There are metro cats and metro cats

Some live in bungalows, some in flats;

Some wear saris, some wear jeans;

Some are middle-aged, some in teens.

All with razor-sharp tongues and claws

Who can trigger a war without a cause.

Lady Novelist

I have for you such awesome liking

Novelist femme of Penguin Viking!

Minister’s daughter, sybarite’s spouse

Who never learnt to keep a house;

Script writer with a bohemian past

More explosive than a bus bomb-blast.

Diplomat’s or biz tycoon’s squaw

At daggers drawn with ma-in-law;

Or an idle DU teacher

Rewrites her life as fiction feature.

Scandal-digging media dame

Of Society-and-Stardust fame;

Or an NRI New York-based

Who never heat and dust has faced.

Hardened libber whose tales disclose

Man the monster, cause of woes;

Ah! if he were wiped out from earth

Eve would laugh in eternal mirth.

Novelist femme of Penguin Viking

I have for you such awesome liking !

Old Mrs Beri of Jorbagh Found Murdered in her Bedroom

Her face is shrivelled like a walnut

She has small verbena eyes

And a large brinjally nose.

It had been rather quick

There were no signs of any fight

Her neck snapped without a crick.

Time seemed ample at her hands

Crocks of maquillage show it

Twice a day did she unlock

The bijoux upon the bed

And with pearls snow it.

Figgery lends a woman charm

So in her mind was drilled

Stone in the ear, stone in the nose

Fat bangles upon straw wrists.

For eighty-two she wasn’t old

At least to stand or sit

Beauty is another name for gold

She had lots of it.

Dastardly of the Gorkha boy

To hatch a scheme to strangle

With that trapcut necklace which

brought her joy

The sparkle and the spangle.

Snowy, her Pomeranian bitch

Now makes an eerie moan

Scarce knowing about that glyptic itch

Stilled mistress into stone.

Page Three Cat

It was a pert Customs panel

Smelled her illicit kit

While she was racing through the Green Channel

Heading for the exit.

Stop, stop, Madam, please stop!

Your baggage we want to check

At once they saw her jaw drop,

As she yelled ‘What the heck!

They slit open her VIP

Out spilled the silly things

Scores and scores of bijouterie

Bangles, carcanets and rings.

Did you take us to be blindfold

That you could run away with your booty?

Ten kilos of pristine-carat gold

Without paying any duty!

For personal use, Madam? We aren’t so dense,

These items all are so saleable –

You have committed an offence

Which is wholly non-bailable!

For the hungry scribe and stringer

It’ll be a juicy bit of news!

On such as you we laid our finger

And sent you to the calaboose!

Socialite Sheetal Mafatlal was arrested in the wee hours on Sunday at the Mumbai airport on her arrival from London for offences under section 135 (a) and (b), importing gold and jewellery without paying duties. Indian Express 12 June 2009

Mumbai Slumdweller’s Invitation to Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of Columbia University

We invite you to our little bivouaс

In a Dharawi chawl, Gayatri Spivak.

Untidy and unceremonial

Post-modern and post-colonial

To talk Derrida in your chaste French

Deconstructing our ambient stench.

Words of a Stuck-up Artiste

‘If you haven’t heard of me,’ said Sonal Mansingh,

‘You know nothing of Indian dancing.

To Draupadi

Mistress legendary

How did you cope with polyandry?

The hungers and thirsts

The variegated lusts

Of multiple husbandry?

Blue Stockings of the ‘Book Review’

Blue stockings of the Book Review

Us, humble folk, do envy you.

Could you be from the cultural coven

Of Nehru Memorial or Azad Bhawan?

Could you be from the teaching crew

Of Jesus-Mary or JNU?

Or Miranda or LSR?

Lodi Estate and Vasant Vihar

 – Your usual habitats, and posh

New Friends, Great Kailash.

Keep you canine pedigreed

Not tykes like us of lowly breed.

