Image credit – pxfuel.com

AFTER LOCKDOWN
 
April 22, 2020
 
Outside, the wind moves like an apparition
animating the clothes hung out on the line.
Someone invokes the names of God and cries.
 
Wherever you turn, the faces are the same,
fenced in by three-ply masks or handkerchiefs.
Autorickshaws line the margins of the road
 
like ladybugs on a blackened twig;
shops lift their eyelids heavy with prolonged sleep;
and cars wait for the traffic signal to turn green
 
like wild buffaloes migrating to grassier plains
being held up by a predator’s furtive presence.
Light clings like an infection to the shape of things,
 
and imprisoned in it, motes of dust rise like angels
about to be torn apart, wing from painful wing.
Far away, the sea evaporates its heirloom of tears.
 
PANDEMIC, TEASHOP
 
Walking into a wayside teashop
on a cold January morning,
I see the hot, steamy waterfall
of tea suspended for a moment
between two dented steel mugs.
 
I watch on as the tea cascades
into a squat tumbler
cradled between two worn fingers
and the froth puffs over the brim.
 
What does this mean for us—
curious machines of bone,
bandwidth, and flesh—
that we need to take a fall to rise phenomenally?
Or that the surface is the most insubstantial of all?
 
I wonder why I am looking for meanings
in the patchwork of random things.
I see myself sipping the tea
as if from a disembodied distance,
the facemask, a blue crescent
over my stubble-stippled chin, wafting
a sour scent of mingled sweat and suffocation.
 
The tea is sugary, but it is the first
I’ve dared to have out in the open
for what seems like an eternity
now. I’m going to take
my time over it like a prisoner
takes his time over a call from home.
 
KALVILAKKU*
 
Before the idol of the flute-wielding god
smeared with thick sandalwood paste
and garlanded with tulsi leaves, stands
a tiered stone lamp, black with the accretion
of soot and prayers. In each tier,
 
five wicks drenched in fragrant oil—
their tips pointed for self-immolation—
hold the flame aloft. Like a tree
leaved briefly with flames,
the stone lamp bares its vulnerability

to the wind blowing from the east.
Carved figures with enigmatic smiles
peep out of the temple’s walls on all four sides;
sticks of incenses burn,
revealing their wilting spine of ash;
 
and curlicues of smoke rise into the sky;
Incantations subside into a drawl,
then silence. A coucal with a beetle
dangling from its beak
 flies down from the peepal tree and looks about
with its blood-red eyes for the familiar sight
 
of worshippers circumambulating the shrine,
but no footsteps, running clockwise
from private limbos into the deity’s
dark blue bosom, break its reverie.
 
It waits out the stone lamp’s slow Autumn
of flames as the stars begin to erupt
on the sky’s reddening face.


*Stone lamp found in temples across Kerala
*This poem was also composed during the pandemic.
 
KURUNJI*
2006
 
The chill air sticks like a giant leech
to our skin as we walk up
the dusty trail, legs weary
from the climb. Our eyes pan
the slopes where the exodus
of kurinji flowers is in progress.
 
The flowers gaze back at the Ghats,
caught in a stampede as the wind swoops down
on their frail stalks, and sigh. What a pity
they have to leave in such a hurry
and should wait a dozen years now!
 
A purplish-blue sea
obscured by the trickery of mist,
and often with a glinting display
of the Nilgiri tahr’s curved horns,
the flowers speak of the suddenness
of departures, and of happy times
 
suspended in parentheses
beside longer durations of unease
punctuated by hope and tears.
 
 
*Strobilanthes kunthiana, known as “Kurinji” in Tamil, is a shrub that is found in the shola forests of the Western Ghats in Kerala.