The birds on the top branches
of the slender trees that sway
drunkenly in the fresh breeze,
the pigeons circle in the blue expanse
the dusky clouds spread out fast, with a promise of
the delayed Mumbai-rain, this humid
afternoon,
the winged beings and nature in kinetic mode
out there, up, in happy flocks
being watched enviously by the
solitary man from behind the
grilled-windows
of a locked-down home
in a fearful city gone static
and quiet!
The long winds sweeping across the old Badaun,
In gentle yellow October,
I can still feel singing in my ears,
Their cold breath kisses my face and
Rubs my frigid heart,
The winds
Still playful and laughing,
Run their long fingers in my hairs,
Lovingly—
Like a dead Mum calling
Her orphan child,
From across the divide of time and space.
The gray-white pigeons come circling
To finally settle on the gleaming spires and minarets,
Of tombs forgotten,
Still standing erect and tall
In the feeble sunlight,
The rays
Streaming down in rapid fall
Of golden dust
Scattering around,
That lends a magical touch
To the entire ancient city,
Where the past glorious
Intersect with mundane present,
A city,
Enshrined and etched
Permanently in my
Remembering, aching heart,
On lonely metropolitan nights
Spent caged, on the sixteenth- floor house,
Where you peer down but cannot see
Things crawling below—mere moving dots—
In the blurred lit spaces beneath.
The holy winds from Badaun,
My ancestral land, I feel within my parched soul,
And the scented air
Revives my thickening veins, dull pores and icy Arctic inside
A well-groomed body, i hear the banyan tree, once seen,
in my paternal grandfather’s outer compound, near the temple,
on the Patiala Sarai street, transports me back
to that home and community,
I hear the bells and evening chants
And a refreshed me—
Becomes a child again, in the presence
of the folks, now gone, yet
living!
@Sunil Sharma
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)
Why Poetry in Toxic Times?
Poetry can be discovered in most unlikely places.
For example, sitting in the atrium of a big mall, facing a gushing fountain on a hot humid May-end Mumbai evening, you say to your companion, surrounded by all the twinkling fairy lights and fir potted trees placed strategically on the white marble floor, “How poetic!” The crystalline water jet shooting up in a column against a darkening sky in the middle of a soulless glass-n-concrete and sanitized property can be a great diversion for a tired shopper left poorer by few thousands by that sexy and seductive commercial space: The vertical movement of pure drops of H2O can be a big visual relief in a place that registers the maximum footfalls these days in Mumbai or Madrid, Delhi or Peshawar. Malls are the new temples and churches for the post-modern Odysseus hunting for treasures and exotic fare and the urban tribes in Dubai or Kenya find time there to congregate. In such anonymous but identical architectural complexes— in homogenized and standardized settings, amid fake plants and plastic smiles of the overworked and grossly underpaid young poor staff; outside/inside the dazzling shops and their inviting wares, cruising along the well-preserved floors and regularly sanitized loos, gawking at the bald zero-figure mannequins under ark lamps and hunting for mineral water bottle that costs a fortune for your recession-hit middle-class fake-leather wallet— you get a feeling of derivative power and branded kinship with others in New York or Berlin. After gleefully splurging more than you have ever planned and secretly planning to go ascetic for a whole year in your personal expenditure, you, the tired Ulysses, decide to sit down on an empty bench and then—suddenly discover the solitary fountain singing merrily on the hot and humid evening. For the other adjacent happy chatterers on the Blueberry, it is a fixture, a prop; for you, it is sheer poetry in a pricey impersonal place, a symbol of purity and eternity. Poetry in slow motion. Water that priceless thing triggers a primeval response in a subterranean crevice of your overtaxed brain and connects you immediately with the first spontaneous priests of raw nature that wandered the earth, at the dawn of the civilization. You feel transported to a dim age when your distant ancestors conversed eagerly with early gods and twinkling stars and swaying trees and murmuring rivers, finding everything in the universe living and sacred. They talked with the gods and gods with them under starry nights and on fresh dawns, near crystalline rivers full of marine life. All this harmony was recorded in delightful and sublime verses, in epic poetry by the all-seeing ancient minds. There were few facilities then but poetry was a presiding deity of their immediate life; to-day, there are facilities galore but poetry, that musicality, that harmony, is sadly absent. Or, almost. The poetic spirit has started disappearing in prosaic times. Begun withdrawing from an age that is high on high-tech but low on basic human emotions. Bonds are brittle—you care more for your China vase or crockery or Swarovski glass than your dear siblings or pals.
Poetry is like the Golden Barrel Cacti— critically endangered, rare species in the Mexican wild, yet surviving the tough conditions. It is like Welwitschia mirabilis, another hardy plant of the Namibian Desert of the South West Africa. Poetry is a surviving link with our heroic past, with our mythological memory, with a unique moment when man and god were not yet cruelly split but were real for the other and having a continual dialogue. Like these two plants, it is endangered and becoming exotic. But it is a great survivor that adapts to most arid conditions and challenging habitats and grows in most inhospitable climes and times. It is vital to a polluting age like an oxygen mask. It can detoxify your body filled with an overdose of pills, caffeine and nicotine and other drugs, and raked with a toxic desire for More (Remember Henderson, the Rain King?).
Poetry is like the first rains over a smoggy town: It washes away all the grime and revives the dormant seedlings and revitalizes the corroded cores of your inner- life. It is a strong anti-dote to a frightening spiral of mad chasing of the deadly deadlines on daily basis, mechanically performing all the time in office and home and suffering indifferent colleagues, public venues and neighbourhoods that define social existence of competing individuals, and dreaming dollars and economic migrations inside/outside the country of your origin. Poetry is like the first rays of dawn that greet a terminal patient in a grim facility and spreads cheer in a solitary life on the threshold of cessation or a burnt-out top executive fighting for more money and promotion and his bad hangover.
Finally, poetry is coming face to face with your spiritual truths that refuse to be commodified and reified by a mass culture. It fulfills you and makes you whole, like the tiny church-bells chiming on a wintry desolate evening in the Chekhovian land.
Yes, we are the
Warriors
Of poetry
Who
Uphold the standards
In war zones
And never ever
Make them fall.
@Sunil Sharma
(From: Preface: Mundane, My Muse)
—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)
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