and now, me

For how long will you remember me?
Gone as I am already from the pages
Of your newspapers
And headlines on your television

You will remember me of course,
In fleeting glimpses
When another like me is molested,
Another girl child is drowned,
A mother’s foetus ripped because
She will birth her own kind,
a bride's cries stifled,
or set afire


You will remember
When my tormentors are brought to book,
When they are hanged
Or sentenced to life

When governments swear by their children
And their mothers
To never let this happen
Only to play witness again
And again
And again.

And then again,
You will eulogise me
When you light candles in my memory
Year after year


Alas!
You will also forget
In the mundaneness of your life
In the everyday struggles you must meet
In order to survive

You will forget
When you see beauty around you
Happiness, joy and innocence
And you will then
Foolishly believe
That life is still beautiful.
And that there is still hope.

You will forget
Because it is scary to remember.


How many more of us will it take
For you to not just remember
But never forget?



numerous verses on the internet on Nirbhaya. but for how long will we remember?

lessons from a broken plank

she sits upon a broken plank,
cracked from the weight of people
and the sun, the winds and the rain.
beneath it flows a turgid sewer,
greyed with the dirty linen
of the city.

upon her lap lies an infant
and behind her an older dame
who picks nits from the lady’s hair
whilst running a commentary
on the lives of their neighbours,
tv soaps and their men.

i wind down the windows of
my air conditioned car to watch
this curious sight
of huddled thatches. homes.
and the lives they hold within.
but my conditioned nostrils
suffocate.
my oesophagus retches
at the smells.

between the glass and me
lies this unknown world
and i shudder at their misery.
then i look.
i look and see
that infant smile.
and the lady plant upon its cheek,
a wet kiss.

this must be happiness, i think.

and all this time,
i looked for it
in my wallet.

for Malala

shoot me again, if you must
but listen first.

Let me shake your memory a little,
Lost as it is from truth.

it was i that birthed you
watched you slip,
bloody from my womb
and said a thousand prayers
for sparing me a child
in whose warmth i could forget
the emptiness of my heart.

it was my breast that you suckled from,
drinking from my life to keep yourself alive.
yes.
the same breast that now feeds your lust
and calms your depraved mind

it was i who taught you
first to walk. To talk. To think. And to love.
And sheltered you from the wrath
of your father and his tempers

i that you ran to when you were scared
it is still me that you come to
to spill your genes
so that i may birth one like you again

shoot me if you must
but listen to my last wish.
kill me until
i disappear in entirety
until i cease to exist

what a befitting way it would be
to end yourself.
All of you.

bottled. hope.

young little men,
whose moustaches struggle
to display maturity
of responsibility
whilst all the time belying
the frailty of hope
hidden in their eyes.

these children play with death
everyday.
every other night.
by throwing caution to the winds
and fear to their weekly pay.


and when payday arrives,
they hand over crumpled notes
to their weary mothers
and save some to drown their sorrows

just like their fathers did
a score or two years ago.


disparity is stark. it's everywhere. young boys of 18 or so need to work to keep hearths burning.they toil, play with dangerous stuff in factories and give up their own dreams. before long, they are lost.

hurt

drip
drip
drip
blotches of red
on white canvas
mars the picture perfect world
that i have drawn within
my mind.

Hurt.
Stark, deep,
when it invades the idealism
i hold so dear
the lofty principles that i sadly cling to
believing that the world will one day see
beyond me
beyond what makes me.

it is now that i see
reality.
money is perhaps everything.
and because it means nought to me
i will have to live through it –
a blotch of red
permanently etched
on my stark white canvas.




there are people sizing you up wherever you go. your shoes, your clothes, your bag, your social standing. you mean nothing if you don't belong. you cease to become a luxury of acquaintance. you become a necessity that one must live with, when one wants to. society and its ways!

hero. villain. anything but human.

man. sometimes woman. many a time, a child. searching, discovering, learning, unlearning all the time. about who i am.

and here you are, making a mockery of all that makes me. displaying my hidden organs that bear no resemblance to the turmoil that i undergo within. teasing my urges, decreed by the very nature that makes me, me. the very nature that unearths the villain in you. so that you may make a hero of yourself, by making me a sacrifice.

i cry. you call me woman.
i rage. you call me a man.
i stammer, stumble, pick my broken remains. you call me transgender.

and people read, watch, discuss me.

because it is easier to vilify me. than unveil your own hypocrisy.




pinky pramanik. what matters who she is? when all we care is what she brings?

of alms and beggars

She must have seen better times. The glint in her speaks of them and yet, she stands, knocking glass doors of transitory vehicles that have stopped impatiently. I wind down the window and feel the gush of the afternoon sun invade the luxury of conditioned air within. I sigh, place a few coins on her calloused palms. She smiles. And reaches her hand above my head. Gently. And plants a blessing.

