Not only is it possible to fall in love with merely the idea of a person, it is, more often than not, the case. How sad that to you I am an idea of such grand proportions and great potential, when to myself I can be summed up in a few words. I made you, all your flaws and all the magic included. Then why can I not let myself be made? For truly, nothing would make me happier than to know that I exist outside my own body, in you; but I never can stop wondering what would happen to those few words then.

There are no voices in the night. No sprites emerge from nooks except critters that fly about and bite you in your sleep. My sleep is dreamless. Dreams, I think, do not dare enter the bottomless pit of my troubled slumber.

Around me and suddenly, there are smells which fill the air and turn the room sour. Foul reeks and odours bring putrefaction into my house on the backs of nightmare creatures that sing, crowing, at me; the voices in the night are come, are come.

Starbright

I stood naked under the stars, swelling with the knowledge that no one could see me now - I was invisible, free, I was dust. Far from feeling aroused, I felt as if a dead weight had dropped into my stomach. The night and I, we were the same. Both came out silently when no one was watching, and joined each other in a sordid embrace.

Dayend

When you have stood namelessly in the afternoon as it slowly turns to evening to dusk to night, and watched the sky change to colours that make you want to paint; when you have felt the sultry breezeless twilight wrap about your neck and ankles with clouds of mosquitoes sharing your very blood, it is not possible to be closer to any man, to any city, or to your children than you are to Lucknow, your own.

Himspeak

I can remember saying all this as if somebody else was speaking through me:

I could stand and light a cigarette on Chowpatti after dark, shut my eyes and try to listen to the sea over the traffic. And from inside my shut eyes I could see myself on four continents, feel the ocean lick my toes with its salty tongue, and lose myself to the endless water.

When would I ever find where I belong?
I couldn’t place myself on any continent, let alone in one house.

Londres!

Some old dreams of mine seem childish to me now; but some are still under the always-wanted-never-did category.

Busking in Tottenham Court Road Tube Station.

Written in Church; we went with a hosteller to mass in nearby Sant Nagar

Oh what is Holy? For people in their despair And in their joy Come here Kneel And are one. I feel less lost here; A place to dissolve into, Be nameless And unidentified; A place to be, To feel small and full at the same time A child and a woman. To quietly listen to the silence in the prayers. And in the Church I look for the idol Or for the Ideal?

Trillions Apart

I weep when I hear John Lennon sing,
And I wept when George Harrison died.
I took out dad’s old tapes and listened to GH play Here Comes the Sun alone
And I cried.
I walked across Abbey Road.

I weep when I hear my mother’s old house in Gole Market has been demolished years ago.
I weep when my grandfather tells me of his days in Kalpathy, at Annamalai, in Cuttack, in Srinagar and in Sudan.

I wept when I read the stories my grandmother wrote in Tamil, in English
and were published after she died;
Stories about ourselves.

I jump for joy when I realise I live in the place that gave birth to Golgappa, Puchka, Panipuri and Batasha.
And laugh when I realise further that they are all the same thing
and delicious all.

I walked through the pines that rise on one side and fall on the other side of the road
in Ranikhet in the Kumaon hills.

I picked up pebbles from the bottom of Kempty Falls in Mussoorie
And sand from underneath my feet at Kanyakumari.

I have between the pages of my books
Maple from Toronto and Silver Oak from Lansdowne in Uttaranchal.

I walked barefoot on Eleko Beach;
that rests, on one side, on Lagos
and on the other, on the Atlantic.

I touched the Eiffel Tower at the foot because I could not afford to take the lift to the top.
I always put a coin in the guitar-case of a busker.

I fell asleep in Hyde Park,
The bright sun on my face
and the boys playing football - or is it soccer? -
teams of Shirts and No-Shirts.

Whenever I drive through Rajpath I crane my neck out of the auto-rickshaw
to see Parliament House on one side and IndiaGate on the other.
I get goosepimples whenever I hear the National Anthem
of India
of Nigeria.

Is Delhi - where I study - my home?
Or is Lucknow - where I live -?
Is Lagos - where I grew up - my hometown
Or is it Hyderabad - where I was born?

Am I an Indian?
A Palakkad Iyer?
Am I a traveller
Or just lost?

I belong everywhere
And so I belong nowhere.

Who am I?
Or can I never hope to answer that
while I sing
in Tamil, in English, in Hindi, in Spanish, in French, in Arabic, in Assamese, in Gujarati, in Bengali, in Italian and in every language singable.

I search for languages unknown
That everyone will understand
But no one can claim

And I search.

Anachronistic Chameleon

I dissolved into the wind and reddened into the sunset – the city was me and I Delhi.

Until it became hard to tell the date or the year.

I heard his voice and turned around
almost like a reflex,
knowing he was far away,
but unable to resist the urge to see the face the voice belonged to.

Woolly fingers reached out to me
and I said, “Why me?”

I am timeless in the same way one is homeless.

My very dreams are disjointed
like (the song that sings of
a feather) that sings of
a song

Stone

There are pieces of me, the beginnings of a canker, that I never want to see grow into a full-blown person.

The bold haziness
the wheezy calm I don’t read
Wakes me up a-morning
And I am (st)one

“Leave It” Theory

// That what was bought in X city stays there. Thumb rule. Give away, sell, destroy. Whatever. Never carry. Must try it sometime...