“Mad: Needs guidance at home.”

Fill in the blanks
Was the only line I could read
Written on the paper
In the last exam I wrote
All my blanks filled by you
I filled in all the blanks
With your name, my love
That was the only word
I could remember
Later, I wasn’t surprised
When my progress report card said,
“Mad: Needs guidance at home.”

What clock read is not time.

The clock on my empty wall
Is as restless and anxious
As I am
It keeps meticulous records
Of all the moments
Of all the minutes
Of all the hours
That you spend away from me
I wish it stops someday soon, forever!

Gandhi Jayanti

Bapu, you are no more real
You used to walk real
With blood and flesh
On this kind earth
Your name was real
Your words were real
But now we have come
Far away from you
You are a real illusion
In the deserts of democracy
This country has grown
Bigger than you
It is shining
Better than the coins
Where your image is engraved
By a destitute
Who lost his mind
Because of choiceless starvation
And not because of satyagarh
Your country has produced
Innumerable Gandhis
Whose fast of poverty
Never ends
And whose charkha of enforced starvation
Never stops.
Long back we handed you over
To the silent resonating eternity
Your echoes are still haunting
This country of poor
And only poor
In their endless pains.
I hope you finally learned
The lessons from your monkeys
You don’t listen
You don’t see
Your don’t say
I hope you live
In the bliss of ignorance
Of the country you dedicated yourself to
Bapu, I wish you Happy Birthday!

“You have enforced me to disappear”

They say you have disappeared
An enforced one

But why do I find you everywhere?
I find you every morning
When I open my eyes
In the intense smell
Of that pungent oil
Which you always wore
With rural arrogance

I find you in your cold room
Near your desk
In your hasty scribbled notes
You used to make
While staring at the black and white picture
Of my mother when she was in prime

I find you in the lawn
Among the whispering flowers
You used to tender
And stubborn weeds
You used to gently weed out

I find you in my mother’s eyes
When she tries to hide
Her real tears
With the tears coiling down her dry cheeks
While cutting onions for our dinner
Which doesn’t taste same
As it used to when you were here

I find you in that ancient field
Where a Chinar stands even now
Like a testimony of your presence
Under whose shade
You and your friends
Used to smoke
The smoke is still entangled
Between its labyrinth branches

I find you in those folklores
Which you used to narrate to me
Every night
In which moon was my personal football
And the enormous vastness of space
My playground
You gifted to me

I find you in the long pauses
And ominous sighs of my sister
When your disappeared name echoes
Suddenly, in the ancient tales
Of my grandmother

I find you ominously omnipresent
Everywhere
I don’t believe that you have disappeared
In fact, they should look for me
I am lost somewhere, everywhere
With your presence everywhere
I am enforced to disappear.

ODE TO THE MASS GRAVES

Why do you mourn us
Don’t you see
We are united now
Unlike you.

I, for one, in life
Could never unite with my father
Whose kindness meant freedom to me
Or with my brother
With whom I had shared
All my games and playgrounds
Or my neighbor
With whom smile was my only exchange
Or that strangely odd looking boy
Who shared same feeling as mine
For my beloved.

I could never imagine unity
When I was alive.
But we are united now
In our death and in a grave
On one side
I am merging into my brother
Ribs crushing into ribs
On the other side
The strangely odd looking boy
Is fusing into my heart
And my skull is snuggled
Into my father’s hollow rib cage
My feet are though
Somewhere lost in the ground
For if find them
I would come out of my grave
To tell you
You should mourn yourselves
Not us anymore.

You live in the living grave of your world
Of disunity
We live our life in death
Of unity
In body and in spirit.

Metamorphosis

How do I make sense of world

When you are not around

Everything is strange

Nothing works in its proper way

Morning doesn’t come on time

Night falls asleep

Breathing becomes endless

Dreams become rare

Life becomes a foolish habit

Living become a bad joke

Sitting, standing and all overt gestures

All become mundane

When I speak to the world

Words become banal

Truth becomes a fiction

Fiction becomes a prosaic art

Love become a passion

Need becomes its face

Hope, its guardian

Destiny endless wait

In your absence, my love

Nothing remains same

I become a stranger

To my own name

I find myself all alone

I find myself all alone

In your sweet reminiscences

I keep looking at my empty room

Devoid of all the pictures

Of nature and people

That could have been there

Had you chose them

For my forlorn walls

Then I look at my furniture

Which is so uninteresting

Devoid of any marks of wearing

That would have been there

Had you sit on them so long

Then I look at my whimpering mobile

It used to whine again and again

Like my heart beat

My heart has not been beating

From so many ages now

The only thing I am left with

Is my failing past

Which is like an old temple or a mosque

Deserted in the middle of dense jungle

I visit it quite often

To find my God there!