How oft we see you exit and enter

Brit Council or the American Center.

You Austen Jane, you Dickinson Emily

From Bhadralok or Lingait family

Some Kobita Roy or Kamala Chari

Tamil Sangam or Kali Bari.

Dad or spouse, chaired-grandees,

Siblings, fizgigs or dandies.

Ayah-addicted, Maruti-driving,

Some arrived, some still arriving.

And though your wisdom pearls in print

Carry their own colonial squint.

Them all we cherish as quillings fine.

We never read between the line.

Blue stockings of the Book Review

Us, humble folk, do envy you.

Lady at the India International Centre

As she dawdles towards me in the hall

Trimorphous, sprawling on three sides,

A scalene triangle on the move

I feel somewhat curious

Seeing her cauliflower face so cream-calcified.

How could a person so real, beam a smile so spurious?

The perfume, the talcum, the wild hairdo –

Some tree-top breaking wind in a squall.

Sitting down in front she blocks my view

A buttress, behind whom I buckle like a mudwall.

The Lakme Fashion Show

 ‘Haute couture’, cries the haut-ton scribе

‘Is not prêt-a-porter’.**

Laymen at it have a jibe

‘It’s exhibitionism’, they say.

Sometimes the vamps walk the ramps

In rags that are so skimpy

And toiletry of harlotry

And hairdos so crimpy.

The Occident our brown girls apе

 It’s, indeed, a weird saga

They don what white models drape

Even the Kermit*** of Lady Gaga.

*Women’s fashions are an eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress, and the unadmitted desire to undress.

** Pret-a-porter daily wear.

*** Lady Gaga’s wacky ‘Kermit The Frogoutfit’. Women with empty heads stuff wardrobes. – George Bernard Shaw

Air Hostess

‘Come, fly Maharajah to far off lands’,

She seems to say with folded hands

Her stairway-sweetness scarcely melts

After she mouths ‘Fasten seat-belts’.

Rekha Tandon!

Even teeth and clear complexion

Saw her through a stiff selection

Peachblossom of the Boeing crew

Whom the Captain loves to woo.

On o’ernights at London!

The clever steward knows her games

‘A Smuggling Cat’, that’s what he claims;

In cahoots with Airport Customs staff

Who share her loot, half and half

For the job is always done!

She packs thick marijuana wads

Between French sanitary pads

And yellow metal in biscuits, bricks

She wangles in through soaps, lipsticks.

Rekha Tandon!

Into the cockpit now she slips

(That arch of neck, that sway of hips!)

She’s a doll you’d love to fly with

 (In an aircrash, love to die with!)

Spick cateress, slick waitress

Rekha Tandon!

Diplomat’s Wife

Not Indian saris but Zandra Rhodes*

 Stuff her spilling wardrobes.

Tampons and scents come from France.

She takes lessons in ball-room dance,

Guitar and violin – (learns from both things

Plucking brows simpler than plucking strings!)

For us reserves her frosty looks

Like Western dishes by Indian cooks.

Mangoes, melons she does not savour

Her tongue’s used to strawberry flavour.

For salads, her palate is no less

Not tomatoes, onions but watercress.

Leeks, pimento, Brussels sprouts

(Desi legumes cause tummy bouts).

*Some years ago Zandra Rhodes, an English fashion designer, came to India to exhibit what she called ‘Indian Designer Saris’. She put up a show with foreign women swaying in sundry apparels that bore as much resemblance to saris as a camel does to an antelope. Later, it was learnt that her trip was sponsored by the wife of an Indian diplomat.

Nouveau Riche

Has acquired wealth

Faster than social graces.

It bulges

Through pachydermic

Wads of her belly.

The slimming centre

In the town thrives

On her caterpillar form.

Her lipstick’d mouth

As an over-painted

Post-box slit glints

With the spawl of smut.

None tells her

At the beauty parlour

It is the ogre of her mind

Needs a facial massage.

