Oh Delhi!

The Jantar Mantar is an architectural observatory

Delhi versus Bombay arguments happen all the time in India, something that adds spice to a first date or an after dinner conversation, not unlike Hong Kong-Singapore showdowns or the NYC-LA face-offs. If Delhi is loud and all brag, Bombay is mercenary and all hustle. If Mumbai claims the crown for business and cinema, Dilli has her four thousand year history to tote. If a Mumbaikar moans over the small town mentality of the Delhiite, Dilliwalas scoff at the miserable Bombay existence. However, one subject brooks no discussion. Delhi is a grim place for women. It is universally agreed that it resembles a frontier town in the Wild West, where everything a woman says or does, including how she carries herself, can become a serious matter, with consequences ranging from the merely disturbing to the truly horrific. And women like us, old timers who came of age in our nation’s capital, have our stock of war stories, yarns that we dourly trade, woman to woman, pretending to more bravery than we felt, reliving the danger and inflating the risks we took… sometimes even sharing the outrage and the shame. 

Jantar Mantar at Delhi

I was sixteen when one Delhi winter morning, my friends talked me into going to the Jantar Mantar. On a vague impulse, we raced up a structure in the architectural observatory. The lack of a parapet brought on the usual tingling in my palms and feet, but it was on the way down that I took in the steep and narrow steps; I was seized by an attack of vertigo. Resting my slippery left hand on the wall, I sat my way down, taking care not to look at the amazed faces of my friends, or the sheer drop on the right. I had been so busy chalking the route back home that I had forgotten my immediate problem of heights.

When I see the crowds on television, protesting at Jantar Mantar in the aftermath of the unbearable atrocity of 16^th December 2012, I am reminded again of how I was always afraid to soar high or venture far in Delhi. Every independent outing during my girl hood was attended by a detailed retreat strategy.

So getting back from Jantar Mantar—we would get off at the main INA Colony bus stop, where one of my mates, lucky girl, lived. I had choices. I could take a bus home, with the usual problem of harassment on the bus and the bus stop. I hated buses, even before I was groped, which was before I knew a prepubescent school child could be squeezed by a clean cut Zaheer Abbas look-alike, and that a busload of men, old and young, could find this funny. I did two things that day – I cut the side seams of my kurta higher, so they would be baggier, and I decided I would not board a Delhi bus alone. But we were not rich, car rides were out of question.



Primal genocide - Khandava Massacre

I could walk then. If I walked, I could take the shortcut­­—past a Government boys’ school, over a sewage canal with pigs rooting in refuse, and through a dense neighbourhood arranged around a lovely tomb that I never thought of exploring. The deserted and noxious bridge was the only part of the way that was not nerve wracking. I invariably took the long walk home, skirting the market and the residential colonies, hugging the main roads, ignoring likewise the parallel feeder lanes on my left, and the whizzing traffic to my right; disregarding my mother’s maxim that safety lay in crowds. Where the likelihood of harassment is high, you seek solitude and pray.  I got lucky, for in my sporadic outings over four years, I did not meet too many people on this route. Two, to be precise and on both occasions they justified my trust in the misogyny of the Delhi male, though nothing terrible happened, nothing worse than what I was used to, all par for the course. One boy muttered an obscenity as I passed him, (I was wounded by the “fat” he prefixed to it). He tried to follow me but backed off when I shouted at him. The other time, I was punched hard in my chest by a passing cyclist. I doubled over in pain and shock. I had not expected bicycles on Ring Road and that kind of anonymous hatred was a bit much, but I was not too affected, it was my last week in Delhi, my cursed capital city that has been burnt and sacked and rebuilt so many times. 

Delhi massacres - Timur, Nadir Shah 

Delhi has folded into her lap the terror of the mythical Nagas of the Mahabharata, whose forest homes were gutted to make way for Indraprastha, her first and prehistoric avatar. Delhi has soaked up the blood of the one hundred thousand men beheaded by Timor the Lame outside her gates on December 16, 1398—yes it was the same date. In the course of six hours in March 1739, she embraced the twenty thousand men, women and children who fell to Nadir Shah’s Persian army. And she watched mutely in September 1857, in these, our modern, enlightened, times, as her lofty princes of Mughal blood were stripped and strung up on the roadside like so many ruffians in the dark ages. I had had enough of Delhi and her bloody history. I moved on to Chennai and Kolkata to study, then to Mumbai to find work. 



