Highway Scooterist by Day
My Vespa glides
A minnow
Alongside
Truck-sharks
In sea-lanes of traffic, past
Shops, DDA parks
Bus-stops, crossings. Here where
Din is speech
Tongues of double-horns stutter
Brakes skid, wheels screech
Engines sputter,
Hammer-blows of clamour
Crash upon my helmeted head
Spinning among half-million
Hubbed flyers of the highway and
One rider in tow –
Death on my pillion.
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Highway Scooterist by Night
Through the forest
Of tree-avenue
Lightpoles tiptoe
Like twin-antlered
Antelopes. I ride
My iron-roan, one-eyed, in dread
Of car-tigers, some
Wayfarer starry
May be their quarry.
Overrun, won’t leave
One print of stalking wheel.
In The Suburbs
How can one sleep at night
In a neighbourhood plangent with yowls
Of mongrels, and whistles of chowkidars
Tapping the streets with staves? During day
Careening trucks dump at your doorstep
Slub heaps of earth, grit and sand, constricting the lane
At its waist, leaving the air dusty, olid – the sky
Never cleanly blue. Everyone
Wants to own a dream-house in this city
Of developers and realtors, and after
Buying one, yearns to own another.” Stacks
Of lac-coloured adobes, samel or freshly baked
At the kiln, scaffoldings, ribs of wrought iron –
Structures suspended in midair; pole,
Plank and spar I pass by lying strewn
Amidst the detritus. Crushers, cairns
Of ashlars, gravel, sieves.
Has lapidary greed
Overtaken man’s greed for gold?
* A report recently released by the Housing Ministry says that there are 11 million urban houses lying vacant, many of them bought purely for investment purposes. at about This, at a time, when the urban demand-supply gap for housing is put 19 million. 16Indian Express 22 Oct 2012
Winter Morning Milk-trip to the Mother Dairy
Islands of life stirring
Under the flyover
A posse of patrolling
Cops in a Gypsy rover
Wireless purring.
We are four files
Of mileless snakes
Wriggling our tails
Bellying forward
An hour before day breaks.
Paying money at one counter
Tipping tokens down the slot
At three others –
Old men, college lads, old
Women, young mothers.
Shadows shorten, sidewalk
Halogen lamps douse
On plinths of shuttered
Supermarket shops
Huddled bodies rouse.
The wait lasts an hour, may be more,
Before I am bound
For home – a townsman’s daily
Matutinal chore
Like the newsboy on his cycle-round
Heaving rubberband-tied papers
Into balconies of DDA blocks;
Or, like the uniformed girls and boys
Spilling out to catch buses
Two hours before the clerks.
I see my neighbour walk his dog
Past gate and window-sill,
Between us there hangs a smog
We greet by a nod but know
Each wishes the other ill.
I slink away through the turnstiles
As a gerbille into a dune,
Pip a sunbeam in the race
Set the milkpail in its place
For the day’s cup to be brewed soon.
The work is done – pyramid of pompous masonry!
You see its mirror’d back and face
Which bears no trace of shame and guilt
Each buff and almond stone in place
About the lithic artifact. Built
Upon scaffoldings and bamboo legs
Of unskilled labour, forearms as pegs
Girders propped. For months, shanks
Of women whose subfusc faces looked
Like parboiled paddy overcooked
Rope-walked upon these airy planks.
So, what is new? The poor have always built the grand
Dreams of those who owned the land;
The copped mesa soars as planned.
We have one more Mall in town.
Nehru Place
Better some atokous tree with doddering trunk,
Stray tussock and weed,
Than all these towering monasteries
Teeming with monks of greed.
On these footpaths lined
With curio-shops stuffed with tatt
The white tourists loiter, buying
This and that – some drop coins
Into the outstretched palms
Of a blind beggar, some
Into the bell-metal bowl
Of an amputee whose stumps
Are raised like euphorbia stems.
But the local passersby
Keep their purse-strings tight,
Too wise in the ways of the world,
Schooled to look beyond
Compassion and pity.
Diamonds are easier cut
Than stones in this city
Lok Sabha
This structure resting like a massive inverted dish,
When in session, noisier than a mart of fish;
Earth-shaking speeches are made from its forum
Often adjourned for lack of quorum
Parliamentarians here vent their spleens
Less adept at transacting business than creating scenes.
