Works of RK

It has been raining for three straight days now It has something to do with the constant sound Of rain falling on the windows and ledges On drooping leaves And tin roofs That springs forth sudden bouts of existential sadness From the very dungeons of my being It is almost as if I have lived many lifetimes And yet There are seeds in me that are yet to sprout And await the causality of death To cure this cycle of inconsequential living! ---- Readers: This is not a poem on Depression. As per Indian scriptures the life that we live is an illusion and full of existential strife. Spiritual journey begins with the appreciation of existential sadness beyond temporal joys and sorrows.

I visit her chat window now and then And it feels like an ode to a Tombstone    And as I walk among the dead lines That were once alive with our love I can feel the grass of time grow  Steadily, under my very feet. Maybe next year, on her birthday  I shall scroll through here again  And until then I will leave these lines here As an elegy To what was once living And breathing But is now very dead. 

I knew an artist once She would paint through those parts in her That bled from neglect   In here frames, There would always be a woman Who will always be engulfed In flames masquerading like oysters Or tresses Or even Dresses For a decade or more She would paint me in dark colors She would scratch me with her palette knives And write on me with her pens And often, she would step back a bit And look at me like I were her Art. You smile still! And she would start all over again.

She would bat her eyelids constantly  As if they were sending morse codes Of the things she spoke about. The things that one misses of another Are everyday stuff, nothing momentous... Like how she enjoyed my food Or how she would allow me to make the bed I wish I could decipher In time The dots and the dashes of despair  Before silences fell over the valley And the fog of time Caved in. 

If you were to cry for long enough Your tears will sear through your skin And create puddles in your soul. And eventually,   You will misjudge the roundness of your edges To compassion and to growth.  Those are just scars Masquerading as Trophies. Stop crying.

Her birthday reminder popped up on my screen yesterday. It was close to two years since we had stopped talking to each other. There was a finality to it.   There were parts of her that I could never fathom. And in the easiest of times, I can muddle minds.  I knew it then, as I know now, that it will be many seasons before she would allow me to grow in her garden again. If ever.  I closed my eyes in a prayer. May I be protected from droughts and floods and lightning and fire and other evils of everyday living.... for I want to someday regain that lost patch of loving land in her garden.  Let there be sunshine and water and shade and care and flowers and love in her life. Until we catch up again, may the keepers of time run slow. ps: Written in early Feb of 23

I want you to look at me Like a passenger on a slow train Looking out of an iron window At an old man sitting on an unkempt Ancient wooden recliner  In the balcony  Of a tiled traditional kerala house And it is raining A really light drizzle  Misting Your memory  Of the time we shared

I was trying to make sense of the thousands of lines of code before me. They wanted me to figure out why it was sluggish.   Over the years, so many programmers had worked on this. There were so many patches and upgrades that the brilliance of the master coder had stopped shining through. There was only this much overwriting that it could accept before it turned into a zombie. I looked at the Client Account Manager. All she wanted was for the application to work. Make it work...she said. I looked at the lines, it were like stories of many characters crisscrossing through time. It was too complex and opaque. As if the meanings of these lines were now lost in time .  Allow it to die....I said. She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Let it be, it cannot be worked upon anymore. It is asking for redemption. Tell the client it's over, I said. She started crying. I could see similar tears bleeding through the lines on my screen.  No difference!

I look back and I cannot see beyond a couple of days of the time that has passed by. A good memory here, a bad one there. A moment of shame, some moments of sorrow and many moments of love. If I were to count all the moments that I remember, It will still not fill the 48 years I have lived. Where did all that time go? Is it hiding in secret places in me. Are there memories in me that have stolen time from me and are now themselves lost to me? Time, so much time, and I cannot figure out where it all went! I now think I know more closely what Einstein meant when he said that time is a human experience. It is an illusion of our befuddled minds to make sense of the chaos of everyday life. When I stare at the crumpled paper on which the innings of my life is written, I see how the dots on the last line converge with the white spaces on the first line. All that is past and all that is yet to come is all enmeshed into one tapestry of intricate stories, mostly out of sequence, but

On a video call with Mom, I told her that I am making Sambhar, something that never really turns out the way I wish it would. I am accustomed to having Mom's version of the Sambhar since childhood. It's taste is imprinted in places where I have no access to. The tongue knows when something is off. Sambhar is a complex dish. It is not like a plum cake or a bread, or even Avial, where, eventually, the grated coconut and coconut oil evens out all the other tastes and brings them to a consensus. Sambhar is complex. The ladies fingers have to be slightly sauteed, else they disintegrate into the ocean that is Sambhar, and you can see that they existed once in the little seeds twinkling here and there. The Drum Sticks have to be just right, else they stand out. Drum sticks have to bend to the will of the greater cause that is Sambhar, but not break. Then there is the coriander powder and the Fenugreek Powder, and the asafoetida chunks that should melt entirely, else they raise hell in

A thought that died in you Died in me too Only, Separated in time It took much longer For mine to die. 