With it, she enlightens me. I know now, who the beggar is.

Bare

the cold has a way
of piercing souls of the poor,
in a way it doesn’t touch others.
it bites into bones, creates crevices deep within skin.
its sinister voice penetrates the cracks between their walls,
stifling the embers of warmth even before they are lit.

but life must go on for the poor.
and it does.
through the day, they tend to cabbage fields,
pick choicest teas and strawberries,
or work at homes made of teakwood floors
victorian chairs and antique doors.

and when the warmth of the sun
surrenders to the night,
they huddle over feeble fires
on which they brew watery soups
with lentils afloat
like shredded hope.
hope, as threadbare
as the clothes they wear.


and when night comes upon them,
and the cold gets fiercer,
more ominous than it seems in the day.
they reach for each other,
like they do every night, for
lust is the only emotion
that keeps them from succumbing.


written in February 2012

dreams are dead in the land of food

Disillusionment is easy
when dreams are dead
when beliefs are questioned before
they are formed
self-esteem, trampled upon
even before it has a chance to rise.

They play dead, these youth
From desperate backgrounds.

They have burdens to bear,
These young souls,
The burdens of becoming
And those of making family dreams
Turn real.
They come, afraid of what the city walls
Will offer them,
Of what they will learn from a foreign language,
When they haven’t learnt from their own.

Before long, the sparkle in their eye is gone,
Their dreams, buried over the heap
Of crumbled egos.

Who cares about dreams anyway,
Do dreams put food on the table?



have been at a training session for final year students. it's so easy to discard them as good-for-nothings. and it took great effort to look beyond them. and then we saw, a faint flicker of hope. and then we saw it extinguished by wisdom-givers. so-called wisdom givers. it's not the young that will kill the hope of this land. it's us who have already killed.

Time Warp

sometimes, the past is all you can cling on to,
especially when you have lost everything to it.
everything that you could touch, feel, hear and see.
now, you have nothing, save the memories,
some bric-a-brac to refresh them and
a few deposits of cash, put away in bank lockers,
to aid survival.

you must necessarily go back to that time,
for today is warped in a world that means little to you,
you cannot understand it,
neither can they, the generation of today.
your lessons of frugal means, spartan living and ideals
seem as out of place as you are.
and then, there are your customs,
of rituals and their many gods,
your beliefs of womanhood as it should be and
numerous other household laws.
but no one listens and your wisdom lies
discarded, like wasted food, tied together in
black garbage bags.

no one understands how slowly time moves for you,
because it moves too fast for them.
but live you must, until it’s time.
and to survive,
all you can do is hold on to the past.

of heirs and heirlooms

It’s a different home he comes to
Every night.
Sometimes it’s his father,
In a drunken stupor,
The money from his meagre earnings
Lying empty in a bottle.
At others, it’s his mother,
On the matted charpoy,
With her clandestine lover
From the street beyond,
Her day’s earnings, spent
On cheap perfume and
Jasmine flowers.

But it’s always the same,
In one way.
He comes back to an empty home.
Empty at the coffers,
Devoid of love,
And on many days, empty of food.

And he, the forgotten heir to
Broken heirlooms
Picks up the fragments,
Discards them
And moves on.

He survives.
Gives himself away,
Little by little,
Month after month,
To anonymous recipients,
Empty wombs
That yearn for heirs.
And in them, he sees
Belonging.


A few days ago, I was told that many poor students who want to escape their poverty and abysmal conditions sell their eggs and sperms every month. we talk of a glorious future but cannot nourish our present.

monoliths 2

What ran through your mind, ye anonymous sculptor,
When you chiselled poetry from stone?
When you breathed life into the eyes,
And the lust for life into the myriad nubile forms?
Did you dream before you built them,
Or did they come to you as you carved?
Did you look back to admire your work,
Or were you too bruised to think of it at all?
What were you like and where was your family
Whilst you worked through night and day?
Why didn’t you leave a little of your history behind,
For us to peer into,
Like you did those of your king?

