No Child, No Cry
Outside the child welfare office
in the night
late for a train
accosted by random men
selling tea, popadom, sex,
I hear the cry of a thousand children…
Shrill, smothered by government ayahs
breaking the pestilent kaleidoscope shell
of this perfidious city.
The broken rattle of riots,
bellies ripped open,
Vedic Vitruvius unveiled.
We are gods, and then dogs
strung on a veena, riding
pillion on a scooter,
the culture, precarious
and classical.
This night of no women
is the night of many rapes—
I alone weep with stray cattle,
eating the roots
of old trees where rats burrow.
The street lights have grown wings
like angels.
Embers
As amma put on her chaddi
I watched her thighs squirm,
into her upper bottom she’d put
this piece of hateful cotton
white flesh smelling faintly
of oriental salons.
When I threw it in the oven
the cakes came out hued with blood,
and she screamed, ‘You jackass.’
Her Taj mahal, the toilet bowl, I’d wipe down
with some Egyptian cotton
her replica bag of cowhide
had a roll of it, among sweets,
she’d buy us from Varkey’s.
She called us hospital refuse.
Her cotton lot
that ne’er ever deserved her.
The Great Indian Kitchen
(After Agha Shahid Ali)
The cold thickens the blood near his heart.
We break our bangles on the hearthstone,
are you ‘ate’ done with the world?
“Feed all your worldly husbands to the kitchen fire.”
says Akka Mahadevi.
The great English kitchen, where Sylvia Plath wrote
Is it a kind of performance art?
On a scaffolding
you do it beautifully well –
every time when
it rains in the streets
like the blood of Hussein,
every time I die a little
when some wise versifier
snatches your paisley
takes it for the finest muslin ethereal
and pulls it through a wedding ring.
On a scaffolding
in Nasik the falling nose ring makes a splash
amidst currency note smells, in the
24 Gunpowder Plot’s soup kitchen
children, asleep like gods in my arms.
In Indic, Agha means noble, a flaneur
of meandering tales,
in English, it means kitchen stove.
Feed your poems to the fire…
Karbala is gone; to be immortal, and to then die…
For I am the only witness to this
till eternity
Shahid,
playing woman to my master
when the Covid rains come to Harappa.
(For Suvir Kaul)
Aura, Aura, Aura
Bengal!
Land of effulgence and horripilation…
Dominatrices,
flagellating momma…
Smouldering alphabets, and tear-stained cacti;
I do not know what!
Gilt-edged speech and soaring IQs,
Naxalbari and Nischindipur,
thorny-fish and mishti-doi,
swamps and stigmata!
I am your son from the desert,
Give me only…
Taka! Taka! Taka!