Stranglehold of expectations.

(another one from the decade and a half old diary. makes me smile now, cos the hysteria has died down.)

Thy ask me if I’m a feminist
I tell them I don’t know
But it hurts, oh yes, it hurts
When her fatigue is dismissed
And becomes a cooking vessel
When they cast the stone at her
Cos she did what he too did.

It hurts, godammit, it hurts
When she is called to be
The paragon of virtue
When she is put in her place
With ‘a woman is blah blah blah - -

It hurts, bl---y s—t, it hurts
When she is told
A lady shouldn’t speak like that
A lady shouldn’t sit like that
A lady shouldn’t think like that
A lady shouldn’t think at all.

Dash it, who the hell wants to be a lady?
What, by the way, is a lady?
Who, tell me, is to decide
How many lines a poem should have?

It hurts, oh God, it hurts
When one of your own gender
Turns around and fires
That final fatal shot.

Anniversary

(another entry in my diary - made a year after my mother's death. she, by the way, was the most powerful influence on me.)

A year since she left.

A year since the detonation

In the chest—or brain?

The steadying hand. Stunned Disbelief.

No more.

Gone.

Where?

Deaf to our grief

Dead to our grief

Where are you?

WHERE are you?

Then the vacuum.

The struggle for air in nothingness

Clawing to grasp the reality of absence.

The quake was better.

Can vacuum be so heavy? Oppressive?

Crushing the nerve from feeling the pain?

When was this sunya infused with grief?

When did it happen?

Brine and migraine

Sobs toppling poise?

Stealthily, absence grew into day to day existence

But - - - -WHERE are you?

Something in me sometimes screams

Can you just cease to be? What strange heaven bewitches you

That you choose not to reach out

And balm my pain

Which once you could not bear?

You too, heartless, ma?

Heart, I guess, belongs to the flesh and bone.

Alas!

MA

(i discovered an old diary today - and in it my poor attempts at writing poems. this was written a couple of months after my mother died.the metre was all wrong, so i left it. today metre matters little to me)

Her stars were all wrong

She should never have been

But gods for cruel fun

Willed it!

The formula was ideal

For the tragic role

Misfortunes they came

In battalion

She withstood them

Her soul unscathed

Never did she wallow

In self pity

Clamouring for sympathy

Was alien to her grain

She bore her jagged cross

With poise rare.

Knowing the sting of pain

She spanned out her wings

To shelter those writhing

In anguish great.

What strange philosophy

Permeated her being?

A complete and total

Denial of self?

Was it worth it, Ma?

Not having afforded them

Their amusement

Did the Gods greet you

Heads hung in shame?

Elusive regions of the mind.

Blue or green?

I couldn’t decide.

Blue morphing into green

Or green into blue?

Bur the thought returned

Or was it feeling?

Thought morphing into feelings

And Feelings into thoughts?

The blue green waters of the ocean

Taking the colours of the earth

As they approach the shore

Only to return

To its never ending pursuit

Of blue or green

Or both?

Once again

That strange sensation fills me

Every cell in my being

As they did

Ever since I remember.

Sitting on the steps in the evenings after shower

Waiting for amma to complete the ritual

Of dusting with rasnathi podi

The line where my wet hair parted

At the center of my scalp.

It was gloaming, almost

And the coconut trees stood large

To my five year old eyes.

They seemed to touch the heavens

And beckoned me to come

With the breeze that moved them.

I watched the birds trail across the heavens

And envied them

As some disappeared into the trees

So close to the heavens.

And that strange sensation

Of thought morphed into feelings

Spread in my chest

Creating a sadness

Or was it joy?

I do not know.

But it purges,

That sensation

And transports

To an unknown region.

I get the feeling

Or is it thought

That strange truths inhabit that land.

The blue green sea merging with the distant horizon

The sky and the swaying palms that shelter the birds

awaken in me

thought or feelings I cannot fathom.

But tell me

I have in me the elements of those regions

I long for a glimpse of - - -

The return of the enemy

When the dreaded foe resurfaced

My heart crashed against the ribs

Knocking me down.

