Is This What We Have Come to?

It’s raining black rivers from the skies tonight,
Incessant angry rivers of our sorrows,
We shiver, cold and wet like drowning rats,
In our warren holes, cracks, and burrows.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Around us the rhythmic Bollywood dancers,
Shake their legs; thrust their hips in motion,
We are like amorous dogs baying in the night,
For a touch of the idols we see on television.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Why do we live in constant, unfounded fears,
Of credit we have used, and loans unpaid,
To buy the follies that rot at home from disuse,
When Warren Buffet lives in a two-bedroom pad?

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Have we broken our errant promises,
To our brothers who till the soil, grow grains,
Not to decimate forests and mine the hills,
So they don’t twist and turn nightly, for rains?

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Instead we celebrate our borrowed money,
Indulging ring tones and crass downloads on the net,
Then we huddle and cry when the skies open up,
And nature weeps the black rain of regret.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

The Platform

On the platform the hiss of steel,
Is like hiss of snake; the clang of wheels,
It’s the 8.30 a.m. local arriving,
And, the 8.31 a.m. local departing.

Travelers, their faces expectant,
Thoughts of home and contentment,
Faces staring at the far horizon,
For trains to arrive to their destination.

The announcer’s trained voice,
Impersonal in its insouciance,
There are voices humming,
Insistent shouts and hurried running.

Tired-, haggard-looking men,
And sweet-, spent-looking women,
They walk, shuffle legs, and shift,
Churning; regimented mass of three shifts.

The bhel-puri is tangy and sweet,
Mixed with the vendor’s own sweat,
Eat we must, spit, and drink,
Of civic sense, we must not think.

Births, this platform has seen,
Deaths, when the lights turn green,
As bogeys trundle in in the night,
There are many a curse and a fight.

There are aimless people here,
Embarking, disembarking to nowhere,
The weak lights cast shadows everywhere,
The neon light’s glow is so bizarre.

Some faces tragic, some faces sad,
Some are bored, some are mad,
Some long to rest their weary heads,
On the soft comfort of their beds.

The platform is now empty,
And, now, full of girls pretty,
Their talk and walk fills one with hope,
But, age has caught up, you dope.

The stoic platform in the early dawn,
Look, how it reposes in the sunny morn,
It bakes in the relentless heat of noon,
And, at night it sleeps in the glow of moon.

J

-----------------
I work very close to a railway station, in fact, I can stare right into a platform from my office. So, I have been working on this poem and hope it works for you.

MINX

Having dispensed with the honorific
in two days flat, she supplanted a softened
first name to take the edge off the former.
Still, it wasn’t strictly his own: all too often
he’d weighed against that hated misnomer.
The bloody thing was not even chic.

His given of course was no less detested –
(his kind being happiest without one) –
buried, save for the odd wifely exhumation
now and then. So what was begun
as a gentle jibe at their age equation
(a lifetime separating luscious and grey-crested)

suddenly sprouted, grew a soul and throve
as love’s surprising spur. The doldrums stirred,
her sighs bussed a sail or two
to life, a tentative swell answered.
Supremely assured, knowing what she must do
she added wile to wind and drove

him out of his wits: she was out to kill.
While he, long becalmed in inert seas
was unused to storms. Taken pleasurably
aback he marvelled at the unwonted breeze,
before being swept aloft inexorably
in the typhoon, gale, blizzard, what you will.

***

The First Rain Saudade

First Rain Saudade

The first showers fall,
Syncopated percussions,
Like memory of first love.

It wets eyelids,
Brings out a drawn sibilant breath.
The rain paints sky with a gray brush,
Satiates the earth,
Slakes desire, like an absent lover’s kiss.

Slowly memory unravels,
Oh! How the nymphs came and went,
Spilling the air
With moist yearning.
Isn’t love
The desire of something one can’t have?

The upended trees, buildings,
Reflected in recent clouds,
And the skin erupting with goose bumps,
The wetness clinging,
As memory to soul:
A feeling of saudade.

She went away,
Forsaking love,
The memory lingers,
As first showers.
The smell of wet earth,
Brings back her musky spoor,
Wish she were here,
To hug and to hold.

The clouds make love to thunder,
The skies pour forth anguish,
It would be enough,
To know that somewhere in the world,
She is alive,
And watching a similar rain.

The first showers fall,
Syncopated percussions,
Like the memory of first love.

J

------------------------------

Saudade, according to wikipedia (http://wikipedia.com) is a Portuguese word for a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return. (Thanks “?!” for introducing me to the word.)

