‘between the spider’

(a tribute to MF Hussain)


in the neighbourhood
of your breath
i have traveled close and far

our lips have moved
dunes, shifting

a bird across the sun
became my hand fluttering
painting a thin shadow over
your lips

under that shadow
your words were horses
naked, riding your breath
till their legs became a blur

we exhaled a spider
its web froze into
a star

in the neighbourhood of
your breath i have traveled
close and far.

‘mud’

she asked if she could plant
herself on me
she had dreamt of mangoes
the night before and asked
me to google what
that meant

the fruit of my labour
came organically

sexual,
said google

her hair hung like a hundred roots
searching my skin for a trace
of an aquifer

wet,
she’d said
in a chat message
when i’d asked her how she’d been

reaching for the sky could take
seventy years
if you are a tree

the rest of us find our clouds
underneath our eyelids
as we shudder
into fistfuls of mud.

‘forest fire’

in the centre
of his world he
stood burning.

“in the jungle,” she said,
“only the rhinoceros runs towards
a fire to stamp it out.”

and she lowered
her horn
to charge him.

‘breach’

you touch my skin
a riot breaks out inside of me
shutters drop
sirens wail
my eyes call a curfew
still, you climb my fence
get shot on sight.

‘fabricated’

embroidered sea, laced
with surf, drapes a memory
in salt white chiffon.

‘shubh yatra’

the train gallops away on metal hooves
eighteen hundred kilometres from
her destination measured
like a tailor’s tape across
the chest of a nation

as the large pale X branded on her rump
sinks into the distant darkness
the cajole of an azaan slides
into the space left vacant by
a tired engine horn climbing

they call her the Gyaneshwari
not for the sporadic emerald gleam that
brings a spring to her step in the dark fields
nor for the seductive way she stretches
over plateau beds between hills
or the winking glimmer of jewels down
both her groaning sides
not even for her voluptuous smoky raven
hair pouring out
behind her as
she becomes a speeding charioteer
and her dark locks – wisps in the night air

they call her the Gyaneshwari
because she wears a bindi
that glows
like a second sun

and because she leaves her lover Lokmanya
every evening with a loud moan dying
sliding down the graceful gullet
of the azaan
making neat rows of intensely hunched backs
suddenly
straighten,
part their hands over their faces –
private curtains sliding open –
revealing a thousand devout faces
to a spartan truth.

Excerpted with permission from Bewilderness, Devashish Makhija, Poetrywala.