Monthly Archives: April 2017

by

“Dirty”

A crescent Moon

Against the backdrop of Jahaan’s grimy skin

Under the shade of

His unkempt hair

Will tell you that he is too happy today.

If you are one of the residents

Of the big building

Just across the road from

His makeshift home,

He might even come up to you

With his beaming smile

And tell you that he found a clean Bisleri bottle 

In the sewer drain just beside his home,

The pipe that he sleeps in with his dog Tinku

Is just the right size for Jahaan

Like it was manufactured

Only to fit the world in it.

But Don’t visit him in the morning,

For then he is out

For his job.

And if you visit him in the evening,

His dishevelled face

And mucky clothes will tell you,

That his is the only job in the world

That dresses him up

After it’s done.

But, he takes pride in his job

If you ask him, he will tell you he just got promoted.

He will tell you that he likes

Collecting garbage from door to door

Better than

Selling pens

Or flags on holidays

From car to car,

Signal to signal.

Or better than

His first job

Where he wore dirty clothes too,

But, to beg on Akbar road.

He will tell you that he likes the sound that bells of different houses make

Better than

His hoarse voice saying “Paanch ka ek, Paanch ka ek” until someone opened the window.

And if you are lucky,

He will even show you his collection,

Jahaan’s treasure from the grime,

He’d say.

A red toothbrush, a tennis ball, a coloured pencil, even a CD at times

He knows the name of every object.

Okay, he asked the Chowkidaar!
He will tell you how much he loves

His treasures

And in between , remember to pick up the innuendo:

Sometimes, he loves the dirt too.

The only thing he hates,

Is the stench that comes with it.

That lingers on to his clothes

And body long after he has abandoned the dirt

And makes all his friends run away from him

Except Tinku.

He might ask you to gift him a “Perfiyum”,

As he heard from one of his friends.

So next time, you visit

Do remember to take the housewarming present

And tell him,

That the plastic perfume might make plastic people​ love him for a while,

But the real perfume,

Is within him

That makes him love himself every single day.
And then, when you return

To your painted home

With colossal walls,

And vintage halls,

Insulated from even a speck of dirt,

The dirt that you call filth

And that fills you up with disgust and dread,

Let his voice resound inside your dusty heart

To tell you that his was a home without filters,

But, unlike those who run away from him, calling him ‘Dirty’,

The dirt in his home does not come from within.

by

ME, RADHIKA.

My Father named me after,
The power of the God he believes in.
Yet, soon
I became his power.
So, my morning yawns became fragments
Of his strength
As he calls out my name
And gently tells me to wake up:

It’s time,

He says.
My name means the power of the universe,
And sometimes
I believe it too,
Urging myself to remember it.
Yet, my memory is a deceitful ally
That looks gleefully
As I fall face first into the sandpit of self doubt.

I start

To fall deeper
And deeper
Until all that’s left around me
Is sand and thistle
That suffocates each cell inside me,
And makes every synapse of my body
Regret the space it’s taking.
They say,
Power is in

Listening,

Then how is it that each time I listen,
To what others have to say
About me,
My name loses it’s relevance.
They tell me,
I am too bold with my words,
I am too naive with my choices,
I am too proud with my thoughts.
I think

To myself

That I wear my words and choices and thoughts
As an armour against their validation,
As the mini skirt their eyes are too ‘purified’ to see me wearing,
As the pantsuit that they dread their sons will answer to.
I want to tell them that my father named his daughter
After the power of God
And I am his strength.

So the next time they tell me this,
I use this power to light the corners of
The pit of affliction and doubt
I had fallen into,
And I solemnly voice the vibration
Inside the long suppressed cells and synapses,
To tell them:
It’s me who knows the meaning of my name

And not them.

~RS


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The Curious Case of the Reader and the Writer

Most days, 

I am a pingpong ball 

Between two mortal parts of me.

Holden Caulfield calls out my name,

From the book that I just kept aside,

To write

About a thought that was just born

Right around the sharp corner

Inside the labyrinth of my mind.

He was never a catcher​, I suppose

For I hop onto my train of thought

To travel miles away to mystic lands

Before he can lure me in, again.

Unlike today,

Most days,

The writer in me remains dormant,

Hesitant,

Uninspired,

Partly because Mr. Darcy seems more intriguing​

Than ranting about a writer’s block.

It’s far too much effort to negate a weakness

By romanticizing it, you see.

So,

Most days,

The immortal reader in me

Wins the tug of war against the mortal writer,

Who is tuned in

To the frequency of Denial 101:

A channel of self criticism.

Although,

Most days,

These two act more like Zeus and Posiedon,

Than enemies at war.

