Night on a Himalayan Highway and Neil Armstrong

(Written at 3 in the morning on way to Shimla)

There is not enough light. Well, you wouldn't expect much at 3 in the morning anyway. Volvo's engine is powering in silence; all we can hear in the cabin is the squeaky sounds of curtains sliding. A light frost has set on the long, end to end spanning windows of the bus that makes every street light hazy and drunk. Sleepy bodies move to and fro, their heads bobbing in an unusual synchronization, with the long winding turns that the bus is making on this 90 km stretch of highway on the hills. Most of the bus is asleep, no snorers this time thank god, however a light giggle and sound of bangles keeps on constantly mingling with the screeches of the tires. I am guessing honeymoon. 

It is monsoon in the Himalayas: High beam of the headlights exposes the tarmac like a lady sitting for a naked portrait. Damp patches of mud and silt are encroaching the sides of the two lane national Highway No. 22., maybe mother nature wants back what once was truly hers. 

It's fluorescent outside. The moon is full enough to pull out wolverines out of men, but no howls yet. The valley opens to the right, so does a deep gorgeous curtain of mist. The stagnant milky white cover is pulled over old Victorian houses, a rusty railway station and four dirty orangish street lamps (there might be more but I'll count them on a clearer night); but then it seems that even the mist has slept with the night like the people below the slated roofs. So this cover of mist hangs like a ghost or an apparition, extending its tentacles towards the pine and fir covered mountains. Ah but these mountains...these mountains are too tall for such seductions and fore-plays. Half a mountain gets drowned in the mist while the other half amalgamates with the night sky. Threads of clouds running across the moon can give the DreamWorks logo a run for its money, only if we can figure out how to put a kid up there, dropping a line in water. But then, we did, didn't we?

Afternoon Scribble

O my great love!
Twinkling like those immortal stars,
hung low and beyond the horizon,
why don't you yield to my call?
Ah my heart breaks and this numbness grows
like a dissident tumble-weed,
devouring me while I wait, and how I wait for you;
I hear myself growing roots,
holding the soil between my toes,
becoming a tree under your eternal flicker.

Poetry & We

Some poems require valor, some thrive on experience and some just need a little patience. To see poems as living breeding creatures is a perspective few understand and fewer exercise. A friend of mine told me that a poem came to her in a language that she did not understand; she knew what the poem was about but could not put it in precise words as the poem did not belong to any of the four languages she knew. This is where we bake the limitations and feed it to ourselves; losing sight of an experience that can be tamed in those perfect set of words that justifies its existence.

But it is not the limitations we should be weary of; it is the vast potential that we feel scared to explore. We must bend and we must break to know again what we already know. What is principle but an idea telling us the truth, but I ask this, why must we accept what we don't understand. My rainbow may have seventy colors not seven, and I may see eight fingers on my hands but then it becomes my responsibility to show the same to you. At these times we need not to cower under ridicule or fancy that our idea is just an idea of out of insanity. Urge it to stay another minute and a minute after that. Play with it, fight with it and if possible go out with it for dinner, but in the end - hold it.

You will feel your pen shake at times, for the idea that you would reflect would be too grand for the man or woman you are, but isn't that the beauty of it? The ability to Rise. The ability to believe that we can be better. I am no Emerson to dictate the responsibility of the poet in this insecure world, nor am I Keats wandering to search the marriage of joy, beauty and truth. I am me and so be you, and our words are ours - waiting to be freed by the unyielding courage of our hearts.

The Kashmiri Pandit

Our father spoke.
His voice rambled incoherently like winter winds of Gulmarg,
But his deep blue eyes calmed me;
They always made me remember the summers at Dal.

Our father spoke.
He weighed every single word;
He was beaten today morning while collecting ration,
I have to share the rice with my brother for a week.

Our father spoke.
I think uncle is not coming anymore,
I remember he was right behind us till we crossed Kupwara;
Mother has been crying since...

