Perch

Entry for 27th Nov's 3WW

Sparrows, curious
over cluttered urban rests,
inevitably wary.

Circle

Entry for 17th Nov 3WW Entry

Aggression:
Exhaust words,
heighten distortion,
light limits.

Heighten:
Light up words,
exhaust distortion,
aggression limited.

Limited:
Lights exhausted,
words distorted,
heightened aggression.

God's Hanger

3WW post for the 16th of October
--- 



Three rings. The sum total of his possessions. Plus a rupee. He has half a mind to bury the rings somewhere before going away. The utter lack of any feeling forbids him from giving them to a fellow being. He wears them instead.

---

Three rings. He pulls away. He waits. He lets the next call trip over to voice mail, letting it take his last rupee down with it. He hears the request to place a message. He clicks.

---

He is not daunted by it anymore.
---
He chances upon an unopened packet of food while scouring the refuse bin. There is my last meal, he says to himself.

He picks it up and moves over to the other side of the road. He lays it open on the footpath. Your food always deserves a clean pair of hands, he remembers. Ever fastidious.

 He walks on to wash his hands at the fount at the far end of the street.

---

He bemoans his misfortune as he stares at the empty packet. He wipes his wet hand over his shirt. He spots a dog skipping across the road with his poisoned meal between its teeth. He is incredulous and stunned to find his death snatched from him in such a manner. His loathing for the fellow being intensifies.

---

In between the two row of fine teeth that this dog has been blessed with, it holds a sumptuous piece of meat, a treat for the lone underfed stray on an empty street. Too hungry to wait, it drops its meal and proceeds to eat.

---

It was an accident goddamit! You find an empty street, you count it as a blessing and you drive fast - that's the rule in a city. I swerved to not hit the dog and I ended up hitting a homeless. Least he could have done was to move away. He had no business standing still there!

---

Clearing

[Entry for this week's 3WW]


Such bright light,
clouding shut eyes, yet
darkness within hampers one's seeing.

---

What I seek are little windows,
Apertures I can slip through.
To sneak in and sneak out
Of past and future,
Pulverize reason,loop ahead
and behind,taunt nature, 
Tear and rewrite its 
Chronological nomenclature.

--- 

Climb

[Entry for this week's 3WW]

Wanderer's struggle,
over foggy, slippery slopes,
denied lenient trail.

Whence

[For 3WW]

At the edge of control, what taunts us is not whatever is on the other side, but how inevitable the crossing over and the looking back are.

---

What the sun had sought all year, mother nature chose to gift it today.

It was a sunny day. Bees hummed about the flowers, water caressed and fed gently the malnourished bed of the river. The sun ambled about between the clouds, enjoying the view, looking over all things earthen with a razor sharp vision.
  
Except that all things earthen did not contain any humans. Whatever wiped the humans out chose to spare the rest of living beings. So the lion whose roar rang around the world, the flora whose fragrance intoxicated the air, the trees whose branches seem to grip each other in a show of strength - the sun could hear, smell and see clearly all of these.

Mother nature had kept her promise. In one great swoop, she cleared earth of all the clutter, all those fleshed ones who could think but alas, chose to think only of themselves.

The Wrong End of the Truth Table

Come on!

Lets open these boxes one by one,

find the one that contain our names.

Check the one to the right,

Let me check the one to the left.

Our names are written in black inside,

Trust my guts and don't ask me why.

One of them will contains our names,

Yours and mine.

Don't ask me why.

---

Having met with failure, be brutal here.

Bury alive a few dreams, see what the blinkers hide.

Revive the dreams worth dying for,

to shine like the sun across a sullen sky.

Sliver

[My 3WW Entry]

Festive sparkle

amid rumpled belief -

lining under our clouds of winter.

Flow

[Entry for 3WordWednesday]

The question I would like to ask Him is this: Will the good be hounded by the bad in heaven as badly as they are on the earth? Or will retribution see to it that the bad serve their dues somewhere else and do not end up in heaven?