TRAVEL SNAPSHOT: TENT CITY

She stood there watching, intent,
for hours, or so it seemed,
on a high rise balcony,
sipping the golden nectar of a
fruit from this land.

The sun beat down
and a child’s skin glistened
brown - the lather slithering
down - under mugs full of water,
extracted from a tiny
plastic bucket by his mom.

Her father soon joined her
for the engrossing balcony view,
and innocent, questioning eyes.

“Where do they live Dad?
The bathing child and his mom?”
For there wasn’t a ‘home’ in sight.

He pointed to the patch
of filthy plastic blue
sheltering a four-post home,
and a few others scattered
in the distance.

He christened it “Tent City”.

The cows on the road
didn’t shock or surprise,
the stray dogs were friends,
and a walk to the beach -
just a time to meet Sana -
a Tent City friend
now clutching a Barbie prize.

Pragya

JERUSALEM

Written for Palm Sunday.

***

No victor’s entry this. And one must bide

one’s mount I suppose: it might have been worse.

At least the fellow’s uncomplaining, and a horse

would have been seen as pride.

The throngs gratify, though what understanding

they have must be left to conjecture or the ages:

do they know what this coming presages?

Six days to a crucifixion, palms notwithstanding.

***

Ambivalence

Not crazy enough to run from street to street naked and stuttering just to be heard, not poetic enough to fill reams amidst drifting smoke, contemplate divorce, walk into a river with pockets full of shiny, round pebbles

Not louche enough to agree heartily or prudish enough to frown disapproval unequivocally and beyond doubt, not stymied enough to win the approval of fat-fingered, balding men who approve whole-heartedly of women who smile a lot and say nothing

Not stupid enough to give without taking, not clever enough to hold out the carrots one by one and hide the sticks away, just beyond the reach of the unsuspecting, the forgettable, the dispensable

Not pretty enough for fame, not ugly enough to incite ridicule the way the village idiot does from small, innocent children who never know any better

Not wronged enough for lawyers to hoist their trusty swords and ride into battle for the fated million or social workers to throng the streets wearing white, not entirely happy either.

Copyright Anindita Sengupta
http://niseng.blogspot.com

MATUTINAL

Mornings are refracted, a Nicol prism
shadow land, death overstaying its nightly
berth. The paling sky nudges it out,
in crumpled bedclothes, unsightly,
as it hurriedly gathers them about –
the start of another diurnal catechism.

Sleep layers the kitchen pane, grey
and pallid, a maid rudely shook awake.
It’ll be a while before its baleful stare
loses its blear, becomes less opaque
with the lightening air,
readies for the white implacable day.

I put the kettle on, mulling ghosts loath
to leave, bleak litany of a life’s course.
A flight departs for somewhere, cutting
briefly through the fog; till tea restores
routine, the familiar stir shutting
out debris, wrecks, ruins of youth.

***

LOST AND FOUND

Odd spot to find a paperweight –
I mean, a windowsill in the office loo
is no repository for even the commonplace.
Yet there it is, with nary a clue
to its ownership or lack thereof, its glaze
winking sun perfect, smilingly ovate.

Still life: “Glass egg on ledge.”
In my mind the tentative title
forms itself, neat, un-dramatic;
a neutral, even recital
to stamp the perfection of the static.
For a moment I regard the image,

then pick the bauble up, not quite clear
what I’ll do with it, wondering too
at this curious epiphany:
loss, abandonment, a rescue
perhaps, in some funny
fairy tale where I play saviour

to vitreous birds in embryo.
Or whatever. For suddenly I’m fond
of the thing, like a schoolboy
and a matchbox beetle, a bond
of unaccountable, irrational joy –
as only another schoolboy would know.

***

Review of "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss springs at you with the many-splendored colours of life in the North-Eastern part of India, Kalimpong to be exact. It is tragic, comic and a dark reminder of how insurgency, extremism is threatening to wreck this once-peaceful region of India. In fact, the threat of violence looms large throughout the novel, in the very words of characters that seem to have something lacking in them, just the feeling that their lives aren’t fulfilled.

Picturesque, but crumbling Chuo Oyu is the abode where young Sai is sent to after her parents’ death to live with her grandfather, the retired judge Bomanbhai Patel, who is living out the last phase of a life of a taciturn man who during his training in Civil Service in England didn’t speak to anyone for years and has painful memories of how he mistreated his wife to death, which he is trying to atone. He had sent his wife back home where his daughter was born. This daughter, a scientist, who never met her father lived all her life in hostels married Sai’s father, an orphan, who was also a scientist. The couple then go to work in Russia where Sai was born and both her parents die leaving her grandfather as the only caretaker and relation Sai has in the world.

