July journeys: Five poems for ‘the pilgrim soul in you’

Hike

Siddhartha Menon

Now that we have traversed there
the hill is different, the yellow slope
is not so bland as it looks, so sheer,
but is face-or-waist high lemon grass
concealing boulders and sudden pits
between the solitudinous trees.

We lagged behind our visions, but climbed
to views that the sky was lifting off.
A rhythm was rising out of silence
The wind boosted a bird and sang
the emptiness of the cave. We weren’t
the first but felt like pioneers.

If someone down here had cared to watch
they might have noticed our not quite random
dottiness: the stops and starts,
the skirting of prehistoric barriers,
the leaps, the falls, the moments when we
were extinguished in a yellow vastness.

Nothing’s the same now: our passage was not
without effect. Our tread is lighter,
we know of thorns that are rid of us,
of stones displaced, the wind has heard us.
Invisible lines are where we passed,
remotely, like dinosaurs or poets.

Train to Agra

Vandana Khanna

I want to reach you –
in that city where the snow

only shimmers silver
for a few hours. It has taken

seventeen years. This trip,
these characters patterned

in black ink, curves catching
on the page like hinges,

this weave of letters fraying
like the lines on my palm,

all broken paths. Outside,
no snow. Just the slow pull

of brown on the hills, umber
dulling to a bruise until the city

is just a memory of stained teeth,
the burn of white marble

to dusk, cows standing
on the edges like a dust

cloud gaining weight
after days of no rain. Asleep

in the hot berth, my parents
sway in a dance, the silence

broken by scrape of tin, hiss
of tea, and underneath,

the constant clatter of wheels
beating steel tracks over and over:

to the city of white marble,
to the city of goats, tobacco

fields, city of dead hands,
a mantra of my grandmother’s –

her teeth eaten away
by betel leaves – the story

of how Shah Jahan had cut off
all the workers’ hands

after they built the Taj, so they
could never build again. I dreamt

of those hands for weeks before
the trip, weeks even before I

stepped off the plane, thousands
of useless dead flowers drying

to sienna, silent in their fall.
Every night, days before, I dreamt

those hands climbing over the iron
gate of my grandparents’ house, over

grate and spikes, some caught
in the groove between its sharpened

teeth, others biting where
they pinched my skin.

Castaway

Menka Shivdasani

It began like this:
Holding my hand across a wooden table,
studying the lines with your eyebrows knit,
you were charting a course
we knew would lead nowhere;
I saw the Brahmaputra in your eyes,
and dipped my small canoe.

Years passed, silent and still upon the river banks.
The seas grew into the distance and the small stream
that was the source dried upon my eyelash.
Nothing was said and the canoe
turned upside down and back again.

The oar became a friend,
but took its time,
digging into my flesh and tearing skin.
The tributary in my cornea
turned to glass;
I felt it crack, draw the tornado in.

Now, as the waters turn calm,
I pull the canoe through,
feel the Brahmaputra in my eyes.

(Originally from Menka’s Book Safe House, published by Paperwall Media.)

Local Trains

Mihir Chitre

Rehman, Ram, Rafiq, Shankar,
D’Souza, Yadav, Shinde, Patekar
the welder, the cobbler, the car-driver,
the deprived writer, the failed painter,
the ticket-collector, the call-centre
employee, the quick-tongued waiter
at a shady bar, the fuck-faced chef
at a five star, the sweatier-than-thou
carpenter, the whore of pending sleeps,
her slimy pimp, the grandfather of a goon,
the black magician gawking at his spurious
posters, the surreptitious child molester,
the short north Indian bhel-puri wala
whose bath soap stinks worse than sweat,
the Patel who always has a card to deal,
the 20-something heartbroken boy with long
hair and longer nights, the incredibly sanguine
school-girl, the stoned death metal guitarist, the lazy-
as-fuck clerk at BMC or some other government office,
the cola-seller at Malad station, the DJ, the dancer,

those who sleep early, those who sleep late,
those who never sleep at all; those who shit,
spit on highways, and those who clean it all,

the moon-lovers and the lunatics; the liberals
and the fanatics; the mother, the father, the kid,
the illegitimate kid; the strong, the weak, which is
the rich and the poor; the librarian; the bookless;
the sombre; the reckless; the humane
and the less humane –
are all the same
until they get off the train.

A Depressingly Monotonous Landscape

Hemant Divate

i

How did the landscape in my mind
flow into my daughter’s mind?

Right now in front of me is an expanse of
buildings, shopping malls, highways, factories and traffic
and if I tell her to sketch a landscape
she draws sunsets
a flowing river, trees, fields, shrines
draws birds which look like scrawled numbers*
in my tiny, overcast skies

From the seamless forest of this city
are never seen
the sunset beyond the house in my mind
the river, trees, paths, temples, birds, footways
How did these
stream into her mind?

ii

When she understands
the picture of my childhood
which has flowed away
and the answer
to “Why does she draw exactly like this?”
then will all the paintings by everyone in this world
have melted away? Or will they have remained
trapped in just their quiet?

iii

She gets nightmares, so do I
of headless people carrying
the corpses of orphaned villages
into the cemeteries of cities
or ferrying frightful landscapes of the city
to superimpose them on the erased villages
The same, the very same landscape
encloses within itself
all the headless people
All, all cities have the same name
the same streets, same buildings, same shopping malls
all transfixed in the same predefined places
like a regiment ready for a march
Moving about paths of
the same name same colours
the same smells same forms
the same faces as though clones of themselves
and at the same deceptive crossroads
she reaches the same statues
No matter where she flees
the same statues confront her again and again
and she arrives at the same landscapes
of the same cities
with no signs or landmarks to guide her
In the same places
she sees the same people
speaking the same language
and with the same shapes
same gestures
standing in queues of the same length
in the very same manner
going to the same stations
driving the same vehicles
at the same speed
in the same direction
at the same time
passing by the same trees
of the same height
of the same kind
separated in the same way
by the same dividers
on the same road
The same people
are shredded
in the same way
by the same bombs
and lie scattered the same way
petrified the same way
broken the same way
In the same monotonous manner
on any channel on any TV
flash the same misery-multiplying pictures
monotonous
monotonal
monototal
total ly monotonous
depressingly monotonous
totally depressing
dip dip depressing
She dips and collapses
sees my same terrified, depressed face
the moment she let goes
her tight grip on my hand in the crowd
and just like me
she too flows away into
the gigantic, self-destructive flood
of headless people
I dream the very dream she is dreaming
at the same time
I too see her alarmed, depressed face
and shudder
I forget to carry village to city and city to village
and reach here
reach where?

This selection is curated by Rohini Kejriwal. She also curates The Alipore Post, a daily newsletter stemming from a love of​ art, poetry, music, and all things beautiful.