‘Ouroborous Pastoral’ & Other Poems

Since you kept walking the unlit length of the field   in the periwinkled

night you were certain   to run into the old man with his walking stick

with its aluminum alloyed handle shimmering   like a flash

of illicit day serenading the damp earth   with stifled thumps

he is here to take stock of bounty   he is here to vindicate sacrifice

of eroded layers   the metaphysical urgency that compelled him

to leave his wife fast asleep on the bed   at this dense hour wears off

as soon as he meets you   and God above flies

a spaceship low   over the peepal trees whose heart

shaped leaves release oxygen through the night

in exchange for the howls of the excitable jungle

say you greet him with folded hands   and he pats your shoulder

with the prodigious affection of a force   bonding bodies born on either

ends of a century   you curse yourself for thinking he might pass

away right now   and you might be the only witness in flesh

he sees horror   in the impotent red of your eyes   doesn’t mind   he smiles

his omniscient smile   wants you to steel up for a life of dignity

enjoy the falling down, he says, before getting up   and don’t get up too fast

wisdom eases the wind    he tells you how the five-trunked ten-tusked elephant

invented rain   by sucking in oceans   and spraying the mountainous flux

of a continuous fountain for days   the tusker’s reward: guarding the gates

of heaven   who is to do that thankless job tomorrow   the old man asks

you don’t want to look clueless   so you look in the direction of house bulbs

shining from at least a few hundred meters   thinking God is responsible

for the hot song   of a hot filament that could make of blazing

irresistibility a useful vocation   when you are home you rant about fate

how your phone suddenly died when you entered the field

yet it hummed when the old man spoke   you claim such a night comes rare

when language is healed a little   during its generational passage

through the medium   of a vulnerable vernacular

days later when the old man breathes his last on full moon night

you imagine him waving from the middle of the nimbus field

vague heft of barnless straw   a scarecrow wishing you in earnest all the

very best     so you run to the spot but dismiss the idea of sleeping on soil

despite carrying   pillow blanket bedsheet    mostly due to a fear

of   snakes vultures thunder   in his obituary it is mentioned he was a prolific

writer of short stories   his wife tells you his last story was unfinished

it became a little too long   it was about some city boy and a field

There’s cause, there’s effect, there’s splaying open of backyards

into lilac meadow— here blooms the average of nothing and everything,

daily a hint of twilight to replenish the pulse of our half-lives. What was your first

moment of bewilderment at the center of this meadow? Mine―

at a desolate guesthouse on the eastern coast of India, a kind of glee

to watch for the first time, my mother’s tears. The rapture of revelation

that grown-ups cry too, disappearing fast into the despair that came from viewing

her weeping face. The culprit― red faced, curry spangled, eight year old

me who went for a walk after breakfast and came back at sunset. To notice

the pin of unconditional love prick a fully functional adult

heart― a lesson or premonition? Almost every day I use the word

paradox as a way to fake resolution. At a parlour in Bangalore,

when a small kid brings the house down, I watch. He bawls

from the scrape of razor on scalp. I watch. Strands fall on tiny shoulders,

his cheeks flooded in pink. I watch. When the heist is over, the dad

and barber shake hands with tired smiles. The kid sobbing

in Daddy’s arms, the brunt of trial and burn of blade

fading away. Turning his eyes slowly, he takes me

by surprise. On my lathered face, stainless steel erasing

oceans of accrual. Is this how symbiosis works? His actor,

now wondrous big eyed observer

in response to mine.

My friend asks me to resend photos when I text images

via Whatsapp because the resolution is reduced to a third

 of the original. Image quality matters to him. My father, a

 passionate watcher of cricket since television first came to

 town, around the time India won the 1983 Cricket World

 Cup, wakes up at 5 am to watch a match being played

in Australia. Still he doesn’t really know what a googly or

a square cut is; he has never cared for jargons and stats. He cares

 about the connection between bat and ball,

 the sparring between two teams to ultimately decide

 a winner. The experience to arrive at this conclusion matters

 to him. That he stays glued to the TV, very much matters

to my mother, who steps out during India matches for

shopping. It mattered to me once— the length of the interval

 between two text conversations with a beloved, the count

 of days— a juvenile way to calibrate yearning, the long

 frisson between moments of forbidden intimacy.

 It’s remarkable how anticipation appears nebulous

in hindsight, as if the rear view mirror was suddenly glazed

with a jazzy Instagram filter. As if time coats a blur around

 desire, seduces borders into liquefaction. Is it through passage

 that days stir light and kisses turn to water? This could explain

 why I kept glancing at a large Monet painting at a friend’s house

 all the while we played a drinking game. Or perhaps why I saw

in a dream a cabbage soaked in blood, after a friend told me she

saw one in her dream. This mood— the inquiry to always connect one

 thing to another, when did it really start? It’s difficult to point

 to an exact moment, but one infernal evening during casual

 conversation began the parting of our ways. And then futile

 attempts through rest of the waning nights to measure lengths

of shoulders with briny fingers. If my thumb dripped despair,

it was from aching to dispel the memory of the future we call fear.