Madras

I was neither born nor bred here.

But I know this city

                                     of casuarina and tart mango slices,
                                     gritty with salt and chilli 
                                     and the truant sands of the Marina,

the powdered grey jowls of film heroes,

                                     my mother’s sari, hectic with moonlight,
                                     still crackling with the voltage 
                                     of an MD Ramanathan concert,

the flickering spice route of tamarind and onion
from Mylapore homes on summer evenings,

                                     the vast opera of the Bay of Bengal,
                                     flambéed with sun,

and a language as intimate as the taste
of sarsaparilla pickle, the recipe lost, 
the sour cadences as comforting
as home.

It’s no use.
Cities ratify 
their connections with you
when you’re looking the other way,

annexing you 
through summer holidays,
through osmotic memories 
of your father’s glib 
lie to a kindergarten teacher
(“My mother is the fair one”),

and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca
suddenly awakening an old prescription –
Peabury, Plantation A 
and fifty grams of chicory 
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.

City that creeps up on me
just when I’m about to affirm
world citizenship.



Home

Give me a home 
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms 
without a trace, 
never worrying 
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside.  

A home that I can wear lightly,
where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to fill in the crevices.

A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting. 

From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2005



Winter, Delhi, 1997

My grandparents in January
on a garden swing
discuss old friends from Rangoon,
the parliamentary session, chrysanthemums,
an electricity bill.

In the shadows, I eavesdrop,
eighth grandchild, peripheral, half-forgotten,
enveloped carelessly
by the great winter shawl of their affection.

Our dissensions are ceremonial.
I growl obligingly
when he speaks of a Hindu nation,
he waves a dismissive hand
when I threaten romance with a Pakistani cricketer.

But there is more that connects us
than speech spiked with the tartness of old curd
that links me fleetingly to her,
and a blurry outline of nose 
that links me to him, 
and there is more that connects us
than their daughter who birthed me. 

I ask for no more.
Irreplaceable, I belong here
like I never will again,
my credentials never in question,
my tertiary nook in a gnarled family tree
non-negotiable.
   
And we both know
they will never need me
as much as I, them.
The inequality is comforting.

From On Cleaning Bookshelves, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2001



Tree

It takes a certain cussedness
to be a tree in this city,
a certain inflexible woodenness

to dig in your heels
and hold your own
amid lamp-posts sleek as mannequins
and buildings that hold sun and glass together 
with more will-power than cement, 

to continue that dated ritual,
re-issuing a tireless
maze of phalange and webbing,
perpetuating that third world profusion 
of outstretched hand,
each with its blaze of finger
and more finger -
so many ways of tasting neon,
so many ways of latticing a wind,
so many ways of being ancillary to the self
without resenting it.

From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2005



Return

After so long you will be here again
and I will have to relearn how it works

this dreaming playhouse of possibilities
choreographed by another accent
of weight and limb

clusters of clothes and paper morphed
into new jigsaws of habitation

and those startled collisions of memory
and reality at the sounds 

of a running tap, a muffled yawn, 
the clink and stumble of presence
in another room

and then the nights
when, turning over on the side, 
the arm reaches out 

and finds
with some primal riverine instinct
a familiar lost tributary of self.

From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2005



Another Way

To swing yourself
from moment to moment,
weave a clause
that leaves room 
for reminiscence and surprise,
that breathes,
welcomes commas,
dips and soars
through air-pockets of vowel,
lingers over the granularity of consonant,
never racing to the full-stop,
content sometimes
with the question mark,
even if it’s the oldest one in the book.

To stand 
in the vast howling rain-gouged
openness of a page
asking the question
that has been asked before,
knowing the gale of a thousand libraries
will whip it into the dark.

To leave no footprints
in the warm alluvium,
no Dolby echoes 
to reverberate through prayer halls,
no epitaphs,
no saffron flags.

This was also a way
of keeping the faith.  

From Where I Live, Allied Publishers, Mumbai, 2005