The Middle Path

Like the perpetual sadness
that belie our widest smile,
there is an ever-flowing anger
that lust to burn life
even while weeping for
all motherless children.

Like the everlasting love
of crucified sons
towards all mankind,
there is this abyssal
hatred towards man
and all his kin.

Like the humility in front
of a sick old woman,
there is an unfathomable
height of hauteur
that makes us spit
at all wrinkled faces.

Between body and soul,
with a shared mind,
we are The Middle Path
chosen by some god
suffering from too much goodness
or by some demon
suffering from too much evil.

The Shame

We say
that we are lonely
and so we write poetry.

We say
that we are artists
and so we write poetry.

Aren’t we deluding ourselves?

Aren’t we poets
because we are
ashamed
to go in front of them
with our ugly faces?

Aren’t we poets
because we are
ashamed
to be with them
amidst their ugly faces?

Back to you

I have come back to you
to see the scorn in your face
and the derision in your wry smile.

I have come back to you
to see your eyes, like that of a tart’s
upon finding her client impotent.

I have come back to you
to shrink myself at your silence
and try to regain my virility lost in the street.

Now I know
that only a woman can give birth to a man
that only a woman can make a man
that only a woman can put him to death.

The Ambush

It was a book by Hamsun and on its back cover it was written that in the book he is telling about the love affair between Johannes, a miller’s son and Victoria, a nobleman’s daughter.

I stood there in the cluttered library leaning on the huge wooden shelf with the book in my hand unopened. As if forbidden to read the story I went on reading the description on the back cover repeatedly. There were a few quotes about the book and about Hamsun's other works by some authors or critics. I read them without understanding what they meant or whose opinions were they.

The small book with about a hundred pages or so fitted in my hand as though the binding was done according to the measurements of my palm. But that did not make the book any suitable for me. In fact it added to the uneasiness I began to feel about the book.

With no apparent reason I started to feel that the book has something about it that is making me hesitant to read the story. And it was not long before the indisposition transformed itself into a kind of fear, a fear of some unknown enchantment hidden in the book. And as moments passed by my fear of that life taking spell in the book started mounting to alarming levels.

As I held the book with both my hands, my heart started to pound faster and faster as though I was holding in my hand a venomous viper and a vial of heavenly nectar at the same time. Never before had I felt suchlike anxiety and unreasonable fear. But fully masked by the anxiety and the fear, somewhere within me throbbed a vague sense of lost joy and forgotten jubilation – a sense of heavy loss, perhaps the sense of loss the dead feel about life.

Deep within my intellect I knew that there is a reason for this state of mind which had already started to make its effect felt on my body (by this time, in addition to the heavy heart beats, I had already started to pant and my temples to sweat). Still holding the book in my hand, like holding a smooth skinned squirrel which may at any coming moment bite hard into my hand with its ever growing incisors, my mind began to play a precarious game of finding out that past of mine which is making me so upset now.

Considering my vulnerability to such dangers my mind was taking a huge risk by pressing on instead of retreating. My thought groped through the summer days of childhood to my vacant youth and then to the despair of middle ages. While it searched frantically in the book shelf of my memory, the risk of its own deracination was continuing to grow incessantly. The squirrel was still in my hand waiting to plunge its teeth deep into my hands.

And then dawned suddenly a very ominous silence upon my mind preoccupied with ransacking the past. That silence was there for a barely perceptible thought-moment. The kind of silence felt by men under a roof about to collapse or the silence felt by trackers upon knowing that they are being stalked by man eater leopards.

What ensued after the agonizing silence was the sudden revelation, the explosive understanding of the reason for such excitement of mind - the cognizance that the roof has begun to crumble, the knowledge that the man eater has made itself all ready to swoop.

I got hardly enough time, before the cataclysm, to fling the book with dread and hurry through the library’s labyrinthine bookshelves to the heavy front door, the door which reminds one of the huge wooden doors of colonial forts. With the desperation of a panic stricken tracker, like a man escaping from a collapsing roof I leapt out of the library through the library’s door and into the street.

As I walked faster and faster on the street, searching for crowds to get myself lost in, I heard the man eater pounce into the void where I was present just a couple of moments ago, I heard many, many roofs collapsing behind me.

What pounced was the memory of a girl, the memory of a girl from the late eighties who used to wear a white salwar and a faded blue kameez with prints of white flowers on it. What fell and crashed down included a solemn smile, a sestet written on a piece of paper torn out from a notebook, a slight touch with the back of a beautiful palm and most importantly a half burnt photograph.