shades

Orange is the color of wish fulfilment.
Yellow of laughter.
you must be taught to like the prettiness of Pink.its not easy.
Blue tends to hold on to forgotten loss. in soft tinges that dab the fringes. But purple struts proudly with remembered ones.
Stubbornness is the color of hot magenta. Sequined with faux stones and egos.
Contentment is chocolatey. not dark or milky. not cloyingly sweet. or delectably bitter. Somewhere in the middle where comfort sits.
Comfort is petrichor earthiness. Ochre.
Surprise is sometimes cyan, often lime. On warm evenings, it is amber.
Green is the arrow that pierces boredom. India green.
Boredom would be the sliminess of stagnant water.mossy and fungal.acid green laced with brackish spots of scratchy arsenic.
Security is the maroon pallu of mother's sari in which you hid from prying eyes and over eager but insincere kisses.
Mauve is gratitude sprouting especially in spring.
Humility wraps itself in peach.
Famished egos are the color of power. Nothing says power like black, except in the real world.
Hunger is dust.
Pain reduced over the auburn flames of rage turns burgundy. Dark. Viscous. Sluggish.
Sepia tones inhabit warmth.
Freedom is the color of simmering embers fanned to life.
Hope is now off white. Over use seems to have dulled it. On foggy winter mornings, off white also clings to despair.
Acceptance is the color of your skin and orientation.
Resignation is the color of the neighbourhood aunty's face when i tell her about us. Mixed with crimson consternation.
Control is the color of delusion.
Colorless crystalline dreams glisten in the black canvas of forbidden love. Loneliness.
Dredging out the palette, life
is the dregs of penultimate breaths.
And in one fell swoop, all is the color of silence.

in memoriam

i will forget your luminous eyes.
My own betraying heart
that at the thought of you
used to leave me in tremors.
That love bathed in spring sunshine.
That angry exchange of silences.

eventually.memory will fade.
like the colors have
on the wall we painted
with motifs whose meanings elude me now.
i trust time's pitiful strokes
to make our stories
Self contained anomalies.

And perhaps i will forgive.
And be forgiven.
For the horrors of my imagination.
But for now
let me carve this portrait
in stone
for the sake of a poet
who will soon forget
poetry.

reflections

the eyes are accustomed to darknesses
tinged with the whites of distant phones
and the dab of orange from the street
stealing through that little crevice
between the curtain and the rod that holds it.
There is the occasional blueness of
computer screens of night owl roomies
who will unsuspectingly turn on
the lone light in the room.
The blitzkrieg of lethal sharpness pierces you
As eyebrows frown, lashes quiver, lids roll unto themselves,
through scrunched noses and clenched teeth
you yell for a belated warning.
Once he finds what he is looking for, the light is turned off.
A casual apology accompanies it.
And ghosts of light dance before you
with the clarity of a water color painting
barely retrieved from unexpected rains.
That is what life is like these days.
That was what love was like when it visited
All those years ago.
A flicker. Blinding light.
Then ghosts. Love runneth over.

love note

love is in the air
screamed the crackling voice
on the radio.
what she saw
through the haze of a swooshing wiper
was a veritable swarm of cars
frozen in a directionless chaos
and as the woman crooned
about monsoon’s first love
set to tune by revered geniuses
she drowned out
the screeching hopelessness
of a stranded ambulance
whose designated role now
was a strobe light
color coordinated
with that idea of love we cling to.

promises

to be young again.
to tear through memories
dust them off bookshelves
forget them on jostling metros
knowing there will be more.
youth came with
the promise of plenty.

and then one day
you find yourself
clutching to a torn sari
not entirely sure why
the weight of time
gathered around your waistline.
the dust of bookshelves
accumulated now in the bare crevices
of a mind full of things
with forgotten names.
the itinerary of old days
now rests in incomplete inventories.
and the promise of plenty
comes through
in ways memory cannot comprehend.

overview

But what is there to lament.
So we loved. and they turned out as expected.

We grew mistletoes on sycamores over
graves of loyalty that we had dug

even as we commiserated.

We stole furtive kisses. And castigated infidels.

So we missed the midnight shower
cooped up in an air conditioned room
surfing the net envying holidays others could afford.
We slept in. and chose the reality of books.

 
We laughed. and got mad
And never spoke again to best friends.
We cried. and got mad
And never talked of ourselves again.
We left time to its machinations.
We danced in the solitude of summers
Bathed in our inadequacies.
And sat under invisible winter moons
listening to vinyl records.

We made light of our losses.
and spent days not getting out of bed.
We pretended. We pretended to pretend.
We fell for fallen heroes.
We fell. We made excuses.
We took the high road
and found ourselves in shifty back alleys.
We let fear overcome necessary action
and courageously backed bad decisions.

We nailed hypocrisy.
We choked on our own morality.
We traded old friends for random acquaintances
we met in shady places.
We made our own gods and then desecrated them.
We blamed others.

We travelled with blinders.
We sat eavesdropping on other conversations.
We lied about ourselves. To ourselves.
We bought the dagger and played victims.
We preached what we were too lazy to practice.
We followed rules. We made exceptions.

We did much. We did nothing.
For all that
What is there to lament.

It is what it is.

aging

it was not a meeting of old friends.
by strict standards of temporality.
(they would have met
thrice before,
each a carefully plucked opportunity
from a universal conspiracy of plans.)

conversations flowed,
occasionally lingered,
lilted, and sashayed,
easing around, sometimes jumping over
boulders of silence, experience, ignorance,
much like the mountain streams
they had sat by and relished
long ago.
 
a year ago, trudging across knee deep snow
they had seen
what the scorching sun did to frost,
much the same happened
in that room with a beautiful view
between laughter and their hearts.

by 3 am, they were cracking up
just looking at each other.
they signed off at pre-dawn
with a cup of tea,
 
and when all was finally silence
in the backdrop of the calm breathing
of transient youth,
the view from over the hill
seemed less daunting.