Thus we meet sometimes
In deserts and ruins of thought
Where absences are also habit
And reconciliations deliberately incomplete
Are tidied in the day's chore
In daily pilgrimages on suburban trains
And evenings rounded by grocery lists
Over the noises of the walking streets
The angry revvings of gridlocked cars
In the fixed gaze of the television screen
And the whistling of the rice cooker
The tucking in of another bedsheet
Before the terror of sleep and dream
We forget each other without pause
Disallowing memory even in generous moments

Let

Let lips sieve its
meanings. Let it
speak in evasions.
Let words recede
without intent.
Let not think. Let
not know. Let not
touch or touch. Let
not await or accede.
Let no quarter for
sorrow. Let this
level incompletion
be. Let this uneasy
contentment be.

Men and Women who Hear Better than You and Me

There are men and women who hear better than you and me
The notes of their certainties clear as mid-morning light
Who have no need to concede what we can’t in our erosions
Who partake without asking and are joyous in the partaking
There are men and women who happy as they are
Have eyes that see better than you and I ever will
The heart and its colours, they know, were splayed for them
They love without questioning and are completed by their love
There are men and women for whom the world was written
And in the sure embrace of their assurance it continues
We, you and I, mark time in undecided fear
Looking at them who know why they are here

The epicentre today is a little, just a little, to the left of the middle, lengthwise and breadthwise, of the afflicted chest. Ordinarily, it is a faint throb or a muffled ache which is reminding of the static of radios as radios once were, with dials and needles searching for their soul along a purgatory of discord and then the notes breaking through hesitantly and, then euphony. The ache would be endurable, ignorable even, if it did not weigh so much at times. As if all the despair and hope of being was gathered together into a bullet and then shot through into flesh, ribs and heart and lies embedded there in a wait counted in eternities and infinities. Until, once every couple of ages and eons, a faint tap of footsteps is heard, treading forward in inches somewhere near, approaching. Then the static raises its tempo beginning anew a crackle, both terrifying and mesmerising, seeking either freedom or effacement. It would have been such redemption if a note or melody or even a call could be heard in that noise, and some do for a fortunate while, but today, in that epicentre, the ache is so clear that every curve and contour and depth can be felt, seen and sensed—so clearly defined because it is so clearly futile.

Eyes crinkle and blaze up with glee, lips purse and pout with mirth, cheeks suffuse with red joy, eyebrows arch up in mock tease, giggles erupt like tambourine jingles, the room becomes feminine in an instant and I hold onto something solid to not be sucked into that deliciousness suddenly zigzagging from the pores of the air. And yet, nothing of any consequence happened to set this moment off into tangents dashing into each other. But there it is, an ethereality shining like a sun about to flare planets away. An almost fatal alchemy. If I was not on my guard this would be annihilation.

Dark into the night where green trees roll over elephant walks
The moon sails the waters which ripple orange to its rabbit calls
One leaf falls to the wind drifting unhurried into the nightly cold
The woods stretch the shadows deeper to the frightened shore
I hold an eyelash and float to the wide sea of the saddest time
Into the aching deep around the froth of unremembered tides
Dark into the night, unbereft by the despair of all that went
Morning arrives, willed out in strands of scattered gold

in the full moonlight

In the full moonlight there will be shadows
Kissing under the shadow of umbrella trees
Nights will be twinkling, smelling of stars
Mountains will sway like areca nut palms
Roads will whistle to the tired tap of toes
Sparrows will colour the sky with songs
Rainbows will bounce from leaf to bough
Cotton clouds will dance with cotton feet
Rivers will blush over oblong cobblestones
Coursing with gaiety like the giggle of love

Now that the minutes are beyond counting

Now that the minutes are beyond counting
The tears undone, not a requiem chasing
The white of the shroud beginning fraying
The grooves of the epitaph furiously filling
Reducing lives, meanings to unread scrawl
Now in that solace of lonely unbecoming
Unchained free from the grief of forgetting
Now in that oblivion and at last knowing
What began empty, was empty, is empty
now. That is one truth and that is all

