Tree

Poggendorff

ऊर्ण ( Wool )

Image: "UP govt. admits deaths of 34 children in Muzaffarnagar riots relief camps", www.pardaphash.com

सो सूनी सी आँखें गयी हैं,

इंतज़ार की कड़ी को तकते |

याद मुझे वो आज भी पल है,

सोई गर्म तेरी सांसें जब थीं |

ठण्ड प्रकोप प्रलय विघ्न निशाचर

बैठा था अपने फन फैलाये,

काले अम्बर के नीचे निर्मित

नील कपास की निर्मम कुटिया

बसी थी जिसमे कुटुंब क्रिथव की,

और बसे थे जिसमें मैं और तू |

चार मास के तेरे क्षुद्र वक्त्र को

चुभे थे जब शीतकाल के कांटे

अनुस्मरण का बाँध टुटा था

हृदय में तेरी माँ का, बेटा |

लहू से लथपथ लाश लिए जब

पड़े थे मैं वो आलिंगनबद्ध,

धर्म के बाशिंदे कहाँ गए वो

आये थे जो कटारों के संग |

आंसूं भी न बहे थे मेरे

न सिसका था मन ये मेरा

हृदय हुंकार-बद्ध सिकुड़ा कुचला

प्रेम तब भी कायम था मेरा |

लाश जली, हुई लाल थी धरती

आक्रोश से जमा था मेरा बोध,

किलकारियां तेरी, तेरा क्षणभर का रोदन

सुनकर काँप उठा था मैं

मातृप्रेम रहित तेरा वो क्रंदन |

प्रतिकार प्रतिहिंसा प्रतिक्रिया निर्यातन

छोड़ कोशिशें की मैंने भरने की

उस मातृ श्वभ्र छिद्र अंतर को

ये कुटिया फिर मिली हमें, धन्यवाद्

एक सरकार सुनिश्चित आश्वासन को |

फिर एक दिन एक पल वो पल आया

जब टपकी मौत की बूँदें ठंडी

जब ग्रीष्म शरीर तेरा शीत हुआ था

ली जब थी तूने सांसें अंतिम |

अब आज मिली मृदंग-हुंकार तृप्त

एक वाहन की कृपादृष्टि से

इक कम्बल प्रच्छद लिहाफ नवत पट |

अब आज ये रक्त चीख रहा है

लाऊं तुझे मैं यादों से खींच

और ओढ़ा दूं प्रेम, ऊर्ण से निर्मित | 

Silly!

Today.

I will tell you a story of a boy and a girl. A girl and a boy.

---

Back Then.

They walked on the streets. Long walks and shorter ones. Days and Nights and Days. Cuddling up and dreaming of a life, together. Her shyness and his anxiety. Their love. Days and Nights and Days. Her pretty face. The most beautiful thing on earth. Her tears, the worst.

He remembers them. All of them and much more. And yet, he often struggles to find the details of the moments revelled. Ask him, and he would fumble. And deep inside his heart, in his subconscious, each and every second of her time, all of it, is etched with vigour. He remembers the aroma of her hair. The touch of her hand. The feel of her fabric. The sound of her steps and yawns. God! She looks the cutest when she yawns. The pouting face of hers, he remembers. And the baby voice she makes on the phone still stirs his soul. He remembers the sight of her eyes. The cornea. And the taste of her labial commissures. Morning rays were the best. Falling on her sleepy face, they made her hold his hands, breathe calmly, open her eyes and prepare her to bless another day of his life. He today lives to get blessed for the whole of his life, every day. And he will.

I also know with great amazement how she made him fall in love with the city. Her city. He calls it. He never liked it. No, nothing of it. And she, slowly, with her magical demeanour and love, turned it to his favourite one.  He loves the many streets. He loves the shops and the alleys. And the people and dogs of it. He loves the markets, the malls and the bazaars. He wanders there to breathe the air where once she laughed with him. He loves the yellow cabs. He gets into them more often in the hope of getting into the one where once she tried to open his fist. Or the ones where she kissed him. He even loves his own house. He wanders lonely staring at the nearby lakes and the trees and the corridors of his building. He eats the same food which she ate. And he leaves half of it, because they ate together. Silly! The wrinkles of the sheet, he desires to preserve. The wrinkles of the dance and the love-fights and the hugs. He shows me a spot, on the table cloth, of ketchup. She dropped it while giving him a bite of her sandwich.  It was her sandwich, he emphasizes. I remember him keeping a broom. His room was now a dirty mess. And while he was at it, telling me his stories, he took a shirt off the hanger and found a long hair. Must have worn it while she was here.