These ranarian creatures, spawn of our vote,
Whom gutters of the media keep afloat.
Connaught Whirligig
I swim against a heaving tide of buffs
Flooding out of Rivoli, cower under
A giant cutout of stars, past
Lottery sellers, garment vendors, coldwater
Trolleymen. Fumes from grumbling buses smart
My eyes, blitzed by signboards, hoardings,
Letter-littered walls. Long, long ago
Stone-sermons kings left behind to better
May be, coming breeds of men.
The ad world is a bad world
Where brand wars can sometime be
More deadly than air, sea or land wars. These
Ads spell otherwise. If fast foods
Are slow poison do these teeny-boppers
Seem to care? Palate
Rules the maw. I brush against pastry-bespattered
Lips of a Nirula client, confront a Wimpy
Pizza- guzzler, mascara on eyelash,
A strawberry-licking claydoll, Pepsi-tippler. Elsewhere
Nicotine proclaims its wares. Live life
With a flair, live it kingsize.
I disappear underground. The Metro
Is a relief. Within the grip
Of sliding doors, it holds the crowds still-
And at each brief halt, like ghosts, it lets them slip.
Silk-Cotton Trees
Two dozen bombax trees there are
‘Tween Noida crossing and Mayur Vihar.
Erect upon prickly, argent boles
Amid highway row of electric-poles.
At Xmas time you see them stand
Tall candelabras upon the land.
By late January, you notice knops
Like knuckly emeralds on leafless tops,
And when these together burst
You do not know which flowered first.
All through February and March
Every bloom becomes a torch
When corollas red and stamens beckon
All the birds to come and peck on.
Then branches lean like bending trays
For edacious mynahs, crows and jays.
Yet not one seems to incur loss
As capsules later fill with floss
Strewing the earth with silken stuff
Black seeds embedded in the fluff
When April comes, no onlooker believes
The bombax redraped in leaves.
Post-Monsoon Water Chestnuts – Okhla Barrage
Floating clusters – not fruits
Of any tree. These
Green fritters of undrifting
Waters – the whole barrage
For flocks of herons, egrets
And flapping sheldrakes
An eatery.
Bus Odyssey
A man embers maize-cobs on the side walk
A boy sells slivers of coconut kernel
Arrayed on a steel plate. We yawn and wait,
Kink like a chain of centipedes as the sun
Javelins us through eucalyptus leaves. The bus
Screeches in twenty minutes late. The queue snaps.
Stampede. I barely manage standing space
Upon the footboard, clutching the side-railing.
Hillocks of crash-helmets on the pavement humped,
Gleaming like a fabulous clutch of roc-eggs
My eyes blink like traffic lights ingesting fumes
Of lurching three-wheelers. At the road-crossing,
Crouching ghost of a beggar woman, walking
Corpse of a boy hawking ‘Mid-Day’. This metropolis
Could as well be a necropolis, only these tenements
Are not shaped like catacombs. Gates, grills,
Railings of old houses give way to loud bill-boards,
Street-kerb hoardings, mill-stamps. The bus strains
To scale the Patel Nagar overbridge. Down below
The slums – burlap and warped shack against the railway wall
On one side. Bent poles, broken asbestos, jute awnings,
On the other. Tilts pitched in every inch of space –
Boundary walls tarred with party symbols, slogans.
Moti Nagar. Flurry of fresh commuters. A couple of
College boys and girls, two bumpkins from Gurgaon.
One woman on stilettos stabs my toes. I’m drawn in, nudged
From behind, battered, pushed up the aisle
Between rows of seats. Raja Garden, the bus
Brakes suddenly. The mother unloads her shrieking parcel
Of a year-old upon my back. I return the gift with thanks. Now
Stand squeezed between an old woman and a small-time
Trader. Yet deem myself lucky. One bus later
And I’d be packed with the bureaucratic kine,
Herds of clerks released from their office-pens.
I bring back home a hundred body-odours
In my collar-grimed shirt. Sticky, I peel off, fling it
Into the washbin, a crumpled fabric there —
Tranche of humanity lying folded in its sleeves.
On reading of Ramanujam’s death (15 July 1993)
Dead in Chicago. Whom should I send
My tribute or condolence cable?
Good animal returned to nature in the end
Now you, too, biodegradable.
Poets who should be dead are living,
A poet who should be living is dead.
An alembic, God is niggardly in giving,
The dross, he piles high on our head.