A ride to countryside

Returned from a trip to madar lake. Badi. Started out comfortably from home relying on google to drop off sure footed. But suddenly the roads got narrower, not enough to fit our car, the turns got impossibly T shaped and we drove with none of the relaxedness and leisure of the start. Stopped twice only to become aware of the fact that is to be traversed on foot, dipped in stream water. Put the car in reverse gear, hoping that the fact cannot be true and somewhere around is a path which ends in to the lake and there we will get to open our sandwiches, as planned. Started asking around for the right road and came to know that the place we should have gone to was choti madar lake. Not the badi one. The choti one has perfect accessibility. Mourned on our lack of proper research and kept on to reach the wrong place. Reached finally. Also got to see a few other faces besides ours. Straightaway got warned that the place is going to be flooded in a few hours. Opened our sandwiches and clicked some photographs simultaneously. Always kept an eye on the exit and soon started walking towards it. Made a video of us walking through a dense canopy of trees, amongst the shrubs, nearing the end of the shortest picnic ever. Started back the car, drove again through the miniature road-art before emerging on the way back home. 

Welcome home!

Battle

I once saw a battlefield 

with none of the artilleries' din.

It was quiet as a sleeping baby

and mercy was not wished for

at the sharp end of the sword.

But the warriors were a multitude,

each stranded with his own battle before him.

No warrior is a match to the affronted power

and all are in search of the slaying weapon.

Some have chosen 

love,

faith,

will,

but what is secretly given to them all

is a brave face.

Sea

O how guilty it feels 

to choose a favorite out of a 

rippling, exuberant sea

and a quiet, pensive one.

But the sea of my mind,

hiding more questions than answers, 

more doubts than impulse

more tunnels than wide fields,

more me than the world,

that sea is a fire on some days

refusing to quell 

and on other days, 

it is a gentle, cool, insouciant breeze.

And I know not who has the power over it

but I(or Time already has?) am vying for control

to douse the fire.

Bird

 Ho bird! how still you sit,

perched on my window sill

while below a carnival progresses.

For once, I would like to take your place,

not to soar high in the blue

but to nestle up away and aloof,

absorbed in my thoughts, 

without any urgency of prudent action.

For in actions, the grand no more exists

and is turned to ruins of a diminished value,

of which the actual hides in thoughts, out of view.

fourth birthday

She was only three, 
the most beautiful of god’s gifts
when she lost the shade of her father
and the tender touch of her mother.
Alone she cried for days,
wanting her mother to listen to her
and to curl her up into her gossamer arms,
her face drooped down more everyday and
everyday, her cries drowned meeker
when she was taken into an orphanage.

Betwixt the arms of lady, she came in,
her gaze walked over different new faces,
the children there poked her cheeks and kissed her fingers while
she just kept staring them in such amazement
that her tiny ogling eyes forgot to cry, for the first time.

* -- *

Tomorrow arrives her fourth birthday
and today a couple is seated before the lady.
A girl they wish to take home,

like the sun stretches its yellow cover
a girl they desire to spill their love over.
So, depart she will today
and my eyes will not meet hers on her fourth birthday.

She would be 9 or 10 years old. Sitting outside her makeshift house, her elbows slept on her arched haggard legs and her head topped her crouched self. She was lost in her own ruminations, held to the deepest of them and I couldn't pursue any of my thoughts that trooped inside my head to read her mind. But I could see clearly that she was devotedly mulling over something intense, something far older than her age and far gloomier than her face and that she was troubled.

A woman falls out of the gate to the house, down to the floor close to where the girl is sitting.

Her mother, she is wounded but crawls in no time over to her daughter to immune her betwixt her bangle clad hands. Scared, she moves to peep inside into her own house, her quivering eyes raiding the place for signs of terror when her drunk husband barged out in her face. Balancing on unmeasured steps and breathing anger, he was instant. He grabbed his daughter, like we suddenly pounch on a paper to prevent it from flying in the air. He lashed her cheeks thrice before shoving her besides the 'chulha' on the cemented saddle to make 'rotis' for him.

Now, her mother was thinking and this time I knew what thoughts spoke to her.

He was sitting on the window seat, leaned mostly. The train had been false to its much applauded flaring speed and was travelling too slowly to attract everyone’s disgust. There was a continued chaos in the train, infants crying out loud, newspapers being folded and being read and ringtones that varied on a wide spectrum, from the typical Samsung one to US band songs to ditties that praised the god. Around him, the people were all hidden behind books, one enslaved amid Amitav Ghosh’s creations while one was devouring the end of a thick novel, the name of which he could not see. He was thinking of his future, trying to steal that one thumb rule of life that would ensure him a successful and victorious future although he was wise enough to know that life was never meant to be walked on one thumb rule. He had the Ernest Hemingway’s ‘old man and the sea’ in his bag and thought to pull it out to keep in harmony with the vicinity but those iterating fears of a pale future kept clinging his head and he kept striving for that one thumb rule.
That was when the writer instinct in him slackened out and he drifted into the portal of reveries. The fears which he was coercing himself to abandon had all fallen apart and before he knew, he was framing stories one after the other. Stories came up to him like someone turning the pages of a notebook in his mind and he was just reading them up. He would think of a couple, their love unconditional like a free flowing river, rejuvenating like hazel but their puerile judgments on each other are a barricade in their trust to marry or he would envisage the story of a vendor who had lost his daughter at a railway junction. He knows that many of the tales are naive and embryonic but he dreams and believes that one day he would stitch them all together to weave a story of the world for the world.