He is getting a call from her and he must step out of his room. And beside his phone, there is a box lying. A simple box of cardboard. Simple enough to get ignored. He goes out and I am at the box. There are few long hairs, a pointed gravel just like the one that gets stuck on your sole, some very old movie tickets, a Miss Lee clothing label, a broken tip of what seems to me a Kaajal and two Kurkure pieces.

---

Today.

I have a dinner invitation and I should get going. It’s their eighth anniversary. I must also get something for their kids. A boy and a girl. A girl and a boy.

---

Prior to Back Then.

He comes back to his room after dropping her off. Opens the lock. Click. Tip. The light is on. Used plates of the sandwich that was love. They had shared in the morning. A book he read to her. It was open. A pack of Kurkure she ate. He leaps at it. Creeech-Crrrruch. The sound of the orange plastic bag. His hands dig into it. Spicy smell of the two leftover pieces. Caressing his senses. He kisses them. Preserve the love, shall we? In the box.

An Idiot in the Classroom

The sententious sermon slips through my soul like a snake in a stream,

Unaware if it’s dead or alive.

I reject to receive the rhetorical knowledge,

Like a yak in the mountains, only thinner.

Faith

I was travelling from Yumthang Valley to Yume Samdong, also called the Zero Point, in Sikkim in a Jeep. With a temperature below the freezing point, cool mountain wind caressing my face and a terrain that was bound to either take your heart away or your life, I felt blessed to be there at that moment, far away from the worries of the world, far away from expectations and deliberations, free from the sweet shackles of shimmering relations. Just me.

And then I came across these stacks of stones placed very carefully on both sides of the road. And there were many of them. I asked my driver, who was a local resident of Lachung, the nearest inhabited place, about them and what I got to hear was at one hand a very simple and straightforward explanation, and on the other hand a deeply moving expression of faith and beauty amidst the toil of nature.

“We are Buddhists. This is how we pray to our God for the Snow.”

“Ok. Tell me more.”

“This is the time when we expect snowfall in our land. Where you are going now, Sir, you will find fresh snow. You will play with it and click pictures. For us it’s the matter of livelihood. As you can see there is no snow to be seen around even here at Yumthang Valley, leave alone Lachung.”

He was right. I was waiting with baited breath to see the snow all around me but all I could see was the visage of huge naked rocky mountains.

“If we do not get the snowfall in time, our crops will die. If that happens, it will be extremely difficult for us to carry on with our livelihood. So we pray with these stones to the God for a timely snowfall.”

He said this and drove his way to Yume Samdong, dodging a few boulders that rolled their way down on our jeep. And then it struck to me. Even when you are at a place so far from worldly distractions, worries and woes, you are afraid. You are afraid of the nature and for your survival. This is what makes us a living creature. And to counter it, we have faith. Faith.

Let me be here and soak in all the pleasure, for the nature beholds the beauty.

And let me feel the fear, for everyday I used to die.

Let me live the moment and take a leap of faith.

And let me be a stone left there to pray.

I opened the window of my jeep and inhaled life.

(First published on http://shishirkc.tumblr.com)

Free to Live

I despise the rules of the game.

The game that faces play with each other.

The game that a mortal wins and loses to another mortal.

I reject the order of the world. Universe.  

The order that kills the unordered.

The order that beautifies beauty and abandons the ugly.

I ignore the grammar of the language.

The grammar that has no meaning for the uninitiated.

The grammar that not a child knows

Yet he explains with vigor, his thoughts.

I ignore the knowledge of the world.

Knowledge that makes me conscious.

Knowledge that forces me to acquire more of it without any purpose.

I abandon the rationality of humanity.

Rationality that murders the creativity.

Rationality that rapes the innocent art of children.

Picasso said – "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”

I hate world acknowledging Picasso.

Or for that matter Einstein or Brahma or Peacock.

Who are you to prove the existence of the illusion

That you see through your conditioned thought process.

What is Art? What is Fairness? What is Life? What is Sex?

I want to go, move, die in the womb of nature.

Nature alone beholds the truth. The truth of illusion.

I am an illusion.

Free to wander and live and die.