All this time  That has now gone by Is all in here All at once Together   Einstein says That time lives on Eternally in the present Scattered about Across a universe of memories We We are not meant to live in the shadows We are Stardust We burn bright as Stars And then we are dust ...

I caught up with another one of her hairs while sweeping today.  It has been a month since she was last here And here she was again As if she was always right here Living with me In fractal moments Of mesmerizing memories. ( Image )

There are experiences that get encoded into your being. Later,  much later,  when it is time for one last curtain call,  I will look at the faces of nameless strangers in my audience,  and smile as I bow for one last time. credits I know that I will not find you in the crowd.  I know that I will not be looking for you outside of me anymore. I will smile in the fond memory of your lips on mine.  I will tear up with the lingering warmth of your breasts on my being. I will,  for one last time,  run my hands on my body,  and try to redraw the maps you drew on me once. I will look at myself reflected on these screens for one last time,  and find you smiling through the twinkle in my eyes. Out of the multitude of ships at sea, one,  for a little longitude in the time,  sailed so lovingly close to me.

The life we wish to live is often not the life that we eventually get to live.  Time passes by really fast. While the days may each groan and creak, the years themselves would hurtle by like vandals. Before we realize, we find ourselves as old as our parents once were. Friends become rarer and the shadows from the waning sun stay longer.  We recede into ourselves and find new places to hide,  new reasons to be un-found. We become sad in strange places in us,  places that we now don't know how to reach.  We become afraid of silences and try to fill it with noises. And then we slowly hate the noises in our minds.  Slowly,  very slowly,  we become screen saver versions of ourselves.  The Insta Posts of our broken versions, the hurting laughing aching versions of our whatsapp statutes. 

 And then as always, suddenly, I would feel like the city is out to kill me. Its horns assault my senses, its garbage and incivility grates me. As I run towards fifty (age), the glitter and the shine of large urban clusters start looking more like monoliths of enslavement. I feel that Indian cities enslave the human soul and convert us into automatons. Shorn of kindness and joy and art and village greens, we become tools for the relentless advancement of its chaos. As I see it, only the city lives and thrives and we simply die. We die slowly, in sectors and crossings of our being. And then, as always, I packed my bags and went on a road journey. All 37 days of it. Back to the city, the clinical anomie of it all waxes and wanes and continues unabated. Nothing changes. The same set of dirt poor migrants walk back home in the evenings to their shanties, with their infants and their belongings on their heads. A BMW 7 series sounds its horns as it zooms past on the same road to paradiso. Th

I am not a beach person I am for the rapids, the waterfalls and the mountains. I like far away, offbeat places Places that have nothing to offer to the tourist soul Nothing that would mean anything in whatsapp statuses and Insta Posts I like places that don't call out for attention Nor grudgingly even,  acknowledge my presence. Raging hearts roaring and clouds tearing up Peaks that pierce the silences of the skies And moss and lichens glazing the sides. Unrepentant,  unperturbed,  dangerous Let me be and leave me alone kind of places

My soul is a vagrant It wanders around in time Like pollen and like leaves Caught in the wake of life I find meaning in this chaos ====== In the little moments in time that I get,   I open my windows to a world in which I know you live. I hope I see you on the other side   ==== A butterfly sat on the wings of an airplane As it taxied into an airport One carried me in The other,  my dreams.   Birds of a feather Unknown to each other     ==== Airplane windows are modern day apartments. The one who is inside wants to be outside And the ones who are outside They don't like being there

 I look at that child in the photograph All bright and beautiful And I know that it is not me   Dear child I have no memory of you   We die so many time Before we eventually die

As you step into a river in spate Remember The river is not angry with you But, you would never know The mountains that caught the rain The riverines that flooded over The villages that caved in Before you decided To step into A river In spate. Frank Cornfield Photography The river My dear Is not your enemy It is not your friend either It is just that An angry moment in your time.