I have since trekked in the Sahyadri Ghats of Maharashtra and the Himalayan foothills of Meghalaya, I have sung in college bands and worked nights as an Investment Banker; I have taken buses, trains, cabs and auto rickshaws, and walked, in the wee hours of the morning in all these parts of India; I have travelled the length and breadth of my country. Six months ago, I got onto the road in Mumbai to stand before a public bus coming down at my taxi, so we could get the leeway needed to make the impossible about turn my young cabbie had embarked on before he froze mid road ( ‘I hate this’, he had cried. My heart went out to him and we chatted the rest of the way. He was from Gorakhpur, looked no more than seventeen. I am not sure if I would reach out like that again.)

 I hope I am not a coward. But I have not gone back to Delhi.



I passed Darya Khan's tomb everyday, never thinking to explore it

Delhi chat

I have not been to Delhi for fifteen years, though I miss her so, her brash energy and her old history, her emporia of bargains and her wistful weather beaten beauty. But I dare not ride a bus in the city I grew up in, or take a walk to enjoy the best street side food in the country, or go off to explore any of the innumerable ruins redolent with untold stories that dot the city, not without an escort and the trappings of privilege–chauffeur driven cars, chalked out itineraries, experienced guides.

And so I salute the Delhi girls who by choice or circumstance use public transport for their daily commute. Some are born courageous, some have courage thrust on them, but they are all brave Delhi women.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Jess Walter’s latest offering is an irresistible potpourri of Hollywood folklore, reality television, love and ambition, and most of all the overweening need to break out and matter in today’s world. The story moves across a fascinating number of places and times including but not limited to, the Italian Riviera of the sixties, the Hollywood of then and now, small town America, even the Fringe Festival of Edinburgh.  Through it all the author shows an awesome command of form and content, and a phenomenal control of his medium, letting out the suspense to build it up again, maintaining  all the while, a light humorous touch that keeps us turning the pages happily. And he has a message too – do what makes you happy and chill. His panacea for the problem of plenty. (Refer my review of Franzen’s Freedom – “the problem of plenty”).

What’s not to like?



Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in Cleopatra

It is 1962 and Pasquale Tursi of the lovely blue eyes has just returned to his tiny fishing village on the Italian coast, determined to make the family business - a rundown, “Hotel Adequate View”- into a world class tourist destination. To this end, he is busy building a beach, and designing a cantilevered tennis court atop the cliffs, something he imagines would immediately impress visitors coming by boat – incidentally the only way to reach this out of the way hamlet. What happens is that a Hollywood starlet descends on his hotel and Pasquale reacts, as if in a dream’s opposite, a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep. The actress has been sent from the sets of Cleopatra, (yup of Liz Taylor and Dick Burton fame), and believes she is dying. Pasquale finds himself enmeshed in her affairs.

Cut to the present, where Claire Silver, Chief Developmental Assistant to legendary film producer Michael Deane is failing in her own assessment of how she is living her life. Her job’s all assisting, no developing, and she’s nobody’s chief. In the course of her work they have hit pay dirt with reality television – and her hopes for making meaningful cinema shrink by the day as she hears out one outlandish pitch after another –

Claire saw why people worked so hard to not get things made - because once you did one thing, that became your thing.

She has a boyfriend addicted to online porn, strip clubs and texting unpunctuated questions - 'milk', 'cereal', 'what up', to quote a few; she is heartily ashamed of him. Claire is onto her last pitch for the week, when who should come looking for Michael Deane, but Pasquale from all those years back. It is lucky that the man who is making the pitch at that time knows good enough Italian to translate for Mr. Pasquale Tursi, who is on a quest for Dee Moray, the sick starlet who came to his Hotel in 1962. Tursi’s only link to Dee, the seventy-two-year old Michael Deane who was then in the publicity department for Cleopatra, and who through an impossible to trace sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals and stem cell injections has acquired the face of a nine-year-old Filipina, and is as hard-bitten and unconscionable a Movie-Moghul character as was ever drawn, surprisingly agrees to help. Lo, the story has acquired a life of its own.