But soon I picked myself up

And the ground steadied beneath me,

And I faced the foe.

The apparition which had petrified me

Was now but a shadow of what he was

The first time

He’d been demystified.

His cards were exposed

And my reserves I’d discovered.

I mocked him.

You can kill only me

You can’t touch my spirit

abandoned

my muse deserted me

leaving behind a vacuum

which grows and grows

and engulfs.

how did I frighten it away?

will it ever return?

dwelling in a vacuum

is no fun.

thoughts drift in

and drift away.

like a yo-yo

with the string snapped

i roll away

and stop in some corner

till the cleaner sweeps me off and dumps me

in the waste bin

to be trashed.

The Downpour

Earth holds its breath
while light withdraws
at noon
slowly but steadily - -

strange silence charged with routine sounds of noon
awaits it
in the air thickened by the pall of monsoon cloud.

And then it comes

The downpour.
Sheets of rain lash the earth
Pleasant smell of the soil
Warms the heart
As the watery assault slackens its attack
And darkness withdraws
And noon returns

Like joy reinstated
After emotional decongestion
In the wake of heartbroken sobs.

Adios Amigo

Did you blow your brains out
To set it free
From the tentacular stranglehold
Of dark despair?

I understand
And weep for you
Siddharth, my friend.

Parukutty Teacher

Clad in white

Starched white

Unironed white

Indigoed white

With thin black border

Or thinner red border

Eyes brimming with contempt

And hate and disgust

Set below sandal paste streaked forehead

Set below salt and pepper parted in the center

She taught me the language that gave birth to my thoughts.

Eyes flash

Sheer fury

Tongue sneers, spews

Vitriol

“Christians step out

Kneel

You do it in your church

We don’t kneel in temples”.

Mind still soft

Yet to set in position

Wails silently

Cursing its faith.

Worse

Grows estranged

From the language in which it feels.

Chaos

Distortions

Incomprehensible emotions

Self submerged

In the rubble of thoughts and feelings

Gasps for words that describe.

In vain.

Clad in white

Sandal paste furrowing hideously

She cackles in glee.

(My previous post -Confessions of an alienated Malayalee - is a prelude to this)

Confessions of an Alienated Malayalee

(This is a post from my pareltank blog.I wrote a poem more than 3 decades ago which i have hesitated to post on account of the venom it has. This post explains why it is so venomous.I still haven't decided whether to post it or not)

yes. that’s me. I call myself that ’cos of my indifferent competence in my mother tongue. I think in Malayalam, but have no confidence to write in that language. I sometimes think if I could write in the language I think and feel in, I’d become the Shakespeare of Malayalam literature. Don’t laugh. this is how I console myself when I fall into one of those fits of depression at my inability express myself comprehensively – thoughts, feeling s and their nuances. The English language does not have corresponding terms to express malayalee feeling. Or, I am not competent enough in this angrezi tongue. So there is a huge gap between my sensibilities and the only language I can write in. Frustrating, isn’t it?

How did this happen? it’s a long story. I was born less than ten years after Independence. So guess I can call myself post independence generation. Those were days when people believed that future belonged to people who received education in English. I was a victim of that false notion. But, I did have Malayalam as a subject till 4th standard. But the Malayalam teacher took a dislike to me for a reason I don’t want to go into here(I have written a poem on that – so intense was my resentment towards that teacher who alienated me from myself). Unfortunately, along with me, that teacher was also promoted to the middle school. As soon as this news was confirmed, I went home and wept and wept till my mother agreed to switch my second language to French! With that, my connections with Malayalam text books, therefore literary Malayalam, were severed forever and ever.

