Barsaat Mahal - 1
Last night sitting under
a photo of a Ladhak Monastery
in bleak high mountain country,
you asked me about Barsaat Mahal.
You were eager to know its 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 see Saeeda Bai in the garden singing a raga: 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 much younger legs dancing in Barsaat Mahal.
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 to 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 there all the while till you interrupted the rain (or were they tears?) when you knocked on the door of Barsaat Mahal. You hand is calmly 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 shore.
2002:12:23 10:30 Atlanta for T.F.C
Barsaat: Rain Mahal: Palace Saeeda Bai: a character in Vikram Seth's novel "A Suitable Boy"
Revised: 2006:07:26
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Under The Maple Trees - 1
I sit beneath maple trees,
as their leaves color the autumn rain
and fall with infinite slowness.
Meanwhile memories burst open
like jars of fragrant pickles.
First:
There was I and next to me there was she. Which She? Who was this? And where was I? Which song played on the radio? It must have been a radio hit, a popular love song, "I will love you, truly madly deeply", a song that almost believes in its own prosaic verses As much as I wanted to believe that moment would last forever, when I was in love with the idea of love more than I was with that temporal beloved.
Second:
There I was sitting under a tree. Which tree? What tree? Whose tree? Was it the tree of knowing that lies beyond all this unknowing, Buddha's Bodhi tree? Or was it the tree from which Eve was plucking her apple? What poems did I recite? Was it Rilke's Autumn or Neruda's Ode to A Lemon as I ate that fruit. What fruit was that? An apple, a pear or that deep redness that was concealed between her legs?
Third:
There I was leaning against the window watching water trickle down. What water? Was this the rain? Or simply grief? What did I say to myself? What did others say to me? And did it ever stop raining as I sat there, with my veins slashed, in my blood drenched shirt, to feast upon myself, pickled with memories of sitting, walking and kissing under trees.
…
I close those jars, and walk away. Leaves continue to fall with the rain, under the maple trees.
Written around 2002:09:30 Revised on 2006:07:25 Note: A poem from that early dim period, which I think is salvagable afer a few more revisions.
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Few Such Words - 1
I began to speak and spoke not,
and those words stuck in my throat
flare now into a poem, this one I write.
But I open and close the book again and again. I don't find a few thousand mouths in me, like those of your river in that far away country, which I need to write what I began here, before I forget, before a winter day breaks.
I am helpless, unable to find words to pluck as fruit from a tree or words like unsteady planets wobbling in their orbits or words that simply fall as snow falls in a dark night, softly, soundlessly.
My words are hard: as a rock, as I, as lines that etch my face, useless words. I need words as fluid as flags waving in the wind, as fluid as a laugh of a silver fish traveling up the river of my blood, words like a woman dressed in dreams that beat their wings around her as they take off like birds into the evening sky, across the blankness of unfilled sheets.
Will you bring me few such words?
Written on 2002:12:12 01:00 Revised on 2006:07:25 Aisde: If I am ever required to write a memoir of infatuations, mostly unacted upon, all I would have to do is follow these blotchy tracks I have left behind. No wonder, with Taepodong like missiles such as these, nothing ever happened. Thank the lord (& the devil too) that I have grown out of that phase of blubbering frothiness. :)
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