Two flailing oiled chotis

slap me out of stupor.

The Goddess arches out

hinged at the pole,

her saucer hands clasped

below mine.

A hooting call answered

with crystal stare

from wide apart eyes

that grazes my shoulder,

wounding me. Incoherent slang

shot with a nasal twang.

A crisp line scarred

by ghosts of stitches drawn

on scalp with the edge of a comb

down, down the valley

of her marred maang.

The milkmaid, having borne

the consequences

of an agitated udder,

the warrior princess

sporting the memento

of unanticipated victory.

An ecstatic partner

with clammy palms, thrown

off a phugdi rotation,

Devdas marks Paro

with expressions of love

garnished with glass shards.

*** This happened one morning as I shared the foot board of a Mumbai local train with a most astonishing girl, standing in front of me. chotis: braids (Hindi); maang: a line formed by the parting of hair on two sides (Hindi); phugdi: an act performed by two or more people holding hands and flinging themselves in a circle, common during Indian festivals

6.45 pm on a Saturday, two bodies try to catch up

with traffic swayings and omnipresent speed breakers

Our Maruti Alto negotiates its presence and passage

with bikes, cows and vegetable carts

A third body inverts itself between the two seats

Legs up and hands groping air

reaching towards a wheel

that juts out of the car dikkie

10 minutes of flailing in limbo

My right shoulder bettered

by an afternoon session

at the physiotherapist groans

A moment before I falter and let her jump

for her prized wheel and crash,

You park the car and jump out

Plucking our bawling distraught child out of my arms

In the car now drenched by a wave of silence

Shuddering more out of exhaustion than anticipation

I look out to see a vision radiating happiness

Vismaya in her new red and black tricycle

A fair distance away from the park.

dikkie: the storage compartment of the car. Also trunk (North American English), boot (British English), dickie (Indian English)   

You feel like a design

I'm working on,

whose date of submission

is not yet fixed,

by indecisive studio professors

who want us students to work more,

just a tad bit more.

On nights before a pre-final review,

like a tracing full of ideas,

essential but tentative,

you have the power

of lingering in my subconscious,

making me jump out of intermittent sleep

each night, to engage with you.

No paper to draw on,

you draw from me what is yours now.

No name plate either,

for your loved ones

use sounds borrowed

from seven languages

whose alphabets cannot be lettered.

I comb strands of your hair

so they fall in parallels,

like meticulously pointed bricks and dressed stone

rendered into masonry, in ink on paper.

I wipe eye secretions, tears, milk stains after a feed.

Your smudge-free face

becomes a drawing, complete.

 

Every once in a while

I place my ear on the floor

to gaze at an exactly angled ray

of sunlight working its magic

on a sleeping you.

A roughly 1:3 scaled model

of who you may be in 20 years

stares back at me;

your myriad expressions

changing by the millisecond

Unwittingly,

a satisfying thought crosses my mind:

did I just happen to create you?

I sing like the

single running stitch

of an unoiled tailoring machine,

reaching, quite linearly

from one point to another,

amply wandering, uncontrolled

outside the edges of sur in the songs i sing

You sing like the

convoluted floral embroidery

of a kurta worn proudly

created by hands, weathered by riyaaz,

making listeners lose themselves to

the nuances your textured voice creates

in snippets caught on Insta and Facebook

The completion of your song

holds no relevance to me

as the safar has become

more khoobsoorat than the manzil

and i enjoy your rendering of individual words

as you nurture and embellish them

with seemingly effortless harkatein

Your singing comes from a place of truth without pretentions.

It has made me knock on the door

of that room within me.

sur: a musical key or a scale; kurta: a long tunic like shirt; riyaaz: practice; safar: journey; khoobsoorat: beautiful; manzil: destination; harkatein - movement. Here it means a variation taken in the tune.

come

let's look out

the same window

see

differently

together

lift tinted panes

make real

our lives

don’t pay heed

to frequent reflections

come now.

let’s find

a window

that cajoles

to re arrange

our insides

as it shows

the changing

outside

so we have

only each other

as constant