The Telegram

(being my friend’s experience)

“Your father is dead”,
screamed the telegram
fluttering noisily in my hand.

Heart pulsing,
I ran for a phone.

Much later,
back from the telephone booth,
I held my quivering wife
and whispered,
“The Post Office got it
all wrong,
It was not for me.
At least not-
this time”.

Name

(To my friend Hasan Mansur)

1
A child is named
after mother’s some unfulfilled wish
or father’s passing fancy,
after somebody’s favourite film star
or freedom fighter
and sometimes after the grandfather-
that egotist who wants to pass on
something more than just his genes,

Like some old fossil trying to gain currency.

2
Few get to choose their own names.
Most keep for a life time
what they have been given-
changing, contorting
to fit their given masks.

Except that Hindu friend of mine,
who turned into a Muslim
and selected a brand new name for himself,
first name, second name and surname inclusive

And that daughter of my friend’s
because he called her by a sound
rather than by a name,
“She must choose hers herself”, he said.

3
To change one’s name
is to unmask oneself,
to strip one’s being of every stitch of belief

and stand naked in public
to receive each passer-by’s barb of stare
and declare one’s loss of faith,

to pick oneself up from the heap
and don the beliefs that have withstood
the singeing heat and walk on

into the crowd as though nothing
ever changed, but one’s own being.

Death

When the neighbourhood men
go to the hospital and fail to return,
It is then that I think of death

and of that sealed copper pot of holy water
locked away with the family jewels
in my mother’s steel gray storewell.

And I think of grandfather
for whom that pot was secretly procured.

But that aging healthfad,
who cured his diabetes with relentless dieting,
after his farewell visit to Kashi

had said, “When I am dead,
Don’t give me that polluted water.
That river is filthy with unburnt corpses.

It will make me retch in my after-life!”

My Father

1
I looked down at my father,
doubled up on his straight-back chair,
gasping for his asthmatic breath.

In a short while,
as the whistling spasm subsided,
he straightened up,
The twinkle came back to his eye,
“It is because I climbed the stairs”,
he said.

“Was he always like this?”,
I asked my mother,
As my father downed his glass of milk
in one long breathless gulp
and sat panting.
“He can do nothing slowly”,
hissed my mother
as the daughters-in-law, mocking,
smiled at each other.

2
He was my age,
when he left the small town
for the Big City,
wife and two children in tow
and then sired me
in a rented house-
also upstairs.

Having always lived in the Big City,
In my own flat,
Having never had children,
Having never had any difficulties
climbing stairs-
(I also drink my milk very slowly)
Our lives could not have been more different,
Which is why
I am always surprised,
When his past occasionally returns
to haunt me-
A nightmare bout of nocturnal asthma,

The result of a gene hastily borrowed,
Impossible to pay back!
------------


(The last two lines are copied from a poem by A.K. Ramanujan)

Mango Season

1
Ever since the neighbourhood tree
began to recklessly flower and
hang out its fruit like some monochrome linen,
my mother had taken to sleep by the window-
thieving footfalls and stone-throwing urchins
kept her awake through night and nap-time.

Grand children deployed at mealtimes
screeched and chased
squirrels and garden lizards
flinging mud balls and waving sticks.

2
“They ought to have grown to over
a kilo in size each”,
said my mother,
training her hawk eyes on
a heap of tender mangoes
gathered by the grand children
from the street-side drains.

“This must be a pickle-mango tree!”,
said my pickle loving sister.
So one heap was sliced wafer-thin and pickled.

“This pickle is sweetish!”, grimaced
my father.
In his long checker-board life,
he had never had his flavours mixed.

3
“This tree has an infection”,
said the tree-doctor from the Agri-University.

“All trees shed their early mangoes.
You must wait for the second crop”,
said my know-all brother-in-law.

Only, my wife knew best.
She firmly walked to the nearby market
and bought a dozen of the juicy fruit.
She peeled and sliced them into succulent cubes.
At the evening meal, every one quietly ate.

That night, my mother slept like a baby.

Dharwar House

1
Stout stone walls and
a slope of rising roof.
Somewhere at the top,
tiles merge their edges
to my short-sighted eyes.

Here ancient spiders
weave their tales
in a transparent web
and trap
fact and fiction like fruit flies.
-This tangled history
is beyond the reach of my broom.

2
Some tiles have cracked,
others have worn down.
They weep rain water at
every shower and turn my
bed into a soggy mess.

I sleep on the floor and
proclaim Gandhian simplicity.

3
Latter day poverty scissored the
mansion into rented fragments-
one to a clinic, the other to a
newly married couple,
the third to a bunch of college students
who wash their clothes noisily
every Sunday morning and hum
film tunes, not very softly.

4
Somewhere along the line
came a painter-genius
who paved the uneven walls
with ancestors imprisoned in
varnished wood frames.
(I don’t believe they ever smiled.)
The varnish has peeled
into a leucodermal skin.

More paintings lie face downwards.
Septic nails jut out of their hollow backs.

5
I stripped for the night
and a row of somber eyes
looked piercingly down from the walls.

Somewhere a cat mewed
and a bone dropped by a flapping bat
came clanking down
the metallic tiles and
broke the rain drenched silence.

Heart pounding,
I grabbed my book of omens.

A Sewer-Rat

When a sewer-rat
in an unexpected flash
shot into the blinding glare
of street lights,
my wife,
her head bursting
with rodent-pest statistics,
said matter of factly,
“It must be killed!”

Yet,
When a pack of street urchins
hunted it aground
under a hail of vicious kicks
and a rain of boulder-missiles,
she turned in disgust.

“What if giants hunted a man like that?”