Steps

Soul Food

What comforts your soul, when it is weary with life and cannot go on, what brings you back to the centre when you feel drained of your vital energy, are words written by some strange wise person living in some place and time.

Like a young person perusing loveletters, one reads words of comfort from an unknown hand from an unknown land as if they were written just for your eyes. You feel sustained by their wisdom and they make sense like pieces in a jigsaw coming together. It feels like an unreal experience where the hand of Providence set them right before your eyes to nourish your strength and you feel grateful that you didn't give up this time either. 

The Unsent Letters

The Unsent Letters

SOS

I didn't run for shelter before the storm
But kept wandering with a sinking heart;
Meanwhile you slipped out of my fingers
Nor did I get back to the real destination.

After roaming around for years, here it is,
The same crossroads and the bittersweet,
Memories of a good life lost in the long run
While a hand that offered solace is now gone.

Now the roads stretch too wide and far
Nightmarish bleak turnstiles without you
You never knew the mirage of temptation
Or how the signs I followed have led me astray.

Finally, I find courage to write these words
For the winds to carry, before I drown again.

Glass-eye

The mind has lost its sharpness, it has become glass-eyed and sits wondering as to what has happened to it. It has lost its powers of conjuring up words after words and images after images.

This world looks desolate without what it has always loved, kept hidden like a treasure from the rest of the world. It weeps over the loss of cognition and wonders how it will survive in the years to come.

However, what hurts the most is its loss of live though most probably it would have been just a mirage and not reality.

Glass-eyed

This heart was a lone warrior, who fought against the injustices of life. Then you came along with the love-light in your eyes and changed this life upside down. You taught me how to look at myself through your eyes and how to love what I saw. It is in your love that I learnt how to be a woman and draw attention to myself. But before my heart was filled with this joy of togetherness, you went away leaving me behind.

Days, months and years when I thought I might have been dead, without you, without my own self that has forgotten how to speak and read. The books pile up before me, my own personal copies from the libraries, here, this and that yet I cannot read a line or understood a thing, a sort of glass-eyedness has taken possession of me. I feel that I need to get away, move out, create a new life but feel sad because I am no longer able to read the print before me, glass-eyed I sadly sit and stare out of the window, thinking of botched goodbyes and unpleasant endings to love stories. 

 But the memory of love that we shared then reaches out to me and I am glad that it was the best thing that happened to me in life.

The Unsent Letters

The Unsent Letters

Happy Raksha Bandhan

Some are brothers in spirit, some real. Anyways, always celebrating sibling ❤

Sanctity

For there no church bells, no crowds. There was no me looking splendid in a white gown or me crying thinking about leaving home. Only you and me, and a few who mattered, your parents who did everything to make our dream come true and of course, the God of silence, in whose presence we promised eternal companionship. 

No priest uttered the holy words, nor did the laity sing hymns of praise, only I closed my eyes with a smile as you tied the holy knot and bowed down, before you and God. I do not know what prayer my soul heaved, but there was much more in that silence than in the most profound of all prayers.

There were no teasing crowds afterwards, to tease us about our first day of togetherness, to bring blushes to you and me, only your ten pet budgies who watched quietly at the newcomer me glowing in their owner’s complete attention. 

Now many days have passed and we have learnt more about each other through words, touch and fights and the budgies have learnt how to speak in my presence. But it’s the God of silence, who reigns supreme with us as we felt on this Sunday when we stood quietly before his holy altar and prayed for abundant blessings throughout life. 

Blue Moon

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Happy Onam

Flowers

Don't hurry. Don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.

Hridayam Thottathu

Earworm

For the one who never stops playing in my head;
Though time has brought so many changes around,
Though the seasons have changed all on a sudden-
You have stayed with me like a persistent song.

Once we were two wanderers in the strange lands;
Taking turns at the dreamer and the wanderer,
With fragile selves, outwardly rash and quiet,
With our naughty smiles that came from silences.

Now, the years have gone so by and your memory
Plays in my being like a soulful monsoon melody;
To cure one earworm, it sure needs another one,
You are no ordinary love-song,but one for life.

You are my all perfect earworm ever possible
That goes on playing from morning till midnight.

Dreams

The Unsent Letters

Chingam

When the much-awaited spring is around
You and I enjoy our days of togetherness, 
The scent of sweet jasmines on our bed
Your fingers undoing my long braided hair.

My six yards of kasavu sari all crumbled
Around your two yards of kasavu mundu
The sweetness of these long waiting years
That finds its way into your limbs and mine. 

We rest together after a sumptous onam feast
Amid smells of childhood and boatsongs
That you sing in your sweet mellow voice. 
To the snake-boats across the River Green. 

When the spring is finally around for us both
We reign an ancient king and his demure queen.