Communists die unsung ,they say. Not entirely. Communists have comrades who sing for them when they die.Slow mournful dirges with a sprinkling of inspirational slogans.They carry red flags in white kurta pyjamas.They don’t cry but only sing rousing songs.A week ago when our communist relative died ,none of this happened because he was a decent and friendly communist .He had carried on his relentless struggle against the bourgeoisie over a series of hot cups of coffee and cigarettes.In his personal life his son was his Achille’s heel and even communists have their Achille’s heels .

Just then a certain communist saw red
And vanished from the scene promptly.
His ashes will now be spread in rivers
Just like India’s first Prime Minister’s
In whirring defense helicopters for fame.
The fame was of course the doting son’s-
It was his purple need from a hot brain
Fevered and full of fertile stories, stories
That made heroes in history-addled brains,
Stories that had sultry spies from enemies
Who indulged in highest skullduggery
And made hapless victims of patriotic Indians
Working closely with defense ministers.
When our father dies our country is with us
We go out briefly to receive condolences
On our cell phones in somber mood.

We have heard of communists dying unsung.Of course ,there is the infamous Pol Pot whose life had meant death to so many in order to make life for so many .There is confusion in Pol Pot’s existence and death .Who is supposed to live and who will die ? May be , it is in the numbers.Some sons of guns will die so that other sons of guns will live.The smaller number will die so that the bigger number will live. Confusing . When Pol Pot finally called it a life,he must have thought of this .We have no news of those who were supposed to live happily ever after ,now that all those people obstructing their happiness have died :

The skull pot

I sit here on the precipice
With my feet dangling
In the abyss of time
On the far-line I espy
A pile of stacked skulls
Of large circular eyes
With the mountain air
Hissing through them.
These skulls had thoughts,
When their holes were eyes,
That wished no brains in them.
What did the old man think,
When , lying on a string cot,
He saw the smile of death
Where the banyan met the sky.

I have been trying to hit the nail on the head -to arrive at a precise assessment of what life is like.This doesn’t seem to work somehow. Has Rilke done it -the mischievous grin I see in his literary face,so to speak,seems to suggest it. It looks like he has upstaged it somehow. He cannot have been far wrong.Of course ,would it really matter to him in his present state of unbeing ? Why would he want to be one up on life?

“The Future” by Rilke

Translated by A. Poulin

“Time’s excuse to frighten us ” - an image reminiscent of John Donne or Andrew Marvell. But the next image“Too vast a project” sounds more ‘modern’ ,conveying a conscious plan to mould future activities to the achievement of a pre-decided objective.The next image draws from the sensory experience of taste-”too large a morsel for the heart’s mouth”-a very graphic image.

But the most fascinating image is “it suffices you to deepen the absence that we are” .Just think about it : as future grows ,the past deepens and with it our absence.

In the Udaygiri caves we looked around for our lost God,who was merely sleeping in the darkness .There he lay undisturbed by the blinding beauty of the hills or by the history’s long stony silences .Was that in the 2nd century B.C. ,when the monks hid in the caves doing penance or moved outside the rock niches ,from where the brown parched plains stretched interminably.

Nearer our times the white masters ,in riding hoods, roamed these hills and the brown plains discovering our heritage ,the heritage of a milenium.Their ghosts wandered in these hills and took shelter in lonely stone buildings.

God’s mountains

Invisible are their powers, unfelt and secure
The mountains lay there brown and puffing
In the mid-noon sun among yellow-dropped leaves
The scrolls on their walls dated back to eons
Brown-skinned ancestors shrieked, ghosts,
Their smelly wings flapped in cave-silences
Several worn-out paths winded to forgot ruins
There they stopped midway vanishing in bushes
The temple bells were heard under the banyan tree
The tree spread its hair reaching the steep slopes
It was the clouds that brought the brown haze
The sky ended up in blue torpor in penciled hills
There in the wilderness shrieked British ghosts
Collectors who had rested in lonely stone buildings
Pondering deeply on history’s ghosts lying supine
On broken temple foundations with missing walls
There in a stony niche slept God with his eyes closed
A lotus emerged from his navel, mysterious and born
In fact the whole of the world burst out from there

At twelve in the night I woke up from a nightmare.Outside ,through the window’s grill I heard the wind blowing through the trees in waves .The pipal tree made such fine music out of its falling leaves. Where does the wind come from -the question has come back to me after such a long time ,when such questions used to come and go like the gusts of wind through the pipal tree.

Why not search for the answer .Yes .Why not on the Yahoo.I type the question and before the question is half formed ,the answers are already there. The variety of the answers is no doubt fascinating but it is  one answer that really captivates.

We stand on a hilltop, you and I,

A tall grassy hill where the wind blows by.