We have become painless time
Journeying down the seasons
Warmed by summer’s yellow
Enveloped by easy night
Riffled by languid winds
Touched by the sprinkle of rain
Our winters come together
On this one winter day

We are beginnings fated to middles
Our stories written in riddles
We are painless time
We were born with evenings
To disappear with twilight’s last
We are silent, we are still
And clocks in anguish run past

to know unknow. to unsay say. to unlook look.
to giggle. chuckle. dote. and play.
to untouch touch. to unfeel feel.
to puzzle. scoff. dismiss. and abruptly know.
and flail. bewail. pine. and yearn.
to enclose. to stay. to run. to go. far. away.
and succeed. prevail. extinguish. and fail.

God’s Own Feminists

God’s Own Feminists | OPEN Magazine. An article I wrote on, of all things, ants

A piece I wrote for the current issue of OPEN (www.openthemagazine.com). Bizzaro bizzaro...



Not Just Another Rape Story
Madhavankutty Pillai

Late last month, one Saturday night, Rajeshwary Khanna, while on her daily walk, saw a man rape a dog in public and screamed with shock. Onlookers gathered and beat up the rapist, a taxi driver from Bihar. It was a well-deserved thrashing. Half of Mumbai wants stray dogs killed, but they would surely baulk at rape. The mob then took the rapist to the police station, and when you get the State in on something, the story has to develop many new turns.

The police were reluctant to file a complaint but that was soon overcome by the intractability of the complainant, Khanna. They then deliberated over what to charge the rapist under (our rape laws are enlightened but not that enlightened). That was when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, fresh from a browbeating because it persecuted gay sex, suddenly made a fresh argument for its existence—it says having sex with an animal is illegal. The rapist was so charged and later sent to a government hospital to be inspected for animal hair in his nails and telltale marks on his private parts.

Since the police were in, the newspapers followed. One afternoon tabloid, Mid-Day, broke the story, and the next day, went on a mission to get justice for the dog-victim. Another newspaper, Hindustan Times, did a follow-up piece. Among others, these reports quoted rape case prosecutors, rape case defenders, a spokesperson for the gay community, an environment and animal law expert and animal rights activists. Some of the headlines that ensued were:

‘Medical exam will be clincher in dog rape’; ‘Haan, maine kiya’; ‘Historic trial for dog rapist’; ‘My friend’s been framed’; ‘Bitch traumatised’.

Some of the news reports went like this:

– “There is no need to take the bitch to court, but, if required, we will do that too.”

– “The man is so insensitive. He is a threat to society.”

– “The dog has been listless since the incident took place.”

– “There is no bleeding and we have not found any semen in the dog’s private parts. But we have sent samples for tests.”

If all this sounds slightly surreal, then it is. Women’s rights activists say that once upon a time if there was a rape case, the courtroom would overflow with every two-bit unemployed lawyer being present for the pleasure of looking at the victim. Laws have changed and victims have a semblance of dignity and protection now. But someone always finds a way to sell the word ‘rape’ to the basest voyeuristic instinct in us in the name of news and justice. If not human beings, even dogs would do.

This is how it must be: that I wake up midmorning and instantly sense that outside the closed windows the sky is bent with purple clouds and the air a lazy grey. I open the windows and instead of the branches of the mango tree edged with clumps of little golden leaves which sway to the lazy wind and rises crooked from the gentle rise of the road two storeys below, there is the flat of a meadow, like an endless green lawn. I step out and see at the far beyond a rippling stream which in this green landscape, is like a blue line curving around the edges. Except that there is no edge.
The sky is purple with monsoon clouds and since it is morning, a white sun is there behind smudging the ends of the rainsky. Except that there are no ends.
I, alone in a vastness of pure earth, waiting for the sky to pour itself down in arrows and drink me into itself. Except that there is no sky or I.

My Name Is Hitler

and the third of my articles for my magazine's (OPEN) independence day special. It's on a Tamilian whose name is Hitler.

