What the Photograph Tells the Poet and other poems

Jawaharlal Nehru announcing the death of Mahatma Gandhi from the gate of Birla House, New Delhi, January 30, 1948. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Feb 23, 2025

What the Photograph Tells the Poet

I cannot show what you see,

Movement dissipates in me.

I do not choose what falls in a frame

and what order is arranged.

I do not ruminate for years

for the absent shape.

I have no retakes.

There is an image you may have seen

The slain leader’s passing announced.

His face is a blur.

Bloom rash of stray light

hems him in from the side,

The half-lit officer’s visage from the other.

The bright lamp on the gate post

dwarfs them both.

He was lamenting

the light that has gone out of our lives.

You could say it is poetic,

I really would not know.

Based on Henri Cartier-Bresson’s iconic photograph of Prime Minister Nehru announcing Mahatma Gandhi’s passing

Insomnia

(23rd January, 25 years later)

It is as if a forest is in bloom

the axonal mesh lighting up.

Buoyant colour blebs floating,

dipping to barely graze the ground,

bouncing up again, through

the grey spaces in the night.

It is a way to keep alive, to dive,

to plunge into tarns of absent light

collecting around colours of days.

Blinding days, soaking vapid nights.

It is a way to keep alive, to pretend

that spark showers from the blazing car

are in fact, glow worm swarms,

inhabiting the sleeping woods.

For Timothy Graham Staines

To My Lord and Master

Is this not enough for you —

the man that I would not be?

Your voice in my head booming-

submit, submit to me?

Orchards that we uprooted?

Babies impaled? Sweet wells

we laced with lead? For you,

the building we sacked?

This fealty, this bended knee?

This ceremony, these lights on

the temple dome, soaking me? Sky

full of incense smoke, choking me?

The drone of the sacred chant

that drowns my gurgling infant.

The patricide bequeathed to me?

The suicide you bestow on me?

Welling Up

Welling up in me are people,

nations, that have ended.

The passing camaraderie

of turncoats. Lives spent on trifles —

hollow hurrahs at cricket matches,

friendship bands, victory marches.

The paeans for vain glory.

Welling up in me are scents

that waft through the land.

The tepid smell of worn-out hope

drying up in the torn down home.

An acrid stench seeping through

mute stone walls, unannounced —

an eeriness, a creeping fear.

Welling up in me are faces,

the pallid hue on all of them.

My mother’s prayers, the song

she would sing some nights

during the roza, wizened fingers

stroking my thinning hair —

Sare jahan se accha.

The citizen amendment rules that would enable the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) were notified on March 11 2024. The first roza in 2024 was observed on March 12th.