Mothers of dead sons

In the evening a soft sun was still hanging above the apartments on the other side of the lake as it shimmered from a clearing on the bank. We talked of a mother of a dead son, speculating whether a bond continued to exist between the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law. Did she matter to son’s wife, after the son had gone? After the link between them has become conspicuously absent, I mean.

Photographer Errol Morris talks of a photograph being decontextualized, torn from the fabric of the life it represents. A photograph cannot be true or false because it is not an opinion, a view. It simply is. A photographer omits the elephant standing outside the frame of a photograph and is there a duty on our part to place a metaphorical elephant in the frame to give it a context?

Didn’t the son give a context to the co-existence of the two women? What if we placed a metaphorical son in this our frame? Think, I said to my wife.

But then there are not two ,but three women. Between them is a dead man, a son, a husband and a father:

Three women

Between us three there is he, a white piece of memory
That defeats us daily by the night, occupying our body,
As fears spread in the belly like a jelly, these silly fears.

He that wore a body till recently is now an idea mainly
That spread from our sleeping body, between our sheets,
In dreams, mainly, to a sky that arched over our body.
Our light shadows coalesce with his own absence of body
Entering our common dreams in our separate sleeps.

( Three women are mother, wife and daughter of a dead man)

Stones in the sun

The chemistry of a winter sun goes well with history’s rocks and the gnarled trees of yesterday’s leaves. Stumps of fallen trees sprawl in the rocks of history as men make their way up on polished stones of time’s footfalls. Up there is a red temple to an ancient mother alongside brown boulders warm with tender sun. The trees shake with birds that chirp like the voices of children waiting for the teacher to come.

A certain village official had made God’s jewelry from out of the State’s coffers. Here is the dark of a cell in which he had spent years before he was released on God’s intervention. But dark doubts persist as brown-winged bats that have lived till today now come to hit you in the face from history.

In Golconda , a matchstick is not seen as a flame but heard. Across the boulders and in the blue sky, to the King’s palace at the top to alert him of unwelcome guests.

Star-dust

The news came in the morning. A young man who had on the previous night pointed the stars to his daughter found himself turned into one .Forty four was no time for turning a star. Look at the Mars, burning brightly, he had said to a wide-eyed daughter. In the morning he was found absolutely blue. The heart stopped at approximately 3 A.M. trying to gauge the depths of an astral sky.

Did he die in sleep? Was he in a dream he never woke up to recount?

Verti-go !

These four days I have been trying to grapple with vertigo, a frightening thing with the head when the world spins without your asking for it. It spins like a top, like the globe-earth in the ocean of emptiness that the boar-God carried on his tusks to save it from the apocalypse.

Of course the spinning was in a movie we saw when were still in knickerbockers. It spun like the model earth-globe that our teacher had spun on its brass axis illustrating our geography for us.

Luckily for me it is called by a nice medical name: Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. The name is truly awe-inspiring .Only the first word “benign” saves the day. In simple terms it is something that takes place in the vestibular inner ear, an accumulation of crystals leading to a loss of balance, a loss of space in the vastness of the inner ear.

What do you expect in an old ear, getting ready to hang its boots?

Evening in the park

One could go there for random images, vignettes from life, stories in the making. Faces tell stories, the way they wince, pucker up, smooth their hair. Some times the way they walk,crouch,and bend backwards.

Some times faces gather up the setting sun, when their wrinkles become deep trenches around their red mouths, full of expectation and reality.

You enter the park ,making clockwise oval movements on the walking track, one per minute.When you enter the park gate ,you always turn to the left. So does everybody else ,who walks. You therefore flow with the crowd. You can hardly recognize daily faces. Today I could see a new face, a young bespectacled face because it had entered the park gate and turned to the right. I saw it coming face to face.

Only one in a hundred turns to the right ,entering the park gate. A maverick?

Sitting in the balcony

When you are behind a balcony parapet wall, the day sounds as if of the sky with all its colors and smells.The sounds come filtered in the opacity of a middling wall ,on which stand majestic plants, embedded in the earth of pots, but proud of their lineage under the sky.

Tiny saffron roses, four of them, sit huddled together in the breeze.They draw their inspiration from the distant earth of elsewhere. But their dance in the breeze is just like it was when they had their first feet planted in the vastness of the earth.

The carpenter’s spiritualism

The proud carpenter quickly vanishes like the turpentine he uses on the wood surfaces .His words sound hollow like the half-made skeletons of cupboards he has left incomplete on the stair-case ,gaping at the morning sun day after day. The sun enters their domes as though they are cavities waiting to be filled with matter.

His body sloshes with drink, breathing like hospital. His body shakes like the beach trees in the night, that by the violence of their bodies appear to be taking leave of the mother earth.

He would, like them, appear to be tenuous on the earth, his knees shaking as he dealt with the bodies of trees.

The carpenter wants keenly to realize beauty
From his bearded face wearing drops of liquor
On the corners of lips, with a buddy on bench,
Sunday not surely being a holiday from beauty.

Wood is butter, to the knife and the hacksaw.
But liquor is quicker, on the body, behold and lo.

Beauty is not always dead wood imitating life.
Beauty lies in a shack, a thatch and on a bench
Frothing in brown at the top, to the flies buzzing
Around eyes ,the world having lost its outline.
The earth and the sky become a single mass.

Communication reaches its lowest point

In the train it was still night and sleep. At four, the train softly flowed in the night holding out a promise of home by eight. That was when communications reached their lowest point.

The mobile phone suddenly jumped from my pocket into the sink-hole and slid into the dark depths of a running night. Apparently it was time to part company with my phone. Looks like I have to build a new relationship.

Justice for the dead

In the yellow light and some green trees we tried to recall a life once lived ,here in the court of justice arguing for others.

Arguing for one self, for one’s own living. A lawyer’s life well lived and loved. Can one remember a soul that is lost to us by a few law books kept in the library for future lawyers?

Large trees overhang. Shadows loom large. A library is waiting to be explored by young lawyers wanting to learn. The efforts of a dead man’s family to install him in people’s memories will now bear fruit. Will they? Will there be reading or just socializing over a cuppa or a night whiskey over cards? As banal as that? We may wait and see.

A thousand lamps for God

This day , four years ago, in Bhopal, we had stood in rows after rows of lamps around God’s pillar, looking for mirrors of lights in people’s eyes. We saw the pipal tree, up above, lighting with new found love for white birds that fluttered in half-sleep. High above the pipal shone a soft full moon overseeing a thousand lights. The moon stood on the brass pillar like a bright lamp that drove away our darkness, inside our minds.

Women took the lamps one by one, neatly arranging them at the base of the pillar. The flames licked the dark air of the night , lighting it with their fragrance.

This day ,here in Hyderabad, we saw the lamps cowering behind cardboard walls erected in the temple. The flames were bright and soft as they had been in Bhopal but there was no pipal tree through which the moon supervised the lamps.