Imagined silences

In the dawn quiet, the birds. Barbets and parrots, bulbuls and koels, mynahs and wagtails, their urban dialect hoarse with gathered smog. A pigeon, strutting on the roof of a tall building, swears at a departing aircraft. Things are not what they seem. Fall or flight is not entirely a matter of wing. The abyss always begins where you stand. Only direction is negotiable.

To live in a city of over ten million people, one bird in the formless murmuration, is to normalize erasure. How easily you stop hearing the noise – of people, of traffic, of need, of despair, of failure, of persuasion; stop seeing movement as individual action: not this person walking, not even that one running for a bus, not a car in a rush hour crawl, not a street dog marking corners and gates and curbs as its own, not the woman with two children, on a rickety scooter, doing a school run. Instead, they all merge into one still background: you disconnect from the city and walk between rickshaws and bikes, sidestepping footpath vendors and the sleeping homeless, brushing shoulders with shoulders and awnings and nameless hurry, comfortable with your thoughts, comfortable in your square of earth, ring of sky, wall-less silo, comfortable in your alone.

Here, in the city, poetry is birthed in imagined silences. On grey canvases. In the belch of trucks. In the queues. In the lifts. In the waiting. In the contrary being. In the pulse of a time that is both tomorrow and yesterday – the long monsoon days both relief and rhythm, the scorching summer both mundane and midwife, the muse as temperamental as the moon, the mind as unwilling as morning.

A single brahminy kite draws slow, taunting arcs over the frenzy. Loneliness, you learn, has nothing to do with the crowds. Clouds have nothing to do with ascent. Peace has nothing to do with chaos. The city, like the word, like the birds, like the night, like the solitude of the moving sky, is within you.

This poem is from my second book, Duplicity, published in 2021.

Tears and Ashes

There is no map to a mirage. Not even a
wrong one. This city is both home and

destination, always moving, always daring
me to keep up. I follow its crumb trail of

shifting shadows, nirvana always a block,
an over-bridge, a bus-stop ahead. Do you

know a city by the tongue of its back streets,
by the teeth of its haunted buildings, by the

vowels of its birdsong, by the phlegm in its
composite throat? This city demands sweat

and bones, tears and ashes. The man in the
square, the one talking to the pigeons, tells

me there is no journey and therefore no end.
‘Now’ is a roundabout where roads meet or

diverge, depending on the angle of the mind.
Where will you be when you catch up with it?

Where will the city be? Funny how, he says,
belonging is a game with only one player.

#Poetry