This Sunday, March 22, across India

there is this self-imposed curfew by the

citizens ready to fight the COVID-19 virus

through volunteer isolation.

I hear, first time, the fluttering of the wings,

throaty sound of the pigeons, chirping of the

sparrows out there somewhere on the trees,

and,

the hissing of the warm breeze

and the leaves, clearly, as there is no traffic

and toxic fumes;

a strange tranquility descends

smog—missing

stillness prevails;

can see the crows and pigeons,

first time,

search for crumbs

in big flocks

on the quiet streets of Mumbai suburbs.

The sweet sounds unheard for last many years

are back—kind of divine music lost

and temporarily recovered for few

fleeting hours!

It is as if nature and its feathery denizens

had reclaimed the urban jungle via their

felt presence!

The golden orb
Lights up the
Rude parapets
Of the Old Fort
In New Delhi;

The November light
Tender and dispersed
Creates a visual
Son-at-Lumiere
On this late afternoon
Collapsing into a young night!
A flight of pigeons can be seen
Hovering in the sky,
Circling the top of the
 Royal library;
Nothing remains of the passage
Of cruel time in those ruins now,
Except the loud laugh of the young
Couples finding shelter in the
Fort of the Moguls,
From the prying eyes that ban
Love and laughter in today’s Dilli.
II
The light dances on the tamarind trees
As the travelling eyes watch the beams
Breaking into tiny particles on the grey
Evening, now coughing and groaning
On the highway to NOIDA,
The last swathes of fertile land
Survive the fat bulldozers,

And high-rises are still to arrive;
The dancing light lends magic
To a green landscape,
A soon-to-be a memory.

@Sunil Sharma

I

 Train journeys are philosophical.

They are magical and transformative!

The black horse drawing the coupés diligently over terrain rough

The fearsome mouth belching fire that shines in the dim night

The burning coals being spread over the receding land

Embers few flying down in the outstretched hands of kids/adults alike

Train journeys—a visual delight, inspiring a canvas or a song

People getting up/down

Embraces loving and farewells warm—and teary for a mother waving only son to the battleground!

Locomotives weave their own tapestries across time-n-space

Puffing up, red-eyed, these horse-machines arrive at the termini

After a long travel across the denuded hills, vales and dusty plains;

Friendships get promptly forged, new perspectives formed over life;

From a window open or barred, the passengers watch

The rolling countryside or bustling cities and towns;

Platforms big or small have got their pull on a fevered mind

The retreating cabins; the red signal down; the sharp whistle sound

And the beckoning mountain ranges or looming forests talk to you

In that fleeting instant!

Dawns/dusks never look the same

Solitude and pure heavens paint them so different!

You see universe travelling with you on such wonderful nights!

Life is motion; not stasis—it is called evolution.

II

Mental journeys can be equally illuminating—if done with your favorite fictional characters!

You learn a lot about histories, heroic struggles and human condition in lands and time distant.

The very act of reading can resurrect such epic journeys done on trains for a promise or Promised Land.

Chapter 7 of  Dr. Zhivago details one such spectacular journey that intersects the grey realms of fiction and fact, and, a past that is present.

Travelling across the vast plains of Russia in an overcrowded train

With the Zhivagos for a distant Varykino can be an unsettling experience in 2015:

Conscripts; the displaced, the exiled, peasants, the landed gentry—all disparate Elements flung together in their compartment by the force of circumstance

Everybody fleeing from something/somebody in a nation convulsing;

The long train hurtling down through a Red Revolution not properly understood; Bewildered, anxious; a part of the stratified humanity melted as a single unit in the crammed space.

Various sights, sounds, smells and colours are seen across the Old Russia in upheaval and bloody change—now forgotten except this literary document of a crucial age.

Another crucible of our times!

Frightening for some!

Comforting for others!

Journeys same; yet so different.

III

Chapter 22.

And then Dr Zhivago, fleeing from past, remembers the spring, looking out of the window of the compartment, in the midst of a gloomy place!

Spring resplendent!

With its hint of change.

Spring in the air.

And you too recall a spring now forever lost in an urban sprawl and smog

A spring remembered looks more romantic than a real one.

Dr. Zhivago is trying to flee from the logic of history like others

A futile effort!

One can never flee from one’s destiny.

Some people get caught up in the cauldron of history and   cannot escape the effects incendiary

A family displaced, running to their old family home, stuck at many stations

Witnessing violence and change in an old system on the brink;

And then doctor-poet remembering the spring in the expansive white of the snow

Two seasons collide in a single moment!

Spring indeed had arrived in his exploited land!

On a personal level, doing this long trans-country train journey with Dr.  Zhivago,

The reader is subtly reminded that we carry our own springs within.

Some train journeys— forever remembered/ inscribed!

