Works of RK

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.

When we were children, we would sleep in one large bed, I, my Sis, and my cousins. The house in the village was ancient. When it rained, the tiled roof would start a slow Tibetan throat song and lull us to sleep. But what stands out is not the rains on tiled roofs.  Etched in our little minds was a night when we heard a Cat Mother mourning her dead kitten. In the dark of the night, she created stories in her mind of her lost child and cried. She would sulk and wail and talk and curse and cry. I could hear her over the noise of the falling rains. I could feel her heart wrenching sadness falling like rain.  Sadness is not a Human quality. To feel pain is universal.  I think sadness is the soup upon which the reality of life floats. It is the salt in our otherwise unremarkable blip of an existence.  An appalling apology of a story! The artwork is by Ankita Swaroopa (Mystique Sunshine) titled: Self Hug.

As long stretches of empty cranes stood waiting, for the last of the Ganesha's to bid adieu, I felt my eyes welling up from a sadness that was not mine. How the stories encoded in my genes have a life of their own will forever remain a mystery to me. I do not fight it, I do not disown it, and I am not enslaved by it.  We will live in harmony, until Dussehera .  Then again, the celestial tales from ancient myths will come thundering down upon this ancient land. As electrons entangled through endless time and space, we will spin with abandon, as our creators spin within us.

A stud of hers had fallen And lost itself in some dark corner Of my other wise very clean room Raj! She screamed There is broken glass in there. She was bleeding A lustrous post office red.  I am sorry baby I am unaware  Of shards of broken glasses Hiding in my dark places And hurting Those who come searching there.  You are my light baby Shine on.

She would not love me Ever Like I loved her. There is a difference being a river And a lake. I would flow into her with a rush Often, breaching banks And she would wait for me Behind the stark tapestry Of brown buildings And soot infested skylines Behind the charade of city living And the grey hush From carpeted office floors Behind the ever grinning insta posts  And the harangue of the tweets Like a lake She would wait for me To fill her emptiness In odd seasons Of random loneliness. ----------------- maestitia stands for, among other things,  heartsore in latin. Image courtsey pinterest

If I could string together What is now broken and lies uncared I would wipe the dust off our faces And help rediscover the music That we lost Traveling Through the hinterlands of our vast Untamed minds.   The title is in memory of Kim Sowol, Korean Poet

And as darkness came upon us it were the same colour As our sullen souls. And as we waded Into this ocean of despair We had already lost our oars. Courtsey : The Guardian

The little lies I tell myself To stay afloat amidst the storm and the sea Are like bright lights from lightnings Bolting down on me All this thunder and the waves All this anger and their tales And I float still!

As I grow older, I can see my shadows from autumn grow longer.  The dull dry leaves of my loved ones continue to fall to ground relentlessly, eventually they become one with the roads that carried their souls on this journey for so long.  The trees are barren for longer. Shorn of leaves, I can see them more clearly now, all their parched boughs and branches, crisscrossing all over, reaching out to the Sun, as if in a prayer for easy exits, or maybe a wail of despair for winds of change. I like autumn. It is less busy than spring, and a lot less noisy than Monsoons. There is only the rustling of the dried leaves and the dull, muted protests of the green ones that fell off anyway.  I like autumn for I can see the forest through and through. I can see through the pine and the deodar and the neem . The big trees no longer block my view of what lies behind them. For as long as I can see, it is just the same thickets, and thorns and leaves and empty stares. It’s the canopy that was leadin

  She would never call Or mail, or text Until I did As if her heart was leadened And sunked her soul Into some dark dangerous depths Every time I let go Some day soon I might just hold on to her As she slowly sinks into her goodbyes And go drown with her Listen this poem here

These ageing wheels creak But unlike my bones They can be greased I am on a slow train Home And when the coal runs out And the pilot call it quits These tracks would hold no meaning anymore It is this slow movement Through the ups and downs Of an undulating terrain That I thought is what we call life The blind beggar woman Who would just not fold up and die The achingly bright cities And the abjectly poor With their unholy cries The covid infected watchman Who coughs for a week Before the government calls him And asks him for a good date to die The little migrant girl child Who saunters in the sweltering summer Sun And will never know KFC Or ABC To the son I never had Little rascal of mine This place won't miss you And to my little Princess My dearest This isn't a place you would miss I hear the rickety wheels changing tracks Soon, it will be a slow beat to a stop And it will be my turn to alight. Light a lamp my dear ones Let there be some light.

Some versions of us live on through the eternal onslaught of time. Deep inside, that person is still there, who last saw you walking Into the land of frozen memories. I remember you as achingly beautiful in your off whites And those were happier times Looking back, it's like a Christmas movie Santa and snow and miracle and all Some version of me still lives there With some version of you.

Over the years Across thunderstorms I have grown to fall in love With all the lightnings  That lit my broody skies And fear the thunder  That reminds Constantly Of what I survived.

Why do roots stay alive long after the tree is gone?  When the little one asked this to me, I was busy clawing and pulling and hacking at an old stump in the garden. I looked around and sighed. All the hard weeds all around the garden were fathered by this one tree.  Wherever its roots went, it spawned stories that entrenched itself like fables and myths.  Looking back,  I think it would have been easier living with her Than dying everyday,  fighting her memories  Spawning all over Like weeds in an eternally damaged garden.