Jess Walter

What follows is an account of what happened in Italy then, the search for Dee  now, interspersed by an interesting set of narratives starring each of the myriad characters populating the book. And reading it is great fun. We are in the pages of a master craftsman. I for one will have to read his most successful book “The Financial Lives of Poets”.

It appears that Mr. Walter disapproves of the ‘extreme anguishing’ that most people seem prone to, especially those with ambitions to be creative. He also wishes to debunk the motto he clearly thinks might be a malaise affecting the populace – Act as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you. He favors doing the right thing, and keeping the wanting in check so it does not take you away from doing the right thing. So Alvis Bender puts his unwritten novel away in order to get on with living (it hits him that, indeed, all that he wanted to say has been said in his first chapter). Pat Bender makes his peace with his relative anonymity, and Claire does what she feels is “right” for her.

If only it were that simple.

Such clear problems and solutions do not make for life, it makes for fiction. Good fiction in the hands of a humorist par excellence, a superb entertainer and master craftsman, who makes you read even as you shake your head. There is no soul searching, no epiphany, or discovered truth as opposed to received truisms. But would that not be the preserve of an artist, the tortured genius who struggles with her medium and extends it, expresses her innermost anxieties, while fighting her demons? (Virginia Woolf comes to mind, maybe because of my feminist 'sheing' of everything in the last sentence.) If that’s the sort of thing you enjoy - I mean art, not feminism - then wait for my next review. “Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov, set in Stalinist Russia, written during Stalinist Russia, when wanting and doing the right thing was all set on its head.

‘The Mountains Came to Mohammad’: My entry for the Get Published contest

The story is set in Hong Kong, where Raghav and Kareena employ an Afghan driver, Mohammad Khan. Mohammad Khan wears a flowing beard, refuses to look women in the eye and prays five times a day. A Nepali maid looks after the two children in the family. Her name is Parbati and she is from Siliguri in India. She is withdrawn, but emanates a calm strength. Parbati and Mohammad have different backgrounds, different beliefs, follow different faiths. Yet something unites them – their love for the young children of the family, and a yearning for the mountain homes they have left behind. As the days pass, they realize that nobody understands them better than the other, but do they have a future?

This story is real because stories like this take place everyday.

The story will unfold through normal events that take place in any family and will include descriptions of the underrated natural beauty of Hong Kong. We will delve into the back-stories of the characters and how that informs the decisions they take. An excerpt from the story-

He drove into the petrol pump, and while getting out, turned back to explain, rather needlessly, “There is no petrol, madam.”

“Why does he look sideways when he talks to me? It’s so creepy!” Kareena had the quick and breathless British diction of a certain kind of Hong Konger. “Like he’s got no eyes, know what I mean? But Raghav went on about how he is being respectful and how their people have ‘tehzeeb’ and all that...”

“Yes it’s a pity,” her friend agreed. “If he ditched the skull cap and shaved his beard, he’d be quite dishy, don’t you think?”

“Puh-leez!” squeaked Kareena, “He’s not old or anything, I grant you; his ID says he’s twenty seven. But his eyes!”

Parbati, sitting in front, was too surprised for words. Maybe it was the beard or the Pathani Suits, or his gentle demeanour; she had thought of Mohammad Khan as an older man. She looked at him as he walked back after paying the petrol bill. He wore a loose shirt over track pants she realized, not a Pathani suit, and he was tall and strapping under those clothes. He got in and turned around as always. “Chocolate for Rishi Baba,” he said, to a chorus of protests. “Mohammad, you cannot give Rishi sweets. I am serious.” Kareena was worked up. “Parbati this is for you too. Don’t let him give any sweets to the children, do you hear me?” Parbati involuntarily looked at Mohammad just as he turned to her, his eyes full of humour and mischief. He had forgotten to look away. Parbati’s breath caught. He had the most beautiful brown eyes, fringed by the darkest thickest lashes she had seen. His eyes…

This is my entry to the HarperCollins-IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs from Yashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India. 

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

(Translated from the Italian Orioginal by Archibald Colquhoun)

The narrative starts in 1861 when great changes are underway. For the first time after the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy is to be unified into a single regime.  Garibaldi has sailed his ships for the southern coasts, the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies looks nervously on and the landed aristocracy of the south watches as power slips decisively out of its hands.

