lit horizon. And a line of cool grey cement.

The flyovers swayed in the wind – sagging in the April heat…screeching at the tug – and then almost snapping – but not quite.

Where we stood still yesterday.

It is a paper-boat hat now. Running ink in non-existent rain before it floats off in a non-existent wind over a non-existent road. It is a non-existent paper-boat hat now. Drinking it’s fill of April. Over and over and over again. Till Sunday gets lost somewhere in between all the letters that hadn’t been posted yet. In between the five-rupee stamps that tasted of burnt coffee on a foggy morning. In between cigarette-coloured socks and half-remembered tomorrows.

It is Sunday. Almost.

the brink

This is where we should fall

On high ground bristling with grass

And other things – beating

Wings in the dark

Too much to hold – and too little to not

There’s a soft glitter here

Whispering. Crashing.

Splintered wood and stone

Rippled in dense memories.

Craving and breaking and reaching.

Like us. Bound to the dust.

Bound to nothing. And everything.

Swirling together and lifting in the gale.

Where the thunderstorm rises dark and wild and free

Over the horizon

Something threatens. To begin.

Or to end.

This is where we should fall.