A few women I know

1.
That day she cooked
The most delicious dish in the whole world
Which no one was permitted to eat



2.
The three urchins
Jumped into the dustbin
To hunt for bandicoots
Which they captured
With a rusty iron rod
Dipped in a flame

They prolonged their game
As long as they could
Until she got hungry
Picked up the bandicoot
And ran
All the way, home



3.
The six year old
Picked up the
Cyan and magenta crayons
And painted her version of the planet
Ugly, unaesthetic, irrelevant

But with no political boundaries




4.
What goes down
Will come up one day
She said
Inside her burkha
When we met in Luxor

After 30 years
Her prophecy
Is coming true



5.
The lady
Who launched a thousand face-lifts
Walked through a broken
Security system
Stared into the CCTV camera
Finger-printed her toe
After they had frisked her bag and body

One hour later
She hob-nobbed with power brokers of the joint committee
On the 17th floor
Discussed the resource crunch
With the fat-cat minister
Who used to mastermind kidnappings
In his days of youth

She
Walked out of the Secretariat
Carrying the Minister's fortunes
To Berne

Unsurprisingly
No one her frisked her
On the way out

Everyone merely stared
At the sashaying hips of
The Maharani of Money



6.
When
The child
Sang a nursery rhyme
The great classical singer
Was wonderstruck

As to how someone could manage to get every note
So horribly wrong
And yet be musical



7.
Every morning
You're not there

All that remains is
A crumpled bed-sheet, three half-read books
(Including Banna Bhai's letters which he penned in Central Jail),
Your asthalin pump, nasal drops, pain killers
A weathered saree you use as a pillow

My memory of the night
Is a blur

All I remember is
You slept
And I counted every single breath

Ten shorts from Tamil Nadu (May 2009)

# 1

Everyday
He read a big fat pedantic tome
Full of phantasmagorical words
That tickled his palate no end
But unknown to him

Daily
She used to swot house flies
With the same book
While he had his afternoon siestas under the oak tree




# 2


He saw a herd of donkeys
Crossing the street, purposefully

In a rare moment
Of honest incandescence
He forgot who he was

And started to bray



# 3

Very confusedly
He paid obeisance at the memorial
Of the martyred leader
On his 17th death anniversary

He muttered a silent prayer
For the lengthy life of the martyred leader's assassin
Who may or may not be alive
Or dead
According to the people of the land

Who no longer distinguished good from evil




# 4

Her seven daughters
Had nimble fingers
With which they collated splints
Transformed them into matchsticks
With a sulphur dip
Faster
Faster
Than anyone in the district

Not that anyone
Knew
Not that anyone
Cared



# 5

Not knowing
Where he was born
He uprooted trees
With his bare hands
In order to reassure
His inner self
That all things have a root
Of some sort



# 6

For 58 years
He plastered movie posters
Of all shapes and pedigree
On the city walls

Genres appeared and outgrew their purpose
Movie stars ebbed into wilderness
Golden Jubilees celebrated

He knew it all
Until one day his vision faltered
Due to c-grade adhesives

His grandson double-seated him on a bicycle
En route to the optician
That's when he asked his grandfather if he had ever seen a movie in his living life



# 7

One by one
He fed wrinkled pages to the fire
To ward of the winter chill
In his index finger
That had once pencilled words
One by one
On those pages

For hundred and one years




# 8

The elephant is no no more
In fact seventeen elephants are no more

The elephants had survived
The Aryans, Buddha, Moghuls, East India Company
All the Gandhis

Until it raided a semi-solid shed
That stocked chewing gum
Which the hungry elephants swallowed ...



# 9

He tells me
Mosquitoes invaded our township, saar
Causing allergy, malaria, malaise

He hasn't slept from full moon to full moon
So he dozes in the office
His children scratch their skin, incessantly
Instead of solving algebra and calculus papers

But my wife is happy, saar
Our relatives will not visit us
You see, mosquitoes have invaded our township


# 10

The river has changed it course
Tanks, wells, spring channels are dry

All that remains is sand
Which is being stolen

By the people of the land who have three choices ...
- To Steal
- To Migrate
- To Search
For water, 500 metres below the ground ...

Four shorts of sorts

1.
Every morning
He gargled his mouth

He saw
A stranger in the mirror
A face that was not his own

So
He peeled off the mask
To reveal someone else

Yet again


2.
I swear, it's true

The hot springs in this cave
Beside being geo-thermal and therapeutic
Tastes like sugarcane juice



3.
This village
Was a special one
Since all the inhabitants carried a bright coloured cane basket
On their backs

In which they carried
A piece of the blue sky


4.
My niece was elated
The first time she saw the Himalayas
From an ashram
That served Maggi noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner

Next morning
She was heart-broken
Look, the Himayalas have vanished

I was tempted to tell a tale

Instead
I explained how it was due to fog formation
The difference between temperature and dew point

And
It had nothing to do with skipping her homework
On transitive, intransitive and incomplete verbs

2010: Three final shorts

1.
A kite he built
The prettiest in the world
Simply refused to fly



2.
A snail
Stood in front of me
She started talking about army tanks and a cruel chief minister
That crushed her family

I kept wondering
How the snail had learnt
To speak in an extinct dialect of Gujarati


3.
When
He tasted the cup of tea
I made out of coffee beans
He hired me for the job

Life need not be vexed

Life need not be vexed
If you are a dog
Who goes to a tall wall
And pees on it
When Daisy barks
From the other side

Akka

The day
She visited
The Stasi Prison - Bautzen II
The largest political prison in East Germany

It reminded her of home

The All Knowing Empress

The Empress
Who was all-knowing
Appointed a blind visionary
Who
Along with his fleet of blind students
Drafted
A national policy
That the people blindly followed