---

An excerpt from the farewell speech

...after all these years of service here, I have learnt that sometimes, I tend to speak in a language that is simultaneously what I hear, and assume those around me will understand, and what others actually do not. This language might seem to push the contours of what is and should be comprehensible; that much I concede. But I will not cede ground to those who are prone to bellow with an almost dogmatic conviction that the words I mouth, its order, its topography is too far outside the realm of proper human speech and communication. I feel like the kid who writes on the shore and wishes that the waves would never wash away the words that he has painstakingly sketched. I agree that , on account of its proximity to the sea, the waves are never going to stop erasing the kid's crooked etchings. But it doesn't quite follow that what I write (or rather the kid does) is wrong or rather, incorrect, does it? It doesn't quite follow that what I write is correct either; however, being human and blessed with an ability to think and reason, I suspect I deserve the benefit of doubt, if not from the sea, at least from others like me. For now, all I can do now is to stand (having been rendered immobile by my inability to swim)and gaze at the horizon and wonder just who exactly it is pouring bucket after bucket of salty water from so far wide out?...

---

Once the claps had died down, it was time for me to move on. I observed that the busybees around me did not waste any time and promptly deserted the venue once the coffee had run out. I waited just outside the exit and made it a point to thank everyone who came in. A few were astonished that a sixty year old knew their name. One even confided that he hadn't heard of me till the day before. I smiled, shook his hand and wished him the very best. The walk outside did not take long. As I walked towards home, it didn't take huge effort to leave behind all the memories, miserable as well as joyous ones, one at a time. Maybe it will come back eventually with all the boredom that awaits me.

Sky

Some days are like today, bookended by birth and death;

the year sheds a day, round goes the earth and sheds a dear's life.

What impact his life had, how blessed his soul was,

we will never know again - the blessed ones aren't allowed to come down,

once away from us, they go.

---

Silhouettes keep marching towards the purple sky,

their limpid vision mocks us, a bit harshly -

Any colour you like, will be rendered pale white,

We are all alike, in the end, subject to the same plight.

Once in your life, you will march here, with us or alone,

the light dimmed, the life saddened, death prone.

---

I have never seen snow, nor felt snow fall over me,

nor built a snow man, nor bruised my hand falling from a ski.

Nor have rolled around on a carpet,

shivering in the chill wind, the ice melting over my skin.

Our city is blessed (or cursed), winter having been ejected by the climate Goddess,

from the list of seasons it experiences.

To duck and run from one awning to the other that dot Mylai,

escaping snow flakes as it falls from the sky,

to watch the snow pile up and submerge the slush outside Anna Nagar,

to rub gloved hands and walk along the Marina,

to have heaters in the Volvos that run to Tambaram.

Ye Alchemists! You have your task cut out:

Let snow fall over Chennai and from not just the pages of a Pamuk's novel.

Water

One fine morning,
a pair of hitchhiking clouds gave their sore limbs a well deserved rest,
heaving badly, nauseating, wanting to get something off their chest.
They stopped above where I stood, wondering loudly, to whom they could,
reveal where they have been, what they have seen.

To them, I said aloud:

Oh you irreverent ones! weightlessly drifting across the sky;
Your eyes ever roving over us, this worthless world open to your pry.
Oh you freeloading hitchhikers! Reveal to us - the cause of your blues!

Note:

To an addled mind, acute replies won't make sense;
So make your answer brief and not very dense.

---

Long ago, thunder and lightning scarred the sky one night,
janky notes filled the air, like fingers scooting over keys black and white.
A boy's feet left its prints on parched lands -some linear, some circular;
whooping with joy, his tread light, what truth did the boy learn
that filled his heart with delight?

The boy was from a village,
far and beyond, from what constituted arable land.
A land misplaced by time, thatched roofs, nettled fences, sticky slime.
Its occupants busy with neem sticks early morning,
biting, chewing, and expecting,
the sun to shine and the moon to mime.

