‘fermentations’ & Other Poems

(Meerut City Junction)

By pure chance I am waiting for God

to show me his face at 8:30 pm

one night on a train. It is the train bound

for somewhere but I am already dreaming

a long dream in a knotted fugue. Because it is March

of 2022, the only dream I can dream is that of Mariupol

perhaps it is only Meerut in the dark

its devastation already secure in ravages of time after Magadh

its kings and prime ministers have come and gone

this is where I sit waiting for God to appear

in the middle of another war

between the peeling pastel

of the houses and children

playing hopscotch

(Dialectics)

but it is only me

between barber shops next to train tracks

shaving beards in the open

holding out to this razor edge world

waiting for grace from cutthroats

it is only me

running barefoot to catch

this train—the Shatabdi Express 12018

between Dehradun and Delhi

between memory and desire

between the deadened news from March

and the cruelty of April

everyone you wanted to save

either gone or forgotten

wears a short sleeved shirt

drinks instant coffee

even the God who will appear

looks for a fix to get by tonight;

the dialectics of the times a prayer and a joke

(Fermentation: Bhagavad Dreams)

perhaps it is always an age of exodus

perhaps it is always an age for bathing in the sea

perhaps it is always an age for dying in a war

the fluidity of sorrows shared and buried

balances what will be now borne

Ashoka and Akbar come and go before

by 2062 you forget even to forget

all that remains in a fog of distant oxidisations:

yes, what you will learn is that cities will burn,

give in to entropy, will wither away

atrophied into minerals long after the anthropocene

if you wait for God to show his face

learn only to ferment the heart

become ash when there is fire

turn to mould when the rains come

become that oblong wild laughter

the rest of this is a fever dream

of powdered sugar                    of the incandescent glows

distilled into metamorphoses    of farewells

water damaged photos             become ancestral homes

that the children playing dead in a classroom

are really dead

that the dead do not disappear in sanitised

cloistered spaces elsewhere

that everyone has to put drops of turmeric

into the mouth of their loved one

and of that other thing we ask the sons to do

to their fathers at the pyre?

Dawn broke and someone drove the car somewhere via Rangjuli where the sal trees were still red, their bark still mimicking dried blood more than wood. There was a slow crunching of the chill in the air and the egrets hung on to the branches, like white fruit aglow even in the midst of foggy darkness. How do they find their way to these villages no one can name? They will make their nests to have noisy chicks, the same ones who will fly to Jatinga to die when they are old. In that coded DNA is a message that sears the memory of our mango tree to the frail body of the egret being born now, who will remember this and come back for years. Only later, when it can no longer fly to the mango tree—or any other tree—does it go to Jatinga and waste away in sunlight and monsoon rain.

Like the man who once flew from Kuwait to Mumbai and then to Guwahati on the 28th of January 2008. He arrived home in a car, ate fish that his wife cooked, and fell asleep talking about the weddings of his children. Late at night, way past midnight, his wife rang up the whole neighbourhood to say that he was dead.

It calls you, mother said afterwards. There is nothing else to it.

there—the Adriatic unfolding

in warm crumpled sheets,

the women talking of memories

of love, the man in front reading—

the sun beats down upon my brow

in a stale, dull ache

there, in the moving bus,

dreaming, I smell two bananas

rotting sweetly in Delhi

one late afternoon.