‘In the morning, when the city is still dreaming’: Poems of evolving urban and interior geography

What the poet does

Every afternoon I sit at my table and write

For the last few days,
in the evening,
at six pm sharp
the sun strides into my living room
pulls up a chair
and just looks at me,
without speaking.

I look up
pack up my words
and leave.

All rhythm

begins between the feet
of a girl who plays the Cajon

because she was forbidden
to sit with her knees open

Perpetual Resort

You’ll find it wedged between a naala and a cemetery –
a white key, pressed into breath, in a sonata
of gullies, filled with compact CPU houses,
whose roofs are ears pricked up to the bustle
of a Bombay street rearing its head between
catcalls, coconut water swish, the laughter
of schoolchildren, and Chandra chaiwallah,
who stains his customers’ crooked yellow smiles
with tobacco, between eternities of tea
spilling like gossip into cutting glasses.

In the morning, when the city is still dreaming
its last dream of solitude and silence, you’d see
Alwin – basketball in hand, glasses firmly placed
under white strands combed neatly around the pate,
whistle slung around jerseyed neck – a prayer coaxed into plastic,
and some of the other boys, jogging with knapsacks
and shin guards tucked safely in place.

They set out for the day solemnly tracing
their synchronised morning crosses under the white signboard
with a palm tree, and a halogen sun bursting
out of the clouds, above the words “Perpetual Resort”

Dandakaranya

for Varavara Rao

On a day when the afternoon pops his head round the side door,
unravels his turban, wraps it around a finger of light, and careens

into the hall in a dance of dust; when the waning sun leans
into a soft, intimate brush of skin, whispering about the forest

and its quiet cool, this heart unravels within my breast
and I step out, shedding the town like a worn-out coat.

A fisherman gathers his net into his solitary boat
noiselessly measuring the evening in the Shivnath river.

The mud road weaves through villages, where trees crown
over me, caught in lovelock, holding up the night.

I see it from afar, finding form in the dwindling twilight,
like a cave in a mountain, where dawn sleeps, and flies out

as the morning-bird that trills the valley into day.
Sure roots snake into the earth, alighting from branches.

I see a banyan tree stand, in dignified repose.
I have to stop, by this temple with gnarled pillars

and a legacy of leaves. It demands surrender,
like some poet in whose imprisoned eyes the future

gleams, like some prophet who stands, elbows folded,
as the world hurries past, gaze trained to the ground.

The Keeper of the Keys

lone one-armed plastic chair
for legs that aren’t used
to the smooth coolness of dried cowdung

flags of opposition parties
to mark the boundary of the house

two crossed gnarled feet

from which grows the tree of Dassauji
and with his curling fingers,
the forest extends its welcome

his courtyard is a sarāi
where tired feet come to rest
at the shrine of the mendicant

the day sees a continuous stream
of pilgrims each bringing stories
carefully wrapped up in a potli

only to be opened at the darbār
of the caretaker of Abujhmādh*

his eyes dart with the curiosity
of a squirrel. his laughter
is the unrealised explosion of
dynamite hidden deep in the mādh

with his tendrils he plucks a string
from the broken cage of your body
calmly drawing out silence

Meanwhile,
slung on the arms of the anjeer tree,
with eyes trained on the smoke
of a half smoked beedi, time has forgotten her job

*Forest that cannot be “comprehended”/ “Unknown Hills”.

Excerpted with permission from The Map is Not the Territory, Aranya Padil, CopperCoin.