A cool wind blew the morning he walked out of his house,
his stiff gait losing its composure, with every feet forward his anger though undoused.
His head was freshly tonsured, paste of sandal applied over his mowed hair,
cooling his thoughts, lessening the glare.
His mind was full of anger,
at the pond outside his house, as dry as a masochist's eyes,
at the land that he walked on, cracking up like a skull struck by a steel rod;
at the perpetual drought, at the breeze that crept up his shirt,
at the bird's carcass that lay in the dirt.

At the centre of the village, he waited under the old banyan tree,
its lanky branches flung afar, swaying lightly in the breeze.
Sat at the centre, beside the old idol, humming to the toll of the bells,
was the sage, old enough to spin lengthy tales,
stroking his white beard, guaranteeing relief.
To him our boy walked up, his anger still uncontrolled, his gait broken.

Seated beside the old sage, our boy seethed -

Oh noble sage! tell me one thing -
the pond outside my house why is it dry?
This land, dry as a crone's wrinkle, so dry,
at nights, the stars here cringe to twinkle.
This land, unclothed by beauty, unloved by the skies,
uncared, uncherished, has mother nature severed her ties?
And look around us, beyond this land, there is only water;
waters of the ocean salty and blue, but this water I speak of is so far,
start walking now and you reach there a corpse.
Tell me, oh great one! What is wrong, when I say there is no water
and hence no truth?

The sage whispered a long reply in the boy's ear,
his eyes relaxed as the truth dawned clear.
With the wisdom easing his truculent visage,
before long, the boy's face was shorn of the mindless rage.

Whooping with joy, his tread light, what truth did the boy learn
that filled his heart with delight?

Sea

[Entry for this week's 3WW]

To the banker, the river was an untamed God,
the sea, a shifty trapper of time,
the sand, night like, a mistress,
kissed, sifted and to be deserted again.

The shore yonder is a notion,
the lands beyond, empty and to be claimed one's own,
reached after a trial and usually by error-
the west taken to be the east sometimes,
the east named west.

To the girl walking alone, the sea is the nature's outlaw,
voluminous brine shed once ago and ever since;
untameable, unmanageable and defiant;
crumpling the shore, a wave at a time.

To the kid busy with the sand turrets -
raised on weekly visits to the shore,
delighting in the chromatic aberrations -
the sea is a saviour, his hero,
soon to rescue the crashing sun
from the dark clouds unspooling across the sky.

To the sailor, the sea is as unpredictable as its blue,
a capricious turnstile, blissfully unaware of its own hue,
his ships handled with scorn, like a father cradling his newborn,
but with lot less love and hands unsure.

Time, the most benign of all Gods, propitiation with it arrived at,
once we abide by the only rule put in place:
to keep to its pace.
Devotion is to be by action,
the rhythm achieved carrying us forward,
wheres and whys not to be asked but duly shown.

To the sea, time is the entity
it twists around its skewed axis;
tides can knock minutes of an hour with ease,
travails can stretch them to infinity.

To those absorbed with the view in the rear mirror,
looking backwards, omitting the future near,
Look here-
at the waves the sea weaves over submarine lands,
at the unsheathed wings climbing over ridges and dunes;
at the life that is held in its womb,
at the living cradled in its deep plains,
and at the unsalvaged in its bottom lain-
Life awaits.

Shimmer

You know all, don't you? Now, tell me why.