They are wonderful expeditions of discovery and self-discovery

On the tracks

Magical in effect—Alice-like

And deeply transforming!

(Credit: —https://www.amazon.com/Trainstorm-Edited-Amitabh-Mitra/dp/0620718307)

in the sun-light

brightly-lit:

few yellow stains

—mere dots and tiny circles of daal-sabzi—

on the glass-topped dining table

in the middle-class neighborhood

of Mumbai

provide tentative evidence:

either the young mother is not there

at home, this Sunday afternoon,

or,

she is unwell.

The stains and finer dust

invisible to others of the

joint-family members!

@Sunil Sharma

After the cruel, abrupt downsizing

The man leaves the office, forever

Face downcast, a bag in hand and

Few memories in a grieving heart.

The boulevard does not look like

The one experienced in the morning

Of the wintry New Delhi—crisp and smiling

And the crowded paths, pavements, similar, yet different!

Daily, years together, the man, now in 50s, walked the

Lanes and by-lanes of the Connaught Place

Afternoons, post-lunch, in the company of

Colleagues and friends from the nearby offices for Chai.

All that is past, within 24 hours! He stands at the same spot, near the

Tea vendor; being ignored by the same set; except the stray dog that wags its tail and

Yelps—in pure, friendly delight—at the forlorn man that daily

Fed the emaciated, spurned dog—bread with loving hands!

@Sunil Sharma

—Sunil Sharma

Les Murray returns from Sydney

To reclaim a personal heritage –

His childhood home

Full of memories of

Time spent on

A dairy farm;

Of a woodcutter father

Working hard there,

Mother who died,

And a feud silent

Between a grandfather

And a dad,

Unable to forget and forgive,

The trees full of white ants,

That killed one of the siblings.

The promised farm never materialized,

And his dad went back to the tree-cutting,

In order to survive;

The return from Sydney

Was reclaiming his regional

Australian roots,

And finding again there

The continent’s true face!

Among the aboriginals, farmers and authors,

The great Murray,

The Bard of Australia,

Discovered the Soul of his

Culture that was missing

In the glittering cities.

Urban centers are

Alike these days

Everywhere but the way

Farmers in rural Australia

Work hard against the odds,

Gets mirrored in poets and writers,

And like aboriginals,

These communities carry nature

Within their selves as sacred,

And that act of getting connected

With nature in a sublime way,

Makes Murray the great voice,

Booming,

Coming down from

Outback/ steppes/deserts

You hear often,

On lonely nights,

On the desolate highways,

Echoing loudly –

In the fevered,

Rational,

Calculating,

Profit-seeking,

Stock-exchange-fixed

Minds and hearts.

(A literary tribute to the iconic poet, now no more)

—Sunil Sharma

Look!

The high-rises there.

Once, till few years ago,

Those were the fields

Worked by the farmers.

Paddy fields that added to the

Greenery created by

The magic of the full monsoons.

Small patches where vegetables were grown

And small ponds with the bent palm trees

Catching the gentle moon-beams.

We walked down to that paradise in the suburban Mumbai

Smelling the earth, after every first rains.

There were trees around and bird-songs

Alas!

Now—

All that is gone!

Only buildings rising up

As bald giants

Above

The untouched

Few clumps of trees

Covered in the soot and exhaust,

Only concrete roads with crazy traffic

All divine songs gone.

Floods of 2005

That drowned Mumbai.

Tsunamis, most places.

Toxic air.

Warmer winters.

Cooler summers.

And the monsoon of 2018

Almost—still-born!

Residents in metros

Pay for the crimes

Of the greedy builder lobby

That kills: The mangroves; ponds; fields

And the maternal trees that nurture cultures

But these developers, sadly,

Always forget to plant.

(Credit: Contemporary Literary Society)

In the summer of 2014
—not long ago in a fast-changing high-tech universe that
deletes conversations—
I saw a bearded tramp, on one of the boulevards
Of Paris: A homeless man, that glittering evening, sitting
under
the imposing façade of a multinational American bank with
revolving doors and a uniformed guard; the structure smelt of
a raw power and the strange scent of capital; made
formidable by design
—a brownstone with glass-n-chrome but let us not bother the
reader about such physical details in a scene dimly recalled in
a suburban Mumbai apartment by a mind, dulled by the
dreary prose of the post-industrial realities of a globalised
world that integrates, only to fragment subjectivities and
points-of-view, under a monolithic narrative—
Along with a dog—a constant companion and guard against
the muggers; just imagine the depravity of these crazy guys,
trying to rob such homeless ones? —that
barked only against the suits, all in a hurry to catch the fastest
modes of reaching gated destinations in some upscale sections
beyond the Seine, and never once glancing at that Caucasian