Thus it is that my imagination was shaped completely by the angrezi language. They say if you learn a language, you tend to identify yourself wiith the culture of native speakers of that language. So my childhood imagination was filled with Jack and Jill, Polly putting the kettle on (I used to go around our kitchen looking for the kettle I saw in illustrated nursery rhyme books- found none), sixpence and pocket full of rye (thought that rye was the higher denomination of sixpence). Must say I used to be fascinated that the English could bake blackbirds in a pie and still keep them alive. Fortunately for me, I had a lot of neighbours, cousins from whom I picked up kakey, kaket, koodevidey?, Omana kuttan, govindan, ayyappandey amma, neyyappam chuttu. I sang these with full throated ease and felt I belonged. But when I sang the English rhymes, my imagination got activated and made me yearn for things I knew nothing of. Like they say, unheard melodies are sweeter. As I reached primary school, Enid Blyton was my staple food. and also all those comics – Three Stooges, Totem, Tin Tin, Classics, Richie Rich, Little Lotta - - - - . my horizons widened and without my quite knowing it, I moved away from my roots into a world I had never experienced. Along with it, an attitudinal change crept into me – a feeling of superiority over those who didn’t know the Famous Five and Captain Haddock!!

Soon, I started reading romances. Mills and Boons told me how the westerners fell in love, how hostility was an imperative prelude to love! How men had to be dark and tall ( I didn’t know then that, that dark was not our dark), that when men fell in love, they snapped at their lady loves for no reason. But i didn't know how people in love behaved in my culture! I soon got tired of Mills and Boons but Georgette Heyer remained my favourite for a long time. How she fired my imagination! her novels transported to a still more remote world - the Regency period, Victorian age - - -and I moved with wide eyed wonder among powder and patch, frills and gloves, lords and ladies and fops - --- Humour so pervaded her narration that I fell in love with the English language! My alienation from my own language was complete.

My estrangement from the imaginative world represented by Malayalam literature is the saddest thing that has happened to me. As I grew older, I moved into the world of English classics and poems. The breathtakingly beautiful paddy fields of Kerala skirted by beckoning coconut trees made me search for Wordsworthian terms to describe them. No muse works that way and the poet in me died. So did whatever creativity I had. Now I realize that one can create only in the language one thinks in, feels in - in the language that shapes one’s day to day life. I was trapped between two worlds – and was not resourceful enough to find a way out of this trap.

Today, I feel like a half baked creature. I fully realized what I lost when I got my first employment in a college in mid Travancore. my colleagues seemed to be at home with such a rich literature and culture. Jokes had to be explained to me and I didn’t find them funny. The humour was lost in the translation. Philosophical ruminations in Malayalam seemed part of the daily diet of my English department. And my colleagues felt guilty when they saw me trying to pretend I understood. Fortunately for me, my spoken Malayalam was extremely good. so I belonged as long as the conversation did not move into higher planes. But it did. too often. That is when I wrote that vitriolic poem about my Malayalam teacher who was instrumental in uprooting me even as I remained physically rooted.

Revelation

Outside the college gate

He sits

Fingers, toes and nose

Eaten.

Burnt out, though

A malady

That haunts.

Children driven away from the gates

Purification of gates infected by their touch.

'The sickening sweet smell'

of the valley in Ben-hur

The mythical ailment

That felled Paul Gauguin.

But he smiles

Outside the college gate

Young ones of now

Exchange pleasantries with him

Provide flowers

For the glass tumbler.

Hibiscus and Cosmos

Beam from glass tumbler

Half full with water.

Some parcel breakfast for him

Others lunch

Or snacks.

But my friend and colleague

Talks to him

As she talks to me.

Subtly notes his needs

Clothes, blankets

Delicacies

Notices his absence

Outside the college gate

Wonders, worries

Shares anxiety with me

Happy when he turns up

“At least, he’s not lying somewhere

Dead

Unseen, unsung, uncared ”, she says.

I judged you once

My friend.

Forgive me.

You taught me

To leave Judgement

To the extra terrestrial.

Haiti

Earth shrugs
Humans cease
His creations crumble
Those safe in the Ark
And lived to tell the Byzantine tale
Of Mohen jo- daro and Harappa
Fail.
Beat their wings in the void.
And humans are back
To bickering.
Oh God, what fools we mortals be!

The Coconut Tree

she was five
when sitting on the step
of the veranda
behind the kitchen
she bent her little head
at right angle
to see the top
of a coconut tree
and the branches
swaying in the wind
beckoning to her
to join the birds
and the crows
disappearing into it
or flying out of it
and soar into the sky
soft in the dying day
and wished she were those birds
and could fly high
and wander into the heavens
and say hello to the angels
and then return
and disappear into the coconut palm.