So, when I curl up in the warm folds of reading,

It tells me to go live my life,

And write my heart out.

And when I make myself comfortable

On a coffee date with writing,

It tells me to follow my heart,

And write again.

Yet,

Unlike most days,

Today,

Scout finally let Atticus Finch go to the courthouse,

And with that,

The reader rested in peace for a while,

As the writer

Surrendered to the poet

Who stealthily

Completed this poem.

by

SEPARATION

Seems like setting a rose on fire, like

Erasing yourself from already painted canvases , like

Plucking out raw grapes from a ripe grapevine

And their sourness seeping into the blood, like

Raging hot liquor against your throat, like

A needle being dragged against a writing slate, like

Two roads diverged in the woods, and you stood there, knee-deep

In the quicksand as they walked away.

Once again, it’s the same discomfort of

Never getting used to saying ‘Goodbye’.

by

Timezones

Timezones collide,

When a friend calls

From halfway across the globe.

The force of the collision,

Consumes destitution in the entirety

And it seems like,

All events in life since the last call,

Conflate to create an endless song,

That you sing unstoppably,

To fill the distance created by space and time.
Listening to that voice,

Brings life to the photographs

We took last summer,

In between lazy afternoon drives

Or sleepy morning bike rides.

Since you left,

Picture papers that hang on my wall,

Stopped glowing as bright as the fairy lights around them,

Until today.
It’s been a round around the sun already.

Your voice seems the same and yet, different-

Deepened under the weights that you choose not to mention.

I do the same.

And yet, in pauses between the tresses of our conversation,

We learn about the aesthetics of a thing called friendship.

And in that moment,

Our unshared heartbreaks,

Our untold sorrows,

Our unheard joys,

Do not matter.

Instead, what matters is the collision of timezones,

That makes the ‘distance between us’ take a backseat,

And let’s eager memories drive

The train of consciousness

Into bending timezones,

Meant just for us.

by

Batasha, Gupchup and Golgappa

My dadi called it gupchup,

My nani called it batasha,

And I,

I am the girl with big eyes that go red

And a small mouth that opens too wide

While having the very last golgappa

That’s on the plate, for me.
I still smell spices in my brain,

Alien to my mum’s modular kitchen

That could be only found

In the folds of a house 

That had outlived its age.

Just like my grandmas’ love

Carefully concealed under

The garbs of the wrinkles

That adorned their faces.
I still see them moving their hands,

Gesticulating every story of Ram or Krishna

That they told me

As they boiled raw mangoes

And crushed tamarind

In between stone slates,

To create the magical water,

That filled the space inside the puri

With the sweetness of their smiles

And sourness of their parting cries.
I still hear them humming,

Tunes of ancient lands,

While they roll and flatten the batter 

Into perfectly shaped circles.

The kitchen making batasha

Hums the tune of a man

Who bends down for those in need.

The kitchen making gupchup

Sings the song of a warrior woman

Returning from battle,undefeated.

In Summer breaks, nani taught me humbleness.

In Winter breaks, dadi taught me courage.
It’s been years,

That I forgot how to trace my steps

Back to heavens of my childhood.

So now,

When I want to go back,

I go out for a plate of golgappas.

And with the first gulp,

I am the same girl

With big eyes and a small mouth,

Who peeked into the kitchen

To always find her dadi with the gupchup

And her nani with the batasha.

Beaming at 

The courage 

And the humbleness.

by

Why humans speak

We talk

To murder sense,

To needlessly get tensed

To silence a child’s first cry

To support an already spoken lie,

To avoid a fight ,

To get into another tussle that involves might.

To drown a prostitute’s screams,

To break a free nation’s dreams.

Yet,

We often speak too,

In just the right amount,

When your voice is the music

To someone else’s ears,

“You are beautiful.”

“You’ll be alright.”

“Cry.”

“Listen to the silence.”
We often speak,

To appreciate the beauty

Of silence

When we stop speaking.

And somewhere the gods smile,

Seeing the last ingredient

Coming out of our Pandora’s box.

by

Frank Sinatra and some cigarettes

There’s more smoke

Of tobacco 

Than oxygen in the air

And yet 

My lungs find

The air to breathe.

There’s more Sinatra

Than silence in my ears 

And yet

I catch my mind

Wandering off to places

I have never seen.

And I wonder

If he believes

In what he sings.

If fools rushed in

Where angels feared to tread,

Why is it

That when he was dead,

He was buried with

A lighter and 

A bunch of cigarettes,

Just as if

He was more afraid

To meet

The angels from heaven

Than

The demons from hell.