---

After a day spent at work, when I leave for home, as the lights from the streetlamps along the path coruscate dimly off the sand swept glass facade, I always notice a couple wait, outside the front gate, hand in hand, barely audible words said and replied, one pair of eyes holding the other, the world around as diffused as a white blur, as vague as the mirage rising off a heated tarmac . A strange couple is what I remark to myself as I wait ten feet away from them for our bus to arrive. Although her sunken eyes and pale complexion suggest a far eastern forefather, I feel she is from somewhere far closer home. I remember how she looked when she had just arrived in the city, when they were yet to meet: her face was as devoid of colour and life as the sideA of a rift riven band. Things have improved now, and a year of sprucing up and addition of right colour and cream have succeeded in suppressing whatever little beauty her face had to provide and stimulate a look that would help her gain greater acceptance among those she wishes to spend time with. He, meanwhile, is far taller than her, blacker eyes, sinews popping out of limbs, clothes that rarely crumple - a build and carry suggestive of far too much time spent in the gym and in front of the mirror. Neither are they the first couple to wait outside an office nor will they be the last. Despite their differing characteristics and nature, they seem comfortable in each other's presence. Sometimes I wonder if it is all a pretence they want to maintain until it gets to them and they admit to each other that it is all a pretence. I do not know why.

Beside us, cars and buses stream in and pause till the seats in them are occupied. Their drivers, with their tobacco spittle stained shirts, well oiled hair that turn rust coloured as they drive around the city with the window open, often get down from their vehicles and cluster together beside any of their rundown vehicles and speak in hushed tones amidst a lot of limb stretching, yawning and the occasional passing of a cigarette. Those whom their vehicles carry, their names are rarely known to them - conversations are rarely struck and at best avoided.

The couple usually board the same bus that I do. Although we wait alongside each other, it has never struck me nor them to speak a few words to each other. We recognize each other by sight alone. I wonder what their names are. Our ID tags are wound and dropped into our bags as soon as we exit our office and they are too caught up in themselves once they board the bus and contrive somehow to avoid venturing a word or two with those around them.

The bus drops us two streets away from my home. The driver always struggles to navigate his vehicle around our neighbourhood and has to move, nudge and literally curse it with an unceasing stream of nastiness, us lined up one behind the other on the footboard of the bus, fully cognizant of the fact that had we not been travelling in it, the driver would have been left to steer his vehicle in bus-friendly environs. We get down and walk away in directions opposite and ways unknown to the other.

Our names are not known to us. We live nearby yet neither our houses nor the way to reach them are known to the other. What do we opine of each other? Nothing? Does it matter?

Seam

Dirges do not accompany these dead,

heads immersed in madness lay down the laws

- draws open wide their eyes and holds them apart,

depart not, drift not apart - where the wails have gone?

- Don black instead, indulge in sullen stares at the sky above.

Doves come by and grip the dead's floating tress,

bless-ed winged ones prefer to fly off decaying spawls,

caul shadows over October's shallow seam,

gleam like stars across a sky hooded in grey,

stay, stay - a few lingering clouds call by,

try, ignore and fly back over the white lane,

lanes with no trails to guide,

glide in silence over these lands too painful to rest,

rest not, lest the thread come apart.

Ficciones

Frames of fiction fall oft an inch or two short,

an empty pane having to cede and pander to reality.

Authorial fingerprints smudge the written word,

sentences are collapsing bridges requiring columns of real meaning to hold them up.

Paws of memories advance through the fictional realm,

shuffling over the blind spots, the present fudged

by what is not.

A Trap

There is a trap, a rattrap,

wielding a passive lure -

like all traps,

a thick slice of kernel between its lips,

set like the one in the bedroom,

beneath the bed where mom and dad sleep,

and the other in the kitchen,

next to the aluminium canister filled with sugar,

and another beside the fridge,

the Amul butter in it, melting faster

than the candle lit in the living room,

where the family is assembled,

blinkered, in silence, abrupt, around the table

the table with a remote control on it, awaiting

the resuscitation, of pixelated images

of life peeled, bleached which is now ,

like the visor of the Splendour

parked outside, bright red which was

once, when there were no rats.

Irresolution

[The entry for this week's 3WW prompt. Thanks to Teal for helping out with the editing]

---

Everywhere, I see shapes grimace

into punctuation marks.


Tear shaped pauses I spot here:

raised ones curving along the spines of dogs asleep on the road;

inverted ones drifting along the cheeks of

a four year old.