The protagonist Prince Don Fabrizio of Salina is of the old order, a splendid man presiding over a handsome family and magnificent estates in Sicily. He has the patrician spirit and bearing of his ancestors and a clear-sighted intelligence tempered however, by a passion for astronomy and a tendency to intellectualise his troubles. He navigates political upheaval with pragmatism and dignity but it is hard. It is always hard. The book is a meditation on the prince’s inner life as he reconciles himself to the decline of his class and his family, and the fact that he has joined the misunderstood and apathetic majority of a land he profoundly loves and knows.   

The story takes place between the villas and palazzos of Palermo, the urban seats of the prince, and his palace deep in the Sicilian countryside at "Donnafugata." It covers a swathe of fifty years- although the action takes place mostly in the first two years, and the account of the remaining years serves as a sort of denouement to the action. The narrative is in the style of a deeply intelligent rumination interspersed with sumptuous descriptions of the decaying grandeur of an old aristocracy. The sense of contained foreboding in the beginning leads to muted resignation matched by a similarly controlled grief at the end of the narrative. Even Tancredi the favoured nephew of the prince, the nimblest and most successful of their lot is unable to avoid the bittersweet memory of a partiality and the consciousness that it was not explored and taken to its logical end. Even the fiercely idealistic and uncompromising Concetta, the Prince’s daughter has to come to terms with her misjudgements. Concetta is an interesting counterpoint to Tancredi. Together they are the Prince’s legacy. And this is what they contend with at the end of their lives.

Shatranj Ke Khiladi, the Chess-Players

Aasman Mahal

The Leopard  evoked for me, “Shatranj Ke Khilari,” a Satyajit Ray film, based on a short story by Munshi Premchand. It describes two Lucknowi Nawabs who play chess amidst political mayhem. The movie is satirical, mocking the incredible detachment of our lordly chess players, as India comes under British dominion. SKK informed my view of the nineteenth century ruling class of India. The Leopard shows me the flip side of that coin, telling me a story from the Nawab’s perspective. Another old movie- Aasman Mahal- comes to mind too. In it Prithviraj Kapoor plays the part of the old patriarch, a less successful version of Don Fabrizio who clings to the glory of bygone days.

The Leopard also evokes the tormented empathy of the privileged for the poor unfortunate of their land, a helpless fellow-feeling that cannot hope for moral approval but may get a nod in literary fiction. Like perhaps Tolstoy who feels for his people through Levin’s tortured heart, devoting pages and pages of Anna Karenina to the Russian muzhik, so too is Don Fabrizio one with his people when he describes the Sicilian voter as “either stunned with overwork or starved by unemployment.” His rant to the Piedmontese official who visits him is wonderful to read and will be understood by any self-styled “have” from a land of “have nots”. The insights offered by Father Pironne speak to me too- “they all (nobles) despise one another, except the peasants who despise themselves.” Brilliant!

The book transcends geographical boundaries and becomes relevant to me, even in its descriptions of the countryside, where “(sometimes) the sun is not so strong as to leach (the sky) of colour”. I like the Prince best when he is in his element, in Donnafugata. I like his flawed self-pride in adhering to traditions that elevate him, his self-absorption and his refinement. I cannot condone his emotional distance from his wife and children despite his ready understanding of what is in their minds and hearts, and this I feel is his downfall.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The prose is exquisite, loaded with the result of many hours of thought, and improves with rereading. Apparently the character of Don Fabrizio was based on the author’s grandfather, indeed Giuseppe di Lampedusa could refer to diaries from the period; this and the fact that he was in his fifties when he wrote the book imbues it with a certain maturity and authenticity. By way of criticism, there is an interrupted, staccato nature to the work, as if Lampedusa worked on different bits that took his fancy and then tried to splice them all into a coherent narrative. All the parts of the book are beautiful, and so is the book, but the joints are not smooth. 

Still from the Visconti Classic - Il Gattopardo

A movie would probably edit out many parts of the novel, focusing instead on the handsome prince, the lovely Angelica, the delicious Tancredi and the heartbreakingly solemn Concetta in an opulent Sicilian setting. Or maybe not. It would still be a visual treat and one of these days I will catch the Burt Lancaster starrer, a classic I believe. It is incredible that every actor in the movie with the exception of Claudia Cardinale (who plays Angelica Sedara) looks exactly like I would have imagined them.

