My fellow-passenger in the train

There she sat,cross-legged
With her eyes screwed up
She seemed to take a stance
But that was not a stance
Energy swelled within her
In waves after waves
Only to break, boisterously,
On rocky shores of nothingness.
Her cell phone rang fitfully
Interrupting pencilled shapes
Of her future textile creations.
Her shapes, not still forms,
But frenetically moving images
Sizzled and then vaporised
In split-second transience
Everything moved towards a stance
A fixed identity for her soul.
Her fabric brooked no such thing
The struggle was worth nothing
Exhausted,she went off to sleep.

I was travelling from Hyderabad to Tirupati in an overnight train and as I was trying to read a book I saw there was a young lady sitting opposite to me. There was something about her which spoke of her profession which appeared to be some sort of a textile designer who ran her own business. She appeared to take a fixedness much against her volatile mind -a stance which perplexed me by its inherent contradictions.It was a constant struggle , the way she coped with the world and her work. There was no attempt to observe me from the corner of her eyes although she was full of my presence. Her energy rose and fell in waves after waves as though all those shapes in her mind were breaking free and nothing finally happened. Nothing interested her in the train and it was only the cell phone that was giving her the much needed identity.

A dog’s death

He had come into us, running,
Yelling, in crescendo of pain
And livid with fateful anger.
Then all was peremptorily still.
The car stopped, screeching
Only to scrape bloody flesh
Off the muddy bumper; actually
He was chasing steel shadows
Which had no business there.

We were travelling from Calicut to the Wyanad forests in our car when he had suddenly come into us .The driver applied his brakes very skilfully to bring the car to a stop but could not save the dog.Everything seemed so sudden ;his barks trailed off quickly in the morning silence of the highway. Actually he was chasing cars which he hated and went down fighting them.

The gloom had persisted till we reached the forests which appeared entirely oblivious of what had happened to the morning’s dog.The elephants decided to play truant but we saw herds of beautiful deer.Not that we failed to sight the elephants ;it is only that we could see them as phantoms behind the tall bushes. Our guide ,a native tribal ,was actually scared of the elephants and would not allow us to get down from the jeep to have a closer view of the elephants .

A photography trip to the forests of Wyanad

First poetry had entered a dog’s life
Chasing steel shadows and gray death
The elephants were hard to come out;
They had their strong sylvan reasons.
Our timid tribal guide called out to Surya
Who had his elephant feet tied to the tree.
There was black fear in his beady eyes.
Earlier, in the morning, beauty had beckoned;
Death of a dog was but a sweat drop.
There was fuzzy rain in the bamboo grove;
Ponderous shadows cogitated on the lake;
The sun shimmered on the solitude-beach.
Poetry returned over the coconut tops.
The quintessential shadows remained.

Struggle

There was fear all over;
Things happened very fast.
The body quickly gave way;
The sanitized walls closed in.
The lone crab struggled
In a puddle of scalding water
There were voices around
All happened in a split-second
When someone shouted
Pull him out, for God’s sake;
This is a mere dream.

Thank God it was a mere dream .I was lying in a hospital ,slowly degenerating surrounded by several phantom figures .I was a crab writhing in a pool of scalding water .Suddenly it appeared as though it was just a mistake and then a wonderful voice came from among the figures surrounding me.

Can I not avoid getting into such sticky situations ? I do not think I can decide the type of dreams I want to have.

Possession

The Goddess spoke, fiercely,
Through white anger’s mists
The body shouted thick-throated
A lower order goddess, surely,
Cannot be all that demanding
Crying for well-fattened cocks.
Fear becomes the key translating
To waves of body movements.
A matter of thinned blood supply
Or a fleeting hardening of vessels,
She lay there sprawled, wailing.
Anger burst out of the bounds
She had crossed all body-barriers
Just when sanity finally returned.
A mere transient ischemic attack
Or a turmeric- yellowed Goddess
Extending dominion over disbelief?

That was my mother who had argued fiercely with somebody against the existence and power of the lower order of Goddesses. When she came out and started walking on the road the Goddess appeared in the temple opposite and it appeared as though she did not approve of my mother’s refusal to acknowledge her power . There she lay ,sprawled on the ground ,with anger she had never experienced earlier. The anger was of the Goddess who possessed her .Was it not merely another attack of ischemia ?