Bikaner
I can’t write about Bikaner
without feeling the sand
climbing my fingers
Can’t utter its name
without tasting
the panna made in Amma’s flour kitchen
Can’t forget the scent of ripe musk melons
water walking on terracotta feet towards me
camphor in the rajais
Can’t see it without
pagan pigeons fluttering in at dawn
skies cracking like a parchment flicked open
Bikaner, a birthmark
on the body of my life
If I am marble, it is the visible vein
Women, their heads guillotined
in pallus and dupattas,
their fingers on my pulse
zero-watt evenings
the heart scraped to belong
belonging is also lonely
No, you’ll never take Bikaner out of me.
Its already knee-deep
in my love letters
2. Anand
Where I kept to myself
but belonged to everyone
where the verdant rolling hills of the campus
placed birds on my shoulders, squirrels at my feet
where dried up trees looked like rivers
& dry eucalyptus leaves, spoke more dead than alive
where I played mother to my mother
where I discovered that daughters were bridges between generations
where I made a bonfire of old letters & gifts
now that I was getting married
where I needed the stars to count my inadequacies
and fingertips to count my strengths
where a house grew on me like a wound
where leaving it behind felt like a final breath
where a town swung into me
where it stayed and stayed.
3. Indore
as many stones as flowers.
I made a man of you
you cotton boy, now tough jute
a grain sprouting the first two shoots
trees can look after themselves
how we ached for our tears to mingle
how we cried away from each other
‘mother’ is six alphabets of rawness
flinching on a salt clothesline
distance arrives with a whole lot of goodness
but the tyres burn every inch of the way
the four o’ clock tea
a sip of the poignancy of solitude
rain
sparkles wherever it falls
diamonds mined from thick grey clouds
a duet of sun and water
loss and gain in turns
the way a city dealt its hand
the way I clutched the dice
the way I waited for years to pass