“Where does it come from?” you ask me,

“Where does it go? What does it see?”

That is how the story starts. From there, the wind takes you on a journey across land, sea and sky. It blows over people and animals, continents and seasons, until it has circled the world and come back again to that windy hill.

Where the boy and his mother also become part of the wind’ s song…

This ephemeral element of nature unites us through the sharing of its touch on our bodies and environments. I liked to think of that when I was far away from my son; it made me feel closer to him. “

http://www.cindyrink.com/wind/wind_preview1.html

Blogged with Flock

The night’s wakefulness came across the starlit sky
Over the dark clump of mangoes and the court wall
With loud cymbals and scraps of movie songs
After lanterns started flickering with halos of moths.
We then kept awake with Shiva over tea after tea .
The pigtailed girls had hungry stomachs
Yet made thin tea for for egotistical boys.
Their plea for holding bats fell on deaf ears
They then jumped over charcoal drawn squares
With their ribboned ponytails doing ding dong.
A mythological movie was then thought.
Mustachioed demon kings threw arrows in them
Which fought flaming maces and burning arrows
it was good which triumphed to our child’s comfort
When we were still confused if that was indeed so.
At two we yawned deeply ,convinced that
Shiva had by then consumed the deadly poison
And got back to his penance on the mount
The blue on his throat had by then vanished.

Today is the Shiva Ratri when we are supposed to keep awake with Shiva who consumes the deadly poison in the night in order to save the world from getting destroyed by its poisonous fumes. We keep awake to express our grateful solidarity with Him.Time to remember my childhood days when we celebrated the festival with lot of fun and play.

On the river bed three holy rivers meet
Two of them are in the minds of people
The third is a streak of undammed water
The holy men and shop people celebrate
The confluence with drums and money jingle
Their minds meet with surprising cohesion
Aided by a loud-mouthed movie song
Holy fires are lit and naked bodies bathed
Head over water, palms cupped against sun
The holy men gyrate to prayer songs
Sung in kitschy styles of Mumbai pop,
Their bodies smeared with ash, hair in mat
The politician duly makes his touristy speech
There is everything at this holy confluence
Of religion, commerce and people politics
With only the collective conscious missing.

While at Raipur we had gone to the Ranjim river bed on which a massive kumbh mela was to take place at the confluence of three rivers.It was planned as an extravaganza and as a Government public relations exercise with none of the religious fervour usually expected in such an event. This is what happens when the politics and religion are inter-mixed.

The angel in red had taken my bag
My body arrived all in a piece as a guest
In the sky-land of a liquor comeuppance
As the red bird had flown low and high
It forgot my bag’s existence in the universe
But brought this bag of bones with verse
And would ,with an apologetic click ,reverse.
My honour was truly at stake for the day
As it ended with everything red and dead
With not even clothes for this bag of bones.

At the Indore airport I got into the Raipur flight of the Kingfisher Airlines in a first experience of the Airlines owned by the liquor baron Vijay Mallya.The red birds(nice aircrafts) together with the angels in red seemed to spread a red carpet welcome and it was only when I reached Raipur that I realised that my bag ,which contained my clothes,did not accompany this bag of bones. Twenty four hours later,the bag was bundled into the flight once again and reached
me with duly muttered apologies.

My mother ,confined to her room mostly,keeps inquiring from the inner space , at regular intervals whether I have gone to the office or whether I have come for the lunch or whether I have come back from office.My wife gets understandably annoyed having to reply to her from the living room from time to time.Why she does this is at first difficult to understand .Today I have understood her .Suddenly it has occurred to me that when time hangs heavily on her she has found her own way of marking time .In the twilight years a person loses a sense of time and becomes disoriented because he is no longer in the mainstream. You not only do not participate in the drama of life but lose your spectator status as well . The world goes on without you and is not even aware of your existence.

My wife says my mother raises her voice even when the listener is close by .Where is the need to shout when somebody is within a close range, she asks.It has again occurred to me why such a thing happens with my mother all the time.She seems to be trying to break the inner stillness within her , the lack of steady hum in her consciousness .The silence is indeed terrifying and it is only by raising the pitch that one could break the silence.

The painting by Edward Munch expresses beautifully a similar kind of loneliness prompting the individual to scream trying to make himself heard .

The scream is a shout from the existential angst of humankind . There is fire and water behind and you have already crossed the large part of the bridge .The fire is not what you are confronted with as it is behind you but the terror of your future at the end of the bridge .It is the hopelessness of the situation ,the meaninglessness of a landscape which you are trying to relate to and become part of but suddenly realize the futility of it. No matter how much you shout ,you are not heard and your scream merely echoes in the vast wild wastes of your existence .