Sai is being tutored by Gyan, in Chuo Oyu, who being a Ghurkha is sympathetic to the Ghurkha national Liberation Front (GNLF) which is violently demanding a separate homeland in this North-Eastern region. Gyan reports to his friends that the judge has two rifles in his house and one night they come and rob the house and humiliates him and his cook. The judge and the cook have a common bond that runs back to the days when the former was a district collector in a remote area where he went hunting for patridges and would write fake entries in his diary about the number of patridges he killed, whereas the truth was that he was a poor shot and killed none.

The situation in Kalimpong is shown to be getting worse as the militancy gains ground and the sisters Noni and Lola are coerced into harbouring terrorists in their house and they even come and poach on their property, building hutments over it. There are demonstrations where Khukri knives are brandished as the GNLF men demand a separate homeland. The irony of how they masquerade for what is according to them “a noble” cause, using insurgency and murder of innocents is brought out very well by the author.

Perhaps the most potent message that the novel conveys is of how a band of youth recruited by goons can threaten peace in a sleepy and peaceful haven and is only waking up to the new realities of life. These youth are inspired by re-runs of karate movies of Jackie Chan and the violent movies of Rambo. It’s a sad reflection of modern life. The novel’s principal comment, made lucidly clear, according to this writer, is how media can corrupt the youth and sow in them the ideals of violence and mayhem, manipulated by a few misguided individuals.

The cook’s son Biju is away in the US as an illegal immigrant, working in hotels run by shady Indian characters, being paid low, working all days of the month to chase his dream. But he finds that he hasn’t made any friends, and his relations are away in India. The idea of migration is well portrayed in these sections. Biju’s and Sai’s life become the leit motif of the novel with Sai being shielded from the childhood she hasn’t had neither in the convent nor in Chuo Oyu where she is a virtual prisoner and pines away for the love of the elusive Gyan, immersed in his poverty and ideals. There is a poignant section in the book when she goes in search of her absent lover and sees the depravity in which he lives.

Biju’s life is even more of that of a prisoner of his own conscience. Though he lives in New York he hasn’t the time to see the country, lives in poverty where he has to sleep in shifts, or on the floor of the hotel he works, and even has to serve beef which he detests. His friend the philandering Saeed Saeed is a colourful character from Zanzibar who is tormented by friends referred to him from his home country, as is Biju by his father the cook from India, who recommends to him stray wastrels who want to immigrate to the US from India. These “tribes” come to US for the first time and are desperate to make a living and like Biju is willing to undergo any torment to make ends meet. The novel truly depicts their sad lives.

The good father Booty who lives with Uncle Potty is found to be an illegal alien, though he has lived all his life in Kalimpong, trying to make it into the dairy capital of India. But he is thwarted by the ever present Amul brand of the original dairy capital of India – Anand. Father Booty is sent back to Switzerland for overstaying, and Kalimpong descends into mayhem with no food available, not even bread, and is overrun by terrorists and the military.

Much speculation has gone on in the media about the portrayal of Kalimpong, of how the denizen of the town hasn’t taken kindly to its portrayal by the author. But this writer feels that the novel has a valid point to make, of how an author can use artistic licence to make his/her point though it may be somewhat in the extreme. The author is primarily writing a work of fiction and not a factual account. It is a story of imaginary characters, though the settings may be real and the world he/she creates is unreal, and hints at his/her view of the truth.

She encapsulates the essence of Indian thought and thinking in this oeuvre of vivid colours of the literary spectrum. For example when the judge loses his dog and goes around asking if anyone has seen it, and the men whisper behind his back, “Sala, he is bothered about a dog, when people are dying here.” How typical.

A definite must read, even if only for Kiran Desai’s devastating wit, charming style, and the way she keeps the pace going. Desai is an author of the new breed who use multiple question marks “???” and multiple exclamation marks, “!!!” throughout the text. I think it jars and should have been avoided. The need is for subtlety and not overt exaggeration. What I also found jarring was the intimate description of the characters including some of the disconcertingly intimate habits of the judge and that of Gyan. Was the author following a stereotype here? Don’t now. However, given the Booker Award and all the salient points the novel makes, a not to be missed novel by a true artisan of the word.