the curtains fall for you
letting in just a few sunrays
that hold swirling dust atoms.
we are dust , atoms and swirling.

This jewel of a girl is not now girl
Because she held the key to jewels.
She needs Vishnu. She is scattered.


(This is about the recent incident of murder of a ten year old girl,
Vaishnavi ( literally the consort of Vishnu, the chief Hindu God) by
her step-mother’s brothers in the wake of fears of her father
bequeathing all his property to her at the cost of her step-brothers)

The drone goes on 'tween the ears;
Existence is some heads bobbing up
On the blue space beyond the spiked gate
A mere serious girl clicking her shoes
On the waking ground in oval motion
And midnight crows piercing the night
Waiting for tomorrow's early dawn
A seller man sitting under the lake trees
Spilling beans on the red and blue bags
It does not surely add up on some days.

My mind overflows the body
Take my body- I don’t need it-
And my bags in the corner.
Give them to the medical student
And to the Kolkata rag picker.

(On the demise of Mr.Jyoti Basu, the veteran communist at the ripe age of 96)

There on the mountain sits my waiting God
As I am trying to muffle all fail-sounds
And wipe three chalk lines of failed roads.
Pray is the keyword of this dark night
As my head rests on the frail pillow.
Tomorrow morning I shall cup my right palm
To take the sacred camphor water to lips
And have that pig-tailed man touch my head
To announce my ancestry to His presence
While my flowers shout in white fragrance
And the flame of my lamp rises in prayer.

*Three chalk lines refer to the Vaishnava ritualism in which Vishnu worshippers (as against Shiva worshippers) wear three vertical lines on their foreheads.

One enters the box of spiked gate
To make clockwise oval circles
Of familiar world views, at times,
With strange incursions of thoughts
Asking why a certain black cat
Beside the rock and the sprinkler
Exists in today’s accomplished view.
It is not the cat alone by the rock.
Try changing it to anticlockwise
To see strangely preoccupied faces
That seemed to be thinking much
In their burping stomachs and acid.
Squeals of old laughter then greet
Morning views of mist and rabbits-
Disappeared rabbits that had merely
Jumped out of the box and gone.
There was no grass left in the box.
We are making circular motions
Dutifully in our own square boxes.
We look up to see standing people
In balconies of red-and-blue houses
Bursting with morning men and lungis.
They should be back in their box soon.

Let me say my words
And live life in images
As in deep sleep, so that
I hear the tree falling
In the forest of dream,
And every tree’s falling
In every forest of sky.

There was the girl of the cross-eye
Her long pigtail tucked in blouse.
The nose told stories like eyes.
Her long back arched silently
As she crouched and waited
For history to break and begin
With fresh stories in the making.

Pink flames rise slowly to the winter sky
As their smoke enters the leafless trees.
Old broken tires blacken the asphalt road
While letters are obliterated for other letters.
A shriveled up man is lying curled up
In the corner waiting to rise from the ashes
The sirens will blare once again and die.

Our home was soft corners, diaphanous shadows,
A ghost-home tamarind tree of dark midnights
That used to shed many tiny leaves and bird-twigs,
A well deep in darkness and shrieking night crickets,
A wet coconut rope slithering on its stone rim.

The water shivered on its perked up surface
At the dark touch of the dimpled metal pail.
The pail got pulled up quickly spilling water
To the banana which squealed with green joy.
The thorny fence wound its way in the moonlight
Quietly disappearing in the hillock without trace.