Five Poems

Sahibi

I am a fleck of shine, a shard
of fin. My mouth, a parchment

darting slick. They tell me I cannot live
under this viscid film, but I

I do and I dream. I was cipher-wise
centuries ago, before the river turned

and changed her name and I purchased
an anecdote of rain.

Stuff sticks to my gills
murky and unmoving. May I renounce

this for a walk in Najafgarh or glide
over to Wazirabad, copying the smartness

of water striders? There, I will chase space.
Pace, stride, take pride in a tart start. Water is air, is

a street paved with the scales
of a thousand beings, the buildings

suspended between leaning reeds, and a loud voice
that guarantees what? But I return

here to this mother-trap, remember
the songs of fisherfolk, shift

from the river of my birth
to this grieving sewer. I recall

being a fish
or something like it.

Notes on the Bombax Ceiba at MKT

1.

Lie inert like April because here
is the trunk, harsh and lifeless.

2.

Be unapologetic; be fleshy. The Yamuna
is just a darkness away.

3.

The pod yawns and outstreams
strings of cotton.

4.

But there’s no cage. Just Semul
from Samyeling to Kashmere Gate.
And the flower falls from its home with a thump.

5.

The traffic stops and I
with it. Flames drop desperate
like revolution.

6.

Stumbling on NH1, the wedding
horses and baubles compete with red.

7.

It was winter, deciduous and dead, but this is Holi
dust now and blurry flies
sail into your eyes.

8.

It is both silk and cotton. Purposeful and fluid
in its descent and white-dirt flight.

9.

Too much water will grant it leaves. The flowers
must hide in the rain-mush of spines.

10.

Full of its own gravity, it settles
with the stress of love’s slow death.

Omphaloskepsis II

Would life have been different
if I hadn’t plucked out my insides
a decade ago and left them to gather
earth on the roadsides of Civil Lines?

That’s where the house
sparrows come — oh, not always, only once
in a while — to flap in the mud, do a split-
second mating dance, and strut
their conspicuous significance.

There is a tinny, nervous twilight. I snap
a little at the smogful moon
and digest the burden of a fairytale
in this city of equals.

Rhesus macaque

Delhi Ridge

A strange day, long ago: Dilli’s fissures
created an unfurling form. The parakeets
swayed and cackled, pointing feather

fingers as he rose from the tiled grid.
Eyes sentient, tail upraised, brown
like the evening as it spreads

beyond the thorns. He grabs
a crumb in passing
and the swarming noise

of these civil lines fold
the mass of roots and vines.
At first, he looks like fury

unentangled, a battleground
inside the barbed wires. Beyond
this tedious Monday calm, an algorithm

without hunger
without teeth, something thrums
like a splinter of unease beneath the soles

of my feet. “Whose home is this?
Whose home?” Speaking and erasing
he traces a haunch-hewn, pink-arsed vault

across multiple skies leading my conversations
astray. A slight wheeze, a few fleas
and the day grows grey as I pray and repeat.

Please, please.
I then throw a banana
to withdraw my disgrace.

On Interruption Near Punjabi Bagh

I knew who was waiting for me.
A god who disturbs
        the pebbles I have collected:
a pink bit of grit, a smooth
brown stone, another striated
        like my arms. This lost god
is a digression: soft, yet unwieldy.
He marks you like surveillance.
        I have crawled around impassable
red lights near Punjabi Bagh, slithered
under the stink-mountain
       of Bhalswa, endured the metro’s
tremors. I have seen my homes
dreaded and smoke-ridden
through the clamours of a procession
       and organs distended
by rhythms
by dehydration
       by godly slime.
I am the line-crazed devotee, struggling
against fluff
       torn by time closer than foresight.