She blinds you

With her ritzy dazzle

Sparkling her rings

Flashing her tops. Magazine ads

Fuel the fires of her shopping binge.

Diehard fop,

Carried by vanities

As a sugar granule by ants.

I have seen many women go into beauty parlours but not one beautiful woman coming out.

John Updike

Housewife

 I

 A palate has endless wants. These seasonings –

Slicing tomatoes, mincing onions, scrabbling

Ginger, flensing cloves of garlic. I

Am sentenced to the kitchen. The same

Culinary cycle, mornings, noons and evenings. First

Awaiting my kids’ return from school

Then my man’s, from office. Is this all

To a woman’s life? I ask. The cooker

Answers through skirls and whistles. Now I switch

To sifting flintlets from lentils upon a plate

Of stainless steel, notching in marble

The nicks of days with my chopping knife.

II

 Should I have joined a careerist’s queue –

Steno, air-hostess, college-lecturer, scribe?

Traded my home for a table and a chair?

A libber like Beauvoir or Germaine Greer

Smoking like a chimney, quaffing Lager beer?

‘Is that’, my man would say, ‘what you want to be’?

Then break into a falsetto and sing,

‘The bandwagon of “feminism is but a rickety van

One woman’ll ditch another, the minute she gets her man.’

‘Our city-bred female has turned into a pest’,

Reverting to his harangue I alone know best

‘To ape in this manner, the petticoats of the West’.

* Gloria Steinem’s marriage is proof positive of the emotional desperation of aging feminists who, for over 30 years, worshipped the steely career-women and callously trashed ‘stay-at-home moms’.

– Culture Analyst Camille Paglia, on Steinem’s first marriage at the age of 66 to activist David Bale (News Week Dec 25, 2000).

When I harp on the tedium of my grind,

He cuts me sharp. ‘What is a working girl, heart? A purse

Of dubious worth, an unsure foot upon a pencill’d heel.

Sworn enemy of home and hearth

Whose budget is planned and spent

On textiles, talcum and scent.

‘Don’t you see’, I pule, ‘Don’t you see,

How you’ve shut me in the cage of domesticity?

Oh, how often I picture myself as a swallow in the sky,

Then swallow the entire picture in my eye

Thinking of my chattels and chores.

Telly sitcoms and soaps depress me even more.

‘Don’t two love-birds need a spreading tree

To build a nest?’, he tells me

‘What bugs other women, bugs you too.’

‘I know what the vice is,

Or shall I call it an affliction? It’s identity crisis.

Come off it’, he pleads, ‘Come off it.’

‘Mother-bird of my fledglings, darling spouse,

‘Queen of the kingdom of my house.

For that’s what you are, aren’t you?’ and he hugs me close.

Wiping away tears running down my nose.

But his blandishments do not quell my yearning

And long after the kitchen fires turn cold, I keep on burning.

For women, generally speaking, there is greater servitude in outside employment than there is in married life. Shouldn’t women, therefore, choose the servitude of love to that of money?

Mother-In-Law

 Constantly reminds father-in-law

He is miles inferior to her

In lineage. Boasts of conceiving

Seven sons

Not a single daughter.

The week is a round

Of rituals. Monday for Siva,

Tuesday for the simian deity,

Wednesday for Vishnu,

The Sunday’s ‘kirtan’

Completes the hebdomadal cycle.

Her professed disdain

For gold and jewellery

Is gullible as a silkworm’s

For mulberry leaves;

The price range of the latest

In chiffon and voiles

At her finger tips.

A picture of piety

In abstinence and the weekly

Fast of silence yet her ear-antennae

Catch the faintest scandal-signals

In the neighbourhood.

A sleuth to reckon with,

The daughters-in-law well know

Her remote-sensing eye that can scan the finest

Hairline cracks in their connubial walls.

Eager to be arbiter in piffling feuds,

Her terms of peace leave both sides irked.