The Little Bee by Chris Cleave

This is the second novel by Guardian Columnist Chris Cleave (his first book ‘Incendiary’ about an Al Qaeda attack came at the time of the London tube bombings). Published as ‘The Other Hand’ in Britain, it has a blurb guaranteed to reel in the undecided-

We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book.
It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it.
Nevertheless, you will need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this:
This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again—the story starts there….
Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds.

Little Bee has a brilliant opening, set in a government holding pen for illegal aliens facing deportation, where ‘Little Bee’ our eponymous and feisty heroine-protagonist # 1 makes the memorable line that launches the narrative-

Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.

There is some follow up stuff about the currency of money vis-a-vis that of an African girl, which does not live up to the promise of that first line, but hey, the book was on the New York Times Bestseller list, was nominated for the Commonwealth Best Book of the Year, the opening and the blurb have started you thinking about Sophie’s choice, and this and that and all that, so you sort of will yourself to enjoy the first chapter. It is not bad, peppered with clever lines (...Scars don’t form on the dying. A scar means I survived) and attractive characters- a gregarious Jamaican stereotype who springs our heroine from the detention centre along with a couple of other detainees - a loony Aishwarya-Rai look-alike (stereotype number 2?), and a woman whose raving insanity manifests itself as soon as they are out of incarceration. Somewhere after the second chapter, the book gets down to the business of story-telling.

The drab detention centre and its colourful detainees are quickly discarded, their bait function performed, and we are introduced to heroine-protagonist number 2, the thoughtful alpha woman who has it all but always wants more. The slide into Pret-Lit Cornyland is swift from here. Idyllic flashbacks into an African village, cinematic villains, chases, torture, electrical engineer baddies who walk away into the sunset, magazines being put to bed, every trick in the book is thrown at us, drowning out a reasonable plot, and to be fair, good writing. For after those initial pages, the book does fall flat.




Chris Cleave

So I sat down to wonder why it did not work for me. My thesis is that Mr. Cleave is unable to inhabit adequately, the characters of the protagonists, and for a book written in alternating first person accounts, this is a disaster. Perhaps in an effort to be precise and concise (and meet a deadline), the author has neglected to draw full and sympathetic characters. I disliked Sarah and was indifferent to Little Bee. When I realised that Mr Cleave did not have much first-hand experience of Little Bee’s world, it was all very clear. Only the characters of the men made sense (white men let me add, for I did not get the Nigerian villain-philosopher who preens himself on his knowledge of English suburbia). The book might have retained a kernel of truth if it had been from the perspective of Sarah’s tortured husband Andrew.

I read fiction to understand some truths. I believe fiction presents truth indirectly. It entertains when it engages honestly with our fears and our desires. When it does not, it is purposeless and soulless. So is Little Bee.

This book is about two hundred pretty pages of unmet expectations. It is similar to but better than Andrew Miller’s Snowdrops, which I have reviewed elsewhere in this blog.

Tinkers by Paul Harding

‘Tinkers’ is a book about people different from book lovers. People who do not articulate their feelings, or think through their angst. If they delight in the beauty and grandeur of nature or take pleasure in the company of their loved ones, they do not resort to painting or poetry to express their emotion; they would instead fashion appreciation with their hands. So a trapper whittles a stick into a figure, while a woman strings flowers in a pattern of her own devising. These are people working at mediums that are far from romantic. And the constraints of leisure and energy have stripped away any flamboyance from their activity. They are tinkers, tinkering when they can, at materials available to them, and the enforced economy and precision of this very circumstance imbues their work with a grace that elevates it beyond art. That might be one way of looking at Tinkers.

Or we could say that Paul Harding, in his 2010 Pulitzer winner, examines the art hidden in all craftsmanship, the artist inside every artisan. He sings for the unsung and inarticulate artist, describing with the same precision and economy and sympathy, an exquisite frame of reeds and flowers woven by a grateful epileptic for his tired wife, in a different time a clock lovingly put back by the versed hands of this man’s son, or many years later a young man giving his dying grandfather a shave he craves. He tries to get inside their minds and although I am not sure he succeeds, what he conveys fascinates.