You didn’t think of course,
that when you were done,
Dead and gone,
You would still remain immortal
Despite your anonymity.


it's hard not to be inspired after seeing the work of the anonymous at Mahabalipuram

monoliths

There they stand,the stone carvings,
Monoliths.
Moved by elephantine visions,
And chiselled by bare hands,
And a tool or two,
To etch the glory of a king and his gods.

The bare hands must have won a woman
In turn,
Possibly even a bag of gold,
A house and enough patronage
To fill coffers of the next few generations.

And the elephants -
The elephants may have got
Their sugar cane
And hay.
They would have been egged on
Until they forgot their own histories.
Until every memory of that legacy
lay etched in their own skin.

red.light.

The red light blinks to life.
Stopping traffic that is waiting to get home
For a few seconds, may be a minute or more,
Tired minds take their feet off accelerators,
Ponder on the myriad chores done.
And the many more
That remain unfinished.
Beggars clamour.
Vendors beg.
Window cleaners begin
Their tasks.
Earnestly.
Until it’s time for green again.

Somewhere else in the city,
The red light comes alive,
Bringing morality to a stop.
Cleavages clamour.
Cat calls beckon.
Men close doors on their homes.
Work begins.
Earnestly.
Until it’s time for day again.


have always been intrigued by the origin of the word 'red light area.' found that sometime in the 1890s, working girls used to shade their candles/lamps red, to advertise their trade. written sometime in jan 2012.

homes from the homeless

For the first few months, selvi will carry bricks,
Heaped upon rusted iron bowls,
That are placed on her tender head,
Whilst her lame son plays in the sand,
Building castles of his own.

Muthu will cement the dreams of eager young couples,
Who have pledged their salaries, on this hope of concrete.
When evening comes, the dreamers will visit, smiling
At their home, being built brick by brick.
When evening comes, selvi will carry her lame child back,
To their rickety shack.
The dwelling, hastily built for them
And seventy five other beings.

In some time, floor tiles will appear, mirroring the dreams
Of the dreamers. The tiles will be polished until they shine,
Like the sweat that glistens on the survivors.
In a year or two, the grand dream will appear, put together
Hand by hand, sweat by sweat, human by human.
And people will visit the freshly painted homes,
Pat the dreamers on their backs and raise a toast
To the good life.

selvi and muthu will then pick up the remains of their shack,
And move on to the next dream that they will build.
And their little lame son will begin building castles
In the sand.
That will crumble again.



written in july 2007. truth, as i saw my home being built by the homeless

What is, what isn’t

Shubha is careless, everyone knows
You can see it in the way she even handles her phone,
Dropping things callously, misplacing keys and books,
never remembering if she added enough salt to her food.
Yesterday she cut her thumb, said she’d sliced some bread,
The other day it was a bruise that ran across her head.

But in the office, she’s full of life; there’s a sparkle in her eyes,
And many friends bring to her their stories of doubt and lies.
She listens to them patiently, and comforts their angst and cries
Tells them that they must keep their hope and never let it die.
Shubha is everyone’s best friend but no one knows about her,
They’ve only seen a glimpse or two of her husband of ten years
He wears a dimple on his chin and a scar under his ear.
There’s nothing much to think about them, nothing much to hear.

When Shubha doesn’t turn up one day, no one wonders why
It’s evening when they get the news and then they start to cry
They visit her in hospital, to see her bruised black,
Burnt stubbs of cigarettes are patterned in her hand,
And whiplash marks and nail bites scrawled on her back.
Her eye has been beaten blue, and she is comatose,
No one knows what happened until they see the reports.

This is the story of Shubha’s life, almost everyday,
It’s not her carelessness after all, it’s a sadist at play.
The dimpled man that Shubha wed is not nice after all,
You can tell by the broken bottles strewn in their dining hall.
Now in hindsight they all see who Shubha was,
Dropping things of nervousness, not because she didn’t care at all
The twinkle in her eye, they saw was masked in wretched tears
They all wish they could have seen behind that grace, her sad wall of fears.

fame 2

Click.
it’s over.
Forever frozen in memory.
But lost to the moment
That is now.
And those that will follow.
As transient as fame,
Whose limelight will soon
Darken
And pave way for the next celebrity.

In time,
Both will fade
Into oblivion.
Like our earthen spirits
Turn to ashes and dust.

Photographs. Fame. Life.
Now there. Now, gone.

shadows

Again. And then again.
Abuse
Hurls itself against the courage within
Her. Breaking her spirit
Little.
By little.
Until the only strand
Of hope that remains
Is to survive it all.
Just survive.