Full, solid stops a few are - fraying at the edges,

disintegrating;


wrinkling, white surfaces console

me on a bright night;


singed ones,

letting out phantasmal shapes in the dark,

offer quick fixes.


Sidebar legend:

lemon green marks strangers;

ashen ones hide those we seek.

---

Today, I misread the print:

'the universe likes to grow forever';

grow into what I ask ?

---

Here, we await a punctuation

at the corners,

stumbling towards it

in the made up darkness of our streets,

ready to believe tombstones will

hold us up to light,

phase out the wrecks in us at last,

and relieve us of our monochromatic breath.


But surprised we are, when our

souls boomerang to life after death.

---

Ka

Your name is Ka. Literature abounds with your namesakes. You are named by your father in his only ever moment of inspiration . We all came out of Gogol's overcoat- a sedate Irfan Khan explains to a baffled Kal Penn the rationale behind his name in that movie. Your father doesn't bother you with an explanation. You find that out yourself.

You step into a school just as the first shower of June sweeps the city. Your rain coat forgotten, you are drenched when you step into your class. My name is Ka, you introduce yourself to your fellow classmates. They laugh at you as only your classmates ever can. You are not adroit enough to handle it and break down. More laughter booms through the class. Even the rain stops and greets you with a hearty roar of its own.

Why is he named Ka?

He is such a bore that his parents forgot to name him fully.

Why is he named Ka?

One of his ancestors is a crow.

And so on.

Their cruelty doesn't deter you from being cruel to Vidya.

Vidya is fat. Takes after her mother. A shade fatter that is all. But fat nonetheless.

You taunt her. Call her a cylinder. She never breaks down. She fusses over you. You have too chubby cheeks to be taken seriously, she says. You do not understand. You stand in front of the mirror and try and pinch your cheeks but the pair never come off.

She has chubby cheeks too. Ever frozen ice cubes lodged at the far corner of your cheeks, you remark to her one day. She doesn't like them and asks you to help. You think of melting them. Eureka! She obliges. You drink your glass of milk and go through the plan with your mother during breakfast. Your mother stops you from proceeding further. A few terse words and slaps do the trick.

Vidya is sad.

She has curly hair. A pair flank her forehead, undulating along her temples. She wants them removed or straightened. You suggest creasing them. You spot the electric iron unattended to at a corner of your father's room. She obliges. You plug it in and fiddle with the panel on it. Cotton, Linen, Wool. There is no mention of hair. You ask her. The two of you decide on linen. Line-n, you pronounce it. The light on the iron blinks on even as your mother rushes into the room and grabs the iron from you. Slaps. She cries because she is sad.

Your father predicts you will be a writer. A writer of lofty ideals and immense ability. You do not understand the words. You impress your English teacher and very soon, you become her favourite. You do not bother to learn other subjects and sneer at them. The rest of your class learn to ignore you. You survive class only because Vidya is your bench mate. You like her. She likes you. 1=1. 2=2. Your class 5 life is filled with such simple equations.

You learn to love English. Shakespeare greets you in the morning, Tagore walks with you to school and at night, Twain reads as you drift to sleep. You talk in aphorisms and wonder why sonnets cannot have more than fourteen lines. You learn to be spare with words. Your teachers concede that you have talent. Your father is happy. You too are. Vidya jumps with joy.

Not so far in the future, you walk home alone one day, your school bag slung over your shoulders and your shoes held in your left hand by the pair of laces. Your mother waits outside your house. You shove the shoes under the shoe stand by the door and drop the bag on the sofa.

You lock the front door as your mother kick starts the scooter.

Your mother paces a ground floor corridor as you try to resolve the meaning of the giant red cross staring at you from the wall opposite. There is a door next to it, opaque glass save for a transparent perforation right in the middle; a view hole you try hard to jump and look through. Cold air greets you from the underside of the door. Does it contain the breath of someone dying?