Now five decades later
she looks down the eleventh floor
of a high end apartment
in the capital city
at the riot of coconut trees
at her feet.
Watches the birds
playing hide and seek
among its branches
and envies the birds
and the crows.

And when she roams
in lands without coconut palms
her heart swells
at the colours of fall
at strange trees that flourish
in softer climes
and looks for birds
and crows
and feels stirrings in her heart
and mind
and her whole being
and looks for her coconut trees
in vain.

The Terror of Absence

The presence of absence
permeating the silence
turning oppressive
becoming tangible
in the aftermath

of the brief disruption
of its humdrum reign,
by invasive Presence
fun and frolic in tow.

As though it resents
the destabilising

of the peace of Limbo.

It wreaks vengeance
with the torture
of the deafening sound
of Silence.

outside the box

Inertia of thought
like death that breathes
conflict free
peaceful
uneventful

This life in death
death in life
is it worth it?

Better to have thought
and struggled to create
and suffered
and died

than flow along
without thought.

The Moment

The Moment of release
From Time

A moment in a millennium?

Released by a strain
that rings a bell
in some far-flung zone of consciousness
Or by the cool breeze
flowing gentle and silent into the balcony
brushing my cheek
in the late hours of the insomniac night
to the accompaniment of the stirring day

The Moment
Suspended in time

of release from the known and comprehended
poised in a bizarre ambiance of freedom
confronting truth measureless

A flash of recognition
like a bolt of lightening

And then it’s gone.

The aftermath of the glimpse- - -

Where is THE word?

Breaking the Magic Wand

They ask me how it feels
the day after

Does it hurt?
do you miss it all?

The routine. the role,
the camaraderie
the feel of belonging.

The burden, the deadlines.

The young minds – impressionable
the puzzled frown
the joy of the idea
the starry excitement
the faces volatile as knowledge unfolds

Do I miss all that?

Strangely enough, no.

Didn’t I love it all?
I ask myself.
Where, then, are the pangs?

Ripeness is all.
Stoicism born of a second lease of life !

Life -
to be celebrated
till the last breath

Every change brings a new horizon

So, how does it feel
the day after?

Serene as I scan the new skies
words falling around me like pleasant showers
‘you gave better than your best, mom’.
‘really m'am, we are proud to be your kids - we treasure your classes – sorry if we let you down – thank you’

What more can I ask?

Posted first on pareltank.blogspot.com on Wednesday, July 02, 2008, the day after i retired from service.

The End of Silence

am no poet.
i know that.

my muse died young
a slow death though
with growing estrangement from my tongue
and my self.

a casualty of imperialism
and acculturation.

but of late I find myself
tinkering with free verse
in the alien tongue.

the genre issues a license
the poetic license
liberation from the strain
of logical exercise,

And offers a mould
that won’t crumble
when loaded with feeling.

minds crippled with entrenched silence
turn to the spirits of the muses
inevitably.

can they be raised from the dead?
will they take kindly
to the strange sounds of broken silence?

posted first in pareltank.blogspot.com on Thursday, July 10, 2008

What are you doing, my son

What are you doing, my son?

Counting crowns.

Crowns? What crowns?

King’s crowns.

Where are the crowns?

Can’t you see? The rain is making them.

She looked where he pointed
At the water rising where each drop fell
And saw the crowns
King’s crowns
Thousands of them

I wrote this piece to be published anonymously in the college magazine, in a page dedicated to versification on rain. Most of my students guessed it was my piece ‘cos I used to relate this little episode where my 4 year old son opened my eyes to the crowns that rain drops made - to prove the point that all of us are born poets but our creativity falls by the way side in our struggle with this business called life.

thank you for the music

talat, denver, rafi
alliyaambal and eleanor rigby
silk route and sindu bhairavi
among others
waft in
flutter in
one after the other - - -
as I sit here and now


the mind plays truant
strays, despite itself.
visits memories
buried under heaps of sunshine and life

the pain of no more music
what sort of heaven can it be?