Today, she breaks free,
Flees.
In fright.
Fright that will always follow her
even when she is far away.
and safe.

And then, she will cry.
The salt of her tears,
will spill on every pore
That he hurt.
Erasing the wounds,
But
Singing them with a memory.
Fierce. Dark. Frightening.

And then she will face the nightmares.
That will rudely awaken her.
Wet with sweat.
And tears. Again.
Making her remember the days.
Relive the nights.

The wounds will still be raw
When she picks up her threads.
broken, but still reminiscent of a once whole.

And she will learn to move on.
step by step.

And he,
He will take his next victim,
Who will follow the same path.
He will remain anonymous.
Slippery, like a shadow.
But there. everywhere.
Until we all rise as one,
To give him, what he gave our sisters.

But then again, it’s always easy to write.
Easier still to speak.


it is easy to speak of courage when we are not faced with fear. then, even the bravest of us, fails. is scared to walk out, shout, scream. perhaps that's why it's easy for the abusers to continue what they do.
this is for a dear friend.

colourless. brown.

To us, she was always brown grandma,
Shorn of hair, clothed from head to toe,
In a shade of colourless brown that was meant to merge
Her presence and submerge her being,
Within the background of the bustling household.

Brown grandma wore no jewels,
Save a garland of dried seeds
that would seep into her being,
the ideals of renouncement from
all the deliciousness the world had to offer.

She was meant to be –
Never seen, never heard,
But her presence hovered around the house
Like the stale, forgotten smell of the doors,
The ceilings and the floors.

We never thought of her as young,
To us, she had always remained this way –
Brown, shaven and devoid of any beauty
That surrounded our mothers and aunts -
brilliant shades of red and yellow
that anointed their heads and faces,
the delicate fragrances of jasmines and pink flowers,
that wove themselves in their hair,
the taste of betel leaves that
dyed their tongues red, already ripe
with gossip of their neighbourhood.
And the sound of their matrimony
That left tinkles on the ground as they walked, bare feet.

We never thought anything at all of brown grandma,
Until one day, we saw her lying dead.
It was then that they said,
That she died young.
Barely forty-two.

When we began to see the dreams
she must have had,
It was too late.
Too young.
Too late.


after a story i heard on the possible genesis of a traditional brahmin widow - it traces back to a few centuries, when a young child widow - the daughter of the king's priest - became the king's obsession. when he asked to see her that night, the priest escorted her in a covered palanquin. when she stepped out, the king was shocked at seeing a form devoid of beauty - hair shorn, giant rudraksha beads on her neck and a dull brown garb.

brought memories of a brown grandma (a distant relative).

when roads are made from homes and dreams

Muthusamy came home
Early one morning,
Drunk from the previous day’s earnings,
On local arrack,
That still reeked a good twelve hours later.
His bleary eyes were suddenly
atear,
With fear –
Where was his home that was here
Yesterday?

Where was the deep blue tarpaulin sheet
That held the rain and sun above him, Kathayi and
The children?
Where were the hastily erected walls
Made of discarded bits of asbestos,
Synthetic sheets and bricks?
Where was that make shift door
That shut out their poverty to the rest of the world?
There was nothing.
Surely he had come to the wrong street,
Muthusamy.

He rushed to wash his inebriation away
From a tap that was left standing,
Surprisingly left standing amongst the debris.
When he was sober once more,
He looked again – there!
There was his door – was it the door?
Yes, broken now, and close to it,
The shredded blue tarpaulin sheet,
The
Fragmented asbestos.
And then he saw it, the might of power
The large bull dozer
Standing mighty,
Among the debris.

What happened, he cried,
Shaking himself of the many
Delusional dreams he had had,
When inconsolably drunk.
Where was Kathayi? Where were the children?
Had they been bulldozed too?

A fellow drunkard came by
And said their homes were gone.
Their homes would now be replaced
By broader roads for the city folk.

The bulldozer man was one of them
And yet, he had brought their hopes down,
Saying they were ugly reminders that
Put the city in bad light.
‘What about us?’ muthusamy screamed,
‘there’s nothing about us...’

There they go, muthusamy, kathayi,
Their many children and fellow humans
On trucks that will deposit them
On the fringes of urban civilisation.
There they go,
The invisible city dwellers,
To a new place they will call home,
Until the city needs a new road, building
Or high rise once more.



muthusamy, kathayi and other names speak for the numerous unseen, unheard faces of society. they are everywhere. but this is what happens to them, everyday.