Paul Harding

I have always been bad with my hands, never learning to knit or crochet or draw kolam patterns. I relied on my analytical and conceptual abilities to tide over workshop and Drawing in Engineering College. I prefer cleaning to cooking, and it is the hair salon always— I don’t even have a hair dryer for my long hair. So maybe I am not skilled in navigating expert systems, but hang on, reading Tinkers reconnected me to the state of exaltation I had entered into when I was learning Mandarin, or when I filled out reams of paper in high school with my best handwriting (never mind the prose). You could call it the pleasure of accomplishment. Calligraphy could have been my skill… But coming back to the book, yes, Paul Harding succeeds in creating with his pen that state of pure and ecstatic concentration that a craftsman becomes.

Tinkers also tells a story, the story of George Washington Crosby, an old man who lies dying in his living room, surrounded by a wonderful, loving, normal and functional family. Harding dives right into the dying man’s mind and immediately we are made aware that he is a carpenter, a clock-worker, an engineer, a tinker par excellence, who is still in tune with his calling. We see also, that his dying mind returns again and again to memories of his epileptic father, Howard. These personal recollections are interspersed by an authorial account of Howard Crosby’s life, a life of hardship and betrayal and lucky breaks. The novel is thus exquisitely crafted, weaving together a superb countdown to old George Crosby's end— including anecdotal reminiscences and everyday concerns as well as the daydreams and delusions of an ill man—with flashbacks to a different era dotted here and there with present time authorial notes of interest. Reading the book was like experiencing a curiosity, a post-modern product that takes stream-of-consciousness writing and sets it on its head. Stream of consciousness suggests a gurgling brook, meandering its way, hither and thither but Harding will not delineate thought. He has made the point that the mind jumps about randomly in space, making ever more lovely points.

However, time moves and a story needs be told, and here, Harding is in control, keeping us hooked despite his fascinating departures and his absorption in the discontinuous and particularized nature of our musings. We are treated to glimpses of lives led, of fathers who fly when their hearts break, of sons who sympathize, of the redemptive power of tinkering. There is a story there for fiction junkies like me who will wade through text on ‘How to Make a Bird’s Nest’ describing exactly that, before we can find out what happens next. You may or may not choose to do so, although these departures make for  rewarding reading. Or is there something like too clever, too crafted? I suppose it is all a function of where you are when you pick up the book. If you like the book but find yourself unable to finish it, put it down and take it up later.

 

At any rate Tinkers is a paean in lyrical prose to the inarticulate craftsman. Keep it in your Kindle, so you can dip into it from time to time. 

Two poems

These poems appeared - along with many other works of many many others- in The Brown Critque, May'12 issue.

Kalpattu - Stoneville

My forefathers’ home
Fine and Mild
On a winter morn
Grey-blue hint of chill
Wet earth and wood smoke
Tang of bullock dung
And they- up at crack of dawn
To toil for the broken tough.
Ignore their iron cladding
Hark!
For the ducks are coming
A flock waddling,
Up our street, toward the pond
Quick!
Feast your eyes on this lively sight
Before they vanish into the dust
Quack.
--ck.
Gone, and the day not done.
**ck.



Strife

This morning red ants
Swarmed in my silver cup
Of rice flakes and jaggery.
My offerings to the Lord
Not eaten last night
Or put away in the fridge.
Three rusty mustard grains
Lightly touching
Balanced on six fine hairs
Intuited feelers
Moving in a Maglev train
Is one Red ant.
I want them off.
Disturbed they break ranks
Are everywhere
And more appear
A red angry seething
Or a panicked scrambling
Over my sacred fare.
Which I leave under the sun
For the distant fire to scare
And return to find them
Gone but still there
Behind sweet sweating rocks
Under shades of white lace
I tap the cup twice and the
Earthquake stirs them out
Scurrying over scalding silver
For the haven of dry hand
Clutching for clemency
In this roiling, boiling land
Hold cup aslant under tap
Tilt away from the flow
And they wash into the drain
Swimming their way
Into… oblivion.
I only wanted a cooling off.
What was I thinking?

Bhavani Krishnamurthy