The universe is made of stories, not atoms - Muriel Rukeyser

Chipmunks are gathering berries. A chipmunk is a large squirrel without stripes. An immigrant is an exile whose stripes slowly vanish. I am one.

New replaces old. Squirrels with chipmunks, gulmohars with magnolias and old faces in the mirror with constant new ones.

Fables remain.

Squirrels had a fable to tell of how they got their stripes, when a human god caressed them as they laboured to build a bridge of rocks across an ocean for his monkey army to cross and vanquish an island bound demon king.

So I invent fables for chipmunks and new words for home.

2002:07:28 17:30 Atlanta

Note: The fable in the poem comes from one of the two great Sanskrit epics, Ramayana. You can find the whole text of it, as retold by C. Rajagopalachari, here. The other epic, Mahabharatha can be found here.

They have been often compared to the Classical Greek Epic "Illiad", but IMHO these are both, a thousand times more brilliant and timeless!

The sky outside this flouroscent lit room is a wash of bright cobalt blue. The smell of the rain still in the air and leaves whirring on the sidewalks, bright red maple leaves.

Trees undressing for the imminent winter and lovers are kissing underneath the dome that spans from me here to you somewhere there. Trees are a irridisient green. I am glad to be alive now to breath this rain washed air and to watch the sun. So what if I am alone in it like that dripping weeping willow in the yard outside?

This spring, overflowing with flowers doesn't bring much happiness to me. What it brings are only memories on a broken mirror in which I dress myself with crushed flowers as tears drip from my eyes.

Is this fiction or a fable I narrate? Even these in reality have divorced me, there is no realism nor hallucinations left to see since that spring when you left me alone, very alone to suffer and repent at slow leisure.

Was it my desperate haste to cage you as you said in my embrace of death? Not because I am afraid to die which I am. I still am a coward, I couldn't cut circular patterns on the veins terilling my hands tonight if I wanted to.

Dying anyway is a matter of few springs And I live because I have learnt something if not from you, from your remembrances that come to me these lengthening days

wearing green eapulettes of new leaves, that life is worth living at least to look, remember and smile at these red masses of flowers that come, these red gulmohars of my springs.

1999:02:10 IIT Kgp, India

On looking at a gulmohar tree in the middle of a class and suddenly remembering someone then.

Note: I changed a lot of these lines today. My old poems sound so gauche, like bad English romantic poetry. 2002:06:16 Atlanta