Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 2. November 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
The City as Muse
1. Bikaner
I can’t write about Bikaner
without feeling the sand
climbing my fingers
Can’t utter its name
without tasting
the panna made in Amma’s
flour kitchen
Can’t forget the scent of ripe musk melons
water walking on terracotta feet towards me
camphor in the rajais
Can’t see it without
pagan pigeons fluttering in at dawn
skies cracking like a parchment flicked
open
Bikaner, a birthmark
on the body of my life
If I am marble, it is the visible vein
Women, their heads guillotined
in pallus and dupattas,
their fingers on my pulse
zero-watt evenings
the heart scraped to belong
belonging is also lonely
No, you’ll never take Bikaner out of me.
Its already knee-deep
in my love letters
2. Anand
Where I kept to
myself
but belonged to
everyone
where the verdant
rolling hills of the campus
placed birds on my
shoulders, squirrels at my feet
where dried up
trees looked like rivers
& dry
eucalyptus leaves, spoke more dead than alive
where I played
mother to my mother
where I discovered
that daughters were bridges between generations
where I made a
bonfire of old letters & gifts
now that I was
getting married
where I needed the
stars to count my inadequacies
and fingertips to
count my strengths
where a house grew
on me like a wound
where leaving it
behind felt like a final breath
where a town swung
into me
where it stayed
and stayed.
3. Indore
as many stones as
flowers.
I made a man of you
you cotton boy,
now tough jute
a grain sprouting
the first two shoots
trees can look
after themselves
how we ached for
our tears to mingle
how we cried away
from each other
‘mother’ is six
alphabets of rawness
flinching on a
salt clothesline
distance arrives
with a whole lot of goodness
but the tyres burn
every inch of the way
the four o’ clock
tea
a sip of the
poignancy of solitude
rain
sparkles wherever
it falls
diamonds mined
from thick grey clouds
a duet of sun and
water
loss and gain in
turns
the way a city
dealt its hand
the way I clutched
the dice
the way I waited
for years to pass