Your mother leads you into the room. Vidya is lain on the bed. White tubes run across her, dipping in and out of her body. You spot a bag filled with a yellow liquid strapped to the side of her bed. You run out and retch into the basin outside the room. Your mother is crying. So is her father. She beckons you to come nearer to her. Your mother prods you to hold her hand. You are too shaken to react. You run your frigid, feeble fingers over her forehead and start to bawl. She smiles. She points at the curls alongside her temples. You hold and try to straighten them. She winks at you. You smile through your tears.

You walk out of the room along with your mother. The door is closed behind you. You jump to look at her through the view hole. Your mother wipes her tears and lifts you so that you can look at her.

You spot each other and grin.

You do not write a word after that.

Prelude

[My entry for this week's 3WW prompt]

---

What could arise out of a simple question asked of a stranger, a question fielded about an address on a rumpled piece of paper, a question put forward by a woman while walking along a footpath covered with leaves led dither by the busy wind? A revelation? Or a bait?

The man walked around the bin capsized just to his right, its content strewn out of its mouth and out across the sand, the stench unbearable but forgettable by habit. He jumped over the plastic bag that had flown the farthest, the few paper packets of stale food contained within interesting the limp and rabid dog presently hopping over milk crates - upturned and blue in colour, the blue of vivacity- the crates equidistant, consecutives just far enough for a human leg to stretch and reach, an arrangement necessitated by the pool of water left behind by the previous night's half an hour rain.

They met.

He was asked the address. Turn left and the fourth shop from the... There lay the dilemma. She mustn't be told.

Friday dressing for him consisted of a pair of jean torn at the right ankle, only there and an yellow t-shirt hurriedly washed the previous night and left to face the heat of an early morning sun. He didn't bother to press them. He was to wear the work overalls at the factory and for the journey on the footboard of the bus, with one leg of his hovering over the road and the fingers of his right hand barely grasping the cold rails of the window nearest to the door, this worked.

She knew the days but their occurrence had lost their significance long ago. Only one thing mattered: the recurrence of the date on which the most singular event of her life had taken place. 72 hours separated her from that day.

There goes an educated man. One who would bother to pause and answer. Surely!

He did.

He read the address on the sheet of paper, its letters black and all in capital, shy, spaced out far enough to indicate a writer unsure of her own literacy, blurred by the sweat that had leaked from the afore held hand. The address was familiar to him. He held the paper with his left hand as his right hand unconvincingly drew a map of the route from their station to the place quested after as he explained the same to her. She wasn't to understand.

The statue at the centre of the square...whose statue was it? He had forgotten. Shiny. Silver? Bald. A true leader. No spectacles worn. Was there a beard? The pose and poise of a masterly orator perfectly captured. A hand fused to the hip and the other grasping the sides of an invisible lectern. His pose in his final photo? Just before the bullet had silenced him. But who was he and why, despite passing by it twice every day, did his name escape him at this moment? Why did it seem so important?

As the route was being explained, time stood by her for a moment, allowing her thoughts to take over and tangle themselves up as she appraised the person standing before her. An apparition of her seemed to queue up beside time and appraise him too, as if the distance and relative solitude mattered and could offer a different perspective. The past of a stranger-how much could be deduced from the first meeting? It mattered, the accuracy of this deduction, for she knew that the future with him could either be spent happily affirming positives or whining about the negatives.

The statue and its name were temporarily forgotten. Instead, he asked her to take a left, a right and then the third right and then...

She shook her head and made to grasp the paper.

The fourth store from the...

the?

...the liquor store.

A sense of propriety had prevented him from land-marking the liquor store. Poor man!

She smiled and thanked him.

He would be there. The man to whom she was tethered. The dog was busy with the stale food.

He hesitated before returning the smile.

Next moment, one of them moved away. The victim was left behind with the dog.
---

War

A bit of a delay. This is the 3WW entry for the previous week's prompt.


Forsaken limbs' trial

in the infernal;sculpted

praise-gentle or vulgar?