An Irony

The night it descends, softly

like the curtain of dew on a world stifled

by the claustrophobia of dust and heat.

The retreat has been sounded

and the footsteps march in perfect symphony

to that eternal call of sleep.

And somewhere deep inside that chasm

where civilizations have blossomed and been forgotten

lies a more ancient music

that softens the ceaseless pounding of time.

For only in sleep can the city-man reconcile

himself to his meaningless day.

Here he walks in a strange murky land

of brown shadows with no past and no future.

But the city-man, he proudly forgets,

that sleep was not to be the gift of man.

It began with the flow of time and despite its

music and its rhyme, it will stop

whenever it can.

And like phantoms from histories lost and misplaced,

they will look around at the world in awe and despair.

Desiccated to bare bones, they will call upon

their supermarket gods for repair.

And then they shall be reminded that

before the foundations of their iron cities were forged

and before their tall towering towers were put up.

There abounded lands and winds

more ancient and serene.

And they shall be reminded that

even within the vacant neon dreams of their deep city

there live other men –

a lesser race

who do not need sleep to comfort their return to oblivion.

00:06 AM

8^th February, 2010

We have been discovered.

A feral, slow and persistent music
hangs obstinately in the air.
It won't talk to you,
it won't stop to smile.
It is obsessed and it doesn't care.
A strange smell is up and about,
a dangerous symmetry is lurking in the clouds.
What insane animals must be out in the streets
for it is darkness today
and in the dark darkness, darker eyes shall meet.
A sinister smile pursed on their lips
and their footsteps fall hard on the tarmac
like the menacing march of death.
A heavy shadow is suffocating the air
like the moist dampness of a crazy choking mist.
Behold, the age of the lonely man -
nasty at birth, ignored in tears and bereft of a lover's kiss.

6:59 PM
20th Aug, 09

The Sentinel

The city is a graveyard of images.
Buried they lie under a sky
that is forgotten by the people of the metropolis.
Criss-cross run the wires overhead
like the lines scribbled on the hands of the other by her lover
in an age when innocence still made them smile.
And here lie the old tram tracks
weary and battered and senile.
Here and there wander about like hungry beggars,
lost little roads who have forgotten their paths.
The city has robbed them of their dignity and of their wrath.
They sob now with all the others, solemn and unheard
in the smoky light of the last long lamp-post;
The sentinel of all that has come to be
and of that which is yet to unfold.
It nods gravely and muses, the city is a graveyard of images
and all its stories will forever remain untold.

9:29 PM

15th September, 09

Sadness let me borrow your name

Sadness let me borrow your name,
for the day has been long
and the hours longer,
for the wild urge to freefall into oblivion
has only grown stronger.
Names have come and faded before my eyes,
and my age has grown tired of telling me lies.
I cannot remember why I smiled as a child,
or how it felt to be free and young and wild.
Now I just stand by the mirror
and pretend everything has remained the same.
I am losing my courage a little each day…
So, sadness let me borrow your name.

Sadness let me borrow your name,
for it is truly a gorgeous day today
and I know of no one who I can talk to about it.
The clouds, bovine and benign, stroll about
on a grassy sky about to sprout
a sun of the most amazingly gentle amber haze.
I have become muddled along the way.
There is a long list of people who I would like to blame,
but they seem all gone now,
and it all seems so far away.
Among the dried bones of a parched summer,
an old man cuts a sorry figure waiting for a cleansing rain.
So, in this lonesome sadness,
won’t you let me borrow your name.

There is strange circus running in my head.

There is strange circus running in my head.
I can see the acts, one after the other,
repeated in an endless loop of madness.
Days go by and sometimes appear together,
before night comes to soothe me in her arms.
I am in love with her charms.
I wait to hear her croon,
that belated song of melancholy
by the light of the raging moon.
I wish I had more time to stop by her address.
Exchange words and silence the unsaid
and become alive when all else was dead.
But an air of the most unbearable stillness
is waiting suspended over my bed.
I am lost to the world of words,
I am lost to my family and my friends.
I have squandered a lot in my life.
I have screamed and cried and bled.
The colour of my blood is still a crimson red.
And I wonder if anybody’s ever heard me…
or if anybody’s ever felt the need for it.
Or was I simply abandoned for the dead?

There is a strange circus running in my head.

11:07 PM
26th July, 09

They are rebuilding Kolkata on every street

They are rebuilding Kolkata on every street.
Brick by brick by brick.
The old crumbles, dying and diseased…
They are rebuilding Kolkata on every street.

They are putting up flyovers and malls now.
Marble and glass and steel.
Old lovers with broken arthritis…
the city has forgotten how they feel.

The lake seems tired and morose,
small puddles on smaller streets.
Shadows grow longer everyday
and old rickshaws are obsolete.

A fog of memory and nostalgia descends,
and it is darkness all around.
A solitary tree by an abandoned heap of sand
thinks of all that is lost and found.
A quaint little tea-shop, lonely and lost,
stands on a forgotten ground.
Only hazy images remain, some snippets of conversation…
a carefree laughter, hair caressed by the breeze.
She is lost in these lanes of time.
Her eyes forgotten, her smile eclipsed.
So, I search for her in the pages of my youth
and I wonder if someday we’ll ever meet.
Then I look around and feel sad,
for they are rebuilding Kolkata on every street.

1:45 PM
21st July, 09

Shadows in the city

It is night. Lit by orange streetlights
standing in a never-ending serpentine queue.
Everything looks askew.
The moon seems pointless and vague.
There are no stars out,
the city has blotted them all out.
The city has erected ugly structures,
of cement and mortar and sand.
Forged in iron and a modern glass,
it has let its history pass.
Now all that remains is forgotten poetry
in the decrepit walls of lost lanes from a lost time.

I search for my youth in these lost walls.
I sit at home pointlessly, for hours at an end.
The television and I, both try to pretend
that we are indeed having a good time.
A nice easy day at home
relaxing after a week of hard labor in a corporate office.
I do have my friends and we drink our whiskey fine.
And we all pretend that there is happiness at the end of the line.


Weeks stretch and weary months go on.
I have been living my piecemeal life without complaints.
But slowly it is all shrinking and coming down to a dot.
A dot, a dot… a dot which the city will blot.
Till nothing else remains except for the time slotted
by the swipe-card on the corporate register.
The only log of the passage of time
as we change our clothes and move through it.

7:26 PM
4th July, 09