My Name Is Hitler | OPEN Magazine

Kapil's Kaplish

a piece by me on the English of Kapil Dev. It's supposed to be funny, so laugh even if you dont feel like when you finish reading it

Kapil’s Kaplish | OPEN Magazine

Life after a Life Sentence

wrote this piece for my magazine. had gone to interior Maharashtra to speak to people who had served life imprisonment. i also saw a double rainbow there, a hazy one over a perfect spectrum of seven colours. but that's not there in the piece

Life after a Life Sentence | OPEN Magazine

Within every woman was once a bird aflutter

White feathers poised for possibilities
Liquid eyes wondering at the great beyond
Inciting her to that unknown flight
Over the walls of mind, womb, man and god
To whiten, in the wake of her white feather flight,
The ink of the lines that they wrote for her

Within every woman was once that bird almost free
Inside every man is a cage

How we remember with unusual calm that walk up the brown mountain path

To the singing stream where the blossoms of the rainbow flowers fell
And us below the overhang of the umbrella tree and its jungle green
Cool in the black cold of its afternoon shadow in the yellow sun
That day was warm to the touch and we were dizzy velvet
We had walked through the zigzag of sheeny dragon flies
And seen a white butterfly, the only albino of that queendom
Heard the bees whimper and buzz in the pollen’s ecstasy
Watched a squirrel watch a sparrow jounce twig to twig
We kissed ascetic branches, stern, stout, gnarled and immortal
Like sylphs we talked to the birds and made the crickets call
Below us the canal was forking, it flowed blue, it filled many fields
We were like flightless clouds, astray in the languid wind
You then said: We must remember this, this walk up the brown mountain path.
And then the day fell mute, the sun blinked, twilight shimmered
We couldn't allow the night, we let ourselves go and trundled down
We rolled through the rough brown mountain road and its jutting rocks
Over the cobbles in the river’s gravelly bank and the weeds of the grey marsh
Until there was a gate, a door cut four ways, a key, a latch, a lock and a lamp
We are home, finally we are home, look we are home, I said.
But we would never be home again.

Note to self

Since I landed the new job, I have been meeting interesting people. I have met an ex-pickpocket who told me that in their trade the thumbnails are grown slightly long for that extra grip; a gang of boy-thieves who rob travelers trying to grab a wink or two in the grounds off CST Terminus and who all unanimously lied to me that they were planning to go straight; a man who had been written off for dead by his relatives to grab his land in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh and who then struggled his way back to life and then started an association of dead people; a girl who has a genetic disorder which is trying to kill her but who is refusing to give up no matter what despite a brain surgery and a liver transplant; a man who had been abused for a decade as a child but now uses that trauma to do acts of kindness expecting nothing in return; a tribal woman from Gujarat who saw a pamphlet and then took a train to Bihar where 100 people were walking 100 kilometres in the state’s interior and in which I was one of them…you get the drift. What concerns me is my inability to empathise with any of them, of being a party to that human condition which they are all experiencing in the full. All I feel is curiosity and that is enough for the journalist, but for the writer, curiosity will take him nowhere near the truths that he must reproduce in the worlds that he should create. I find myself near such truths and completely unable to comprehend it, much alone reproduce it, much alone create worlds with it. Note to self: send imagination for servicing.

As is said, has been said and always will be said: every seed sown will sprout and at some point, in that ground where it germinated, there will then be a tree with branches, trunk, roots, fruits and leaves. If you have sown that seed and then watered the soil, that tree will come up. Once the mighty tree is before you, it is pointless to repent that this was not the one you wanted, that you erred in the sowing, that that was ignorance, that that was youth, that that was passion, that that was a delusion of the mind, that that was not you. For you did plant that seed and once you unleashed cause, what could effect do but follow. You will never be forgiven for it. That is truth.

Beware, therefore, of what you sow. You plant a seed every infinitesimal moment. Seed a weed and you will get desolation. Seed a queen-of-the-night and on some distant day, you will sleep amidst calming fragrances. That is the redemption which flows from your present. That is the only redemption given to you.