‘If tomorrow comes, I will be the ash-heap of today’: Poems of enquiry into self and personhood

North Wind

The heat roars on. It is the defensive voice of paternal
authority. The cold perhaps is the temptress. That
bitch. With a crude, carefully crafted, lethal power.
You know it will sting you. Still you want to touch
it. Your fingers are tingling. Tagore whines in the
background. And a ghoulish voice of the feminist
artiste. If ever there was a bourgeois apocalypse, this is
it. You drown in soft holiday spirits. Naturally, think
of home and hearth. Lost loves. Perhaps new ones.
Ones that look like the old ones. Corpses of cigarettes
lie as testimony to the cruel power of the north wind.
These cigarettes had tried to burn. And burn they did.
But they fought a gallant battle like little foot soldiers.
Their death brought you false tears. Crocodiles had
actually cried, their tears had been soaked into their
dry scales. You sip some more holiday music. From
someplace warm. Where they wear bright colours.
Where the war even looks pretty. On the internet. You
like wars. They make you want to do things. Get out
into the north winds lashes. The north wind mocks
you. You look at the dead cigarettes. Their deaths were
necessary to bring you prolonged survival. It was sad that
they died. They must have wives and children
inside the paper boxes. And what of that? Everyone is
mourned by someone. Who mourns the death of the
north wind?

History

If tomorrow comes
I will be the dry leaf
teardrop crystal
right by the stairwell
thick broken glass pane,
sobbing faintly to brother History.

If tomorrow comes you will be pulling along
a perambulator and shopping cart
pigtails and dream eyes.

If tomorrow comes
I will be the industrial warehouse
dried soot on furnace
waiting for the delight of limestone;
I will be the rocky bed in the rivulet that was
young weed on the temple deity,
pulled down cars of the 80s.

If tomorrow comes
I will be the ash-heap of today.

Morgue: Ode to M Devi

You were alive in a thousand bullet holes.
You sang, you cried, you breathed
your last as though the breath was a final poem.
And here in the megacity, we live on as marble monuments
glistening with credit cards in our palms.
For once we would like a bullet hole and laughter
To burn through our morning keyboard clackety crack.
If tomorrow comes, let thousands stand up and laugh through
bullet-holes.
Let flowers bloom in neon colours
Let no one feel oxygen deficit in their guitar strings
Come back, Draupadi.
So we can breathe into our prosaic mornings.

Abraham Came to My Door

Abraham came to my door.
I listened.
And I listened.
For his knocks.
Three knocks.

Abraham came for me.
With a lantern.
And stick.
A cellphone?
And a shuffle.

It was time.
So I was ready.
With two grains.
An empty jar.
And a ziplock bag.

And men walk along
Into the woods.
Walk past Abraham.
His cape.
And his lantern.

Abraham eshichhilo amar dore.
ek noy teen bar toka mere
Aekhoni shomoy bodh hoy
Godhuli sheshe
Flyover-e

Abraham eshechhilo amar dore.

Lilac

In the name of the cowherd god,
you turned pink at the tick of the clock.
When cattle walk home,
I take my phone out to square you out onto an IG story.
This story is interrupted
time and time again
by tentacles of this ugly city –
people’s bobbing heads, and truck headlights.
Bangalore grows into Eternity
and my taxi ride never ends.
I square and square your lavender
but it spills out of my frame.
IG stories be damned!
Damn you, lilac piece of sky, I say,
you belong in my smartphone
you belong in my pink cocktail
you belong in my colourless heart –
I need to grab you like sand-granules in my five fingers.
This ugly city shields you from private ownership.
The cowherd sky refuses my phone,
my wallet, my finger, my heart

Excerpted with permission from The Book of Blue, Atreyee Majumder, Red River Publications.