Presently the search is on

For a matrimonial match

For the youngest son. ‘A good girl

For the boy is all that I want’, she says.

(Don’t we know, she’d rather have

A squint-eyed wench

With ample dowry for a bride!)

Five-Star PR Girl

You may find her alert, adroit

At Meridien, Taj, Maurya, Hyatt

This well-groomed Hospitality Cat

Trained to catch the Ritzy Rat,

Conscious in her heart of hearts

Hotel biz performance charts

Zoom not by smiles at lowly doormen

Floor-stewards, chefs, cooks and storemen,

But by enticing some Croesus brash

With gold cuff-links and crates of cash.

Words Of A Loving Daughter-In-Law

Am sick of her presence and idle chat

Hope she kicks the bucket soon, my mother-in-law

Then I’ll have my own five-bedroom flat

And all the gold in her almirah.

Has spilled the beans (she is such a talker!)

The bank in which she has hired a locker.

Though I can’t boast of wit or class

Her only son I could bewitch

No big-earner he, and so, alas!

Only what she bequeaths will make us rich

Should she live long, I would grow old

What use then this posh flat and gold?

* A property dispute was behind the disappearance of senior BJP leader Harshvardhan’s sister, Asha, who was drugged by her daughter-in-law, Reena Singhal, with an intention to kill her and grab her property and wealth. Express Newsline 31 Aug 2011

A City-Mom’s Advice To Her Newly-Wedded Daughter

Said the mother of the bride, after she was wed

‘Beti, pray your saas-sassur are soon dead.

Because you happen to be their only son’s spouse

Their dwelling unit, then, will become your house.’

‘The flat we live in will go to your brother

It can’t go to you because we have no other.

So let me offer you some sound advice

(Most folks won’t deem it decent or nice).’

 ‘Offer your in-laws oily sweets, please,

It, perhaps, could lead to diabetes.

Stack their fridge with Amul-butter packs

They trigger, I’m told, quicker heart attacks.’

A practical bride should have just one goal

Hasten in-laws to their grave, then pray for their soul.

A U.S. Visa For Graduate Program

 If you’re Culture-Vultures, listen Buddies,

The latest craze is Gender Studies –

Take the case of Savithri Nair

Who nurtured one burning desire

(Though her grades were low, nor recos good)

To reach Liberty Statue and Hollywood.

She learnt from an American Center Cat

How Twain and Whitman had become Old Hat

Gone were the days of Faulkner, Hemingway,

This was the age of Morrison and Winfrey,

Cut out the crap of all male blighters

Just critique the periods of female writers.

She crammed well for the oral exam

At Delhi Chancery of Uncle Sam

Held her own as a glib talker

On Naomi Wolf and Alice Walker

Spoke as a women’s champion true

‘Not just a feminist, am a Lesbian too’

‘Wow!’, cried the Yankee at her interview,

‘No one more deserves the visa than you.’

Poetess Bilingual

At the Writers’ Program at Iowa

She arrives, our Anna Akhmatova;

Her artful airs and Dravidian looks

Null accent clipped and talk on books

Chasing WASPS with bashful verses

Alas! Their response rather terse is.

Back home, quickly switches loyalty

From Uncle Sam to British Royalty.

Now Emily’s tossed and Frost forgotten,

Whitman a bore and Poe’s rotten;

The finest poets are Keats and Browning,

The finest river, Thames for drowning!

Soon the Council chaps invite her

To Cambridge Seminar on Brit writer;

And though the weather there be colder

She speaks far beyond the folder

And collects a pulp-heap gathering dust

As gifts – courtesy Wallace Trust.

She oohs and ahs when reaches home

Crushed under each weighty tome;

From English then she turns to Tamil

Polishing verse like nails’ enamel

Behold how she waxes high

O’er Kural, river Madurai.

The Indian English versifier

Earns now her bilingual ire;

The lowly Tamil bellatrist

She fogs him with her London mist.