Our father spoke.
In a tent on a Ramlila ground,
The grass has begun to frost with the night;
I wish for my blanket to not get drenched.

Our father spoke
"Someday we will go home son."
We never did.

A Dedication To Loss

I stood with you when sun was weak;
... I stood with you at its best.
And before the fall of night I was
standing with you where waves broke crest.
And the stars they came, spoke and sang;
our hearts beating two abreast;
on our lips tinkered rain;
our eyes they laid to pass -
the dreams, on graves they ceased to rest.
In my youth I enjoyed your love,
an old man I, now understand
the loss of it - the loss that remains.
now I hear no singing of stars above;
and on my lips beats no rain.

The Beggar

Every time I think I can be more,
I make my pen meet the paper
And write a word, darker than before.
What if I cannot afford the ink today;
I will tear the words from the newspapers
and create my poems.
People tell me that I am torn,
From these lines that they see,
Made by half rusted, half broken
blades - filled only with half a resolution
To do what they were supposed to do -
So these lines...they stretch on my skin
Like roads on the map, going nowhere.
But I not a man to be told or tamed;
I am free and I can see that you are beautiful,
And bold, and kind, and great, and you can be
Anyone or anything in this world if you believe for long enough;
I want to tell all these things about you to you
Only if you would listen to me
And stop leaving pennies in my hand.

Nostalgia

I remember your kiss,
Sweet pomegranate explosions in my mouth.
Our baked bodies sinking somewhere
in that yellow meadow;
Watching shadows of trees change direction
like hands of clock.

How often we would penetrate
this pine forest in our conversations and reach that patch of rhododendron jungle where,
you'd insist to have a small cottage filled with butterflies,
a stream that's always running a melody and spring that would never fade.

Remember when we were simple people;
how we wasted hours poking at an amber oozing evening fire
or made pebbles sprint over lake and watched them drown.
When we defined violence by bitten lips and nibbled noses.

And sometimes, when I am more lonesome than alone,
I hear the echoes of a wailing wind rushing through my soul,
reminding me, of the time we spent together on the mountain top
Tying our dreams
to prayer flags.

Courage

I write a letter to you and leave it
Incomplete,
Pressed under the weight of my pen and the
Night
I lie awake hoping that the morning will bring me
Courage.

II.

Spread between those velvet sheets
Mad lovers realize
Not all wars hurt.

Prison Story

I will make you burn the skies, 

yes sir I will...

and if you don't know how, you better learn. I will make you stand in the rain dripping from that burning sky, 

black, thick charcoalic drops of residue 

that will hit you on your face like a mad freight train. 

I will drench you in you those deep pulsating shrill of lightning, 

deep dark red, running in the sky like crazy dogs...

Oh yes sir! Burning skies, freight trains and dogs. 

I will make you tear down the skyscrapers 

just to wake you up and show you that you can.
Maybe call your father and ask him to teach you 

how to be a better man all over again, 

I will take this violence from inside of you 

and use it to break stones or maybe the stones will break you...

and I tell you sir, oh I tell you... eventually the stones always win.

And after you will get used to eat with your calloused hands, 

feel no shame in the nakedness of your body 

and your hate will finally begin to hurt - 

then we will call it baptism.

Bukwoski On The Street

Ah! This buzz of the madness.
Around this tasteless gut of a man
Lying on this unforgiving clichéd pavement;
Listening to the crazed world in passing,
Drunk and half dead or dead and half drunk - I don't remember,
But what difference does it make:
We were too fucked up to understand him anyway.

Surrender

My heart yearns for a romantic numbness –
like the one I felt when you kissed me 
with those lips soaked in tangerine..
                                       
Between this burning desire and longing, 
the only semblance of peace I find
is in the memory of us 
holding each other like passion raved renegades

And I wonder, how we ever found that place,
 beyond this rabid infestation called sanity,
where fought and fought till we owned each other

only to surrender.