Barsaat Mahal
Last night sitting under
a photo of a Ladhak Monastery
in bleak high mountian country, you
asked me about Barsaat Mahal.
You were eager to know it's lines,
the levels on which it was built, how
the sun, rising over Ganga, paints it gold.
You wanted to know if it was real.
It rains in Barsaat Mahal all the while, this is fiction of course, but then I can see Saeeda Bai in the garden singing a song: comparing these rain clouds to a dark bodied god, she is weeping there and I am weeping here. It rains in Barsaat Mahal even as I am drinking tea. My legs on this bench remember these legs much younger dancing on another.
You want to know everything and I want to forget everything. The prison holding the past is Barsaat Mahal, a roadside tea stall, four crude benches and two of us, both alike, plotting escape. Now I drink wine and I celebrate my seeming escape from Barsaat Mahal, but tell me how does one escape this sky fringed with clouds?
I too am Barsaat Mahal, believe me when I say it used to rain here all the while till you interrupted the rain (or were they tears?) when you knocked on the door of Barsaat Mahal. You hand is still patting my head as I, very attentively fold the plans of Barsaat Mahal into an armada of boats and set them drifting across the river to your shores.
2002:12:23 10:30 Atlanta for T.F.C
Barsaat: Rain Mahal: Palace Saeeda Bai: a character in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy
My Poems
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Rafting
Tonight your remembered presence in red,
is a raft which is seemingly on fire
on a river,which I have to cross to live
a dark river, an overflowing river of pain.
I am drowning and you are burning.
Somewhere wheels are turning on the tarmac, a smell of burnt things, ash at the altar before I finish my prayer. Do you know, I am yet to wash the shirt that seperated my heart from yours: skin vibrating like a gong or a drum.I cover my face with it and I smell your burning which marked me.
I am drowning and a black tide is coming in, I am coral, a mere gathering of dying cells, Go on call me beautiful, go on confess before each cell is extinguished, before I become coral. Go on touch me, but you can't touch me: your palms can't hold me but how they held me.
Make a raft for me, open your plams I ask you to open your palms so that I can change my history as I change yours. Open your plams and I will speak no lies, your fortune will burn as your palms burnt mine. Open your palms and sail me across the river But if you can't, become the river and fill me with a roaring silence in which I can drown.
2003:01:06 00:30 Atlanta (AD)
How I wish to complete the circumference of my broken circles.
My Poems
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