Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 1. May 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
On a city, virtual
--- Sunil Sharma
In
the long hours
of short nights
or longer Sundays or a
holidays
the young couple,
exhausted by the day’s repetitive work
and predictable
commutes in crowded locals, often withdraw
into empty shells.
Often, bored, on stale sheets,
they lie sprawled as
corpses
and manage to talk to
each other, backs turned, artificial flowers on the vases,
through WhatsApp
messages and exchange of forwarded videos
on their narrow
marital bed that creaks menacingly, at the mid-night hour,
in suburban Mumbai,
creating buffers of seas of
silence…and some
me-time and privacy.
All cities look alike
their interiors and
exteriors
identically similar
---kind of family
resemblance you see in old B/W photographs,
Now rare, in old and
bound albums, in special corners of creaking almirahas.
The urban-DNA has
become same of these swanky, well-regulated, regimented,
post-modern, post-industrial
centers of unchecked
growth
that are, in real
life, mere fancy
ghettos; some costly
gated communities
guarded manually and
high-tech against the threat of
the lurking and
dangerous slums, the swathe of land, in the open, ugly sore;
the vertical houses
dominate the space
the malls and the
cineplexes; structures that cruelly
suck out the water
tables, in selfish gestures
...and a dry and dusty
wind
of summer
announces the imminent
desert.
Each suburb---
a city burgeoning.
Each such city
an island
connected with the
mainland---the City Major
the power centre, the
hub.
With reference to
Mumbai
Or Delhi
We call satellite
towns as fringes
the places that feed
the Main City
its main army of
workers, every day, in huge numbers.
We call the outer
areas as suburbs
holding Mumbai or
Delhi
as the Centre.
The fact remains,
however
that the balance
shifts in the evenings
and suburbs
ridiculed and
downscale, downgraded
become new centers of
power
...and Mumbai Metro
becomes
a dead city of
corridors and empty offices
and dark spots,
harboring street-walkers, leaping straight from
a Victorian Age or
Dostoevskian
Petersburg.
Is it possible?
Capturing the city
of variegated spaces,
moods, personalities
in few words?
To catch a breathless
manic metro in its
multiple vehicular and human and animal sounds?
the honking---soft or
angry or persistent?
the sound of hawkers
in the evenings?
the strident pitch of
bored salespersons
eager to close for the
night
overcrowded counters?
The yelling on cell-phone
or, of the neighbor?
the blaring of a TV
or, the ear-splitting
orchestra and a DJ wearing ear pieces
and strange tattoos on
brown arms that rotate like robots?
The job is
difficult---like that of sound engineer
or, a man recording
the decibels for a movie track.
You don't know.
A city is a gargantuan
a mosaic of different
realities for different demographics
it means totally
different to the one residing in a flat slum area
a poor frightened
migrant
uprooted from a dying
village
or a small town in a
dusty plain
where time is stuck in
the circular
corridors and broken
asphalt
of the roads that do
not lead to
anywhere but inwards;
and another reality
to a woman speaking
accented English
drinking whiskey
in a tony skyscraper
facing the Arabian Sea
where a fresh and
unpolluted sun gets drowned
for another
resurrection.
You do not know dear
about the invisible
walls
around certain costly neighborhoods
and the politics and
economics of
declaring certain
geographies and swathes of land
as off-limits to the
poor and the downtrodden,
the perpetual
Outsiders.
The city for most is
soul-less machine
sucking out the sap.
It kills by
increments, while promising the gold
at the end of the
rainbow.
Mostly, it is only the
sweat and tears
and sawdust street
seen by a young Eliot some place sometime
now etched
in post-colonial readers for forever..
i have no time to view
the
moon
surrounded as I am
by the sodium-vapor
lamps
and blinded by the
lights
of the automobiles
in a manic city
where the wind stings
the eyes
and the face
and leaves you
asthmatic and drained.
Yes. Moons?
For me, it is a
distant memory that comforts and
Unsettles both---in
the same instant.
But wait.
Well, in one
apartment, they
have painted a moon
and the stars
on the wall of their
children's bed-room.