Cirque Du Soleil

"A girl in a rainbow sky", puts a description to this painting, the kid.
In her sweet voice she enquires, "Does my hair look a little old, Amma ?"
Little old ? What do you mean by Old ?
"Old in the sense poor", she apprises me.
Her forehead; molded like the sun-
my soleil,
comes to my mind even when she is away
in the other room
Everything runs thin like skimmed milk these days. My inability to read and smuggle words.Time.
Days breathe as slowly as they come
Like memory.
Even love is a debt i learn to pay off these days
To survive. no, to live.
Why doesn't the sun get tired of being the golden orb, ever ?
Even the coruscating iridescent skies the kid drew take a break from their concerts. Don't they ?
i measure a sky's emotion in the billowings of the window curtain in my room but
How can i gather fidelity from all the sun love - the first love i receive every single morning ?
Some allegiance, this !
We don't need love, mused a woman i paid my ears to once.
Why do we need it anyway, what good is it came her rhetorical questions to me.
i see now that they are birthed from pain, an inner churn of grievance and fatigue....
All i meet is dejection these days
Dejections that curdle to resignation
Even a sky seems to be shaking me up in Kochi evenings with god kindled flashes encroaching our spaces
Surround sounds richer than Dolby
containing some heaven sent cipher
And i find myself asking again and again
How many times do i undo the stitches of my patchwork heart ?
How many times do i relearn to receive, to become part of the sun again ?
If everything i knew and felt and memorised were to be effaced from memory
surely the kid's forehead sun bulge-
my soleil,
i will remember. always.

Mohabbat as an address

I scratched my hair in raving fury as
we lay in bed
Side by side
Enough distance between us...
One coiled into a pillow while the other flat on back awaiting in the patience of a dog
Side by side
Breath wise.
Our selves facing the open french windows to an April evening's alluvium winds-
hungry as the rains-
whipping the naive room fan air out of its living daylights.
Snapping from the universe of her mind she gazes my way
and announces tentatively
"I want to cut your hair. It will help you get rid of the lice like you did to mine."
i smell the petrichor in the air and say nothing.
She gets up from bed, advances toward me in careful steps
And just as slowly as she arrives
i growl upon her with a sudden pounce
To this drops her plan and her face and she runs away with pure cry in her voice
A dog barks somewhere. Incessantly.
Portending something ?
She returns a few minutes later with a huge bed cushion- a shield
Like an ambivalent warrior on formidable terrain.
"Why did you do that to me", laments she
A benediction i offer to her spirit, her pluck. To return.
"I wanted to strike fear, no, caution into your heart so you never bother me with that idea again", i reply with a kind maliciousness.
i become the serpent one seeks out to court.

But the beautiful girl falls on my lap, laying her hair black sea tangle
Always and again and says," Why did you cut my hair. Look if you hadn't done that i would have had this much hair."
There is sorrow in her voice as she states this.
Stroking her wild curls gently, i hear the thunder and i remember her.
All this while all the skies could do is dream up cameo lightenings like
madness descending upon us sometimes.
Inevitably.
"God spoke to me yesterday Amma. And I don't know what god told me but I want to cut your hair"
No you cannot, i say one last time with my eyes
This is when she mutates into a storm goddess,
a little goddess,
casting a wrath tossing the cushion, stomping off  in seared steps with a gale close on her heels
from my room to hers.
My ears catch her stirring watercolours in jars- elixiristic potions, under the aegis of the
rain which marries the Kochi earth outside.
i recall that her eyebrows smell of incense sticks because she believes they will help thicken them.
With the tempering of time, she makes an appearance with a spiritual toughness and offers me-
"I am not your friend because you are love", a libation.
Always waiting on my breath
Forever knowing our breaths are interdependent
In other words, Mohabbat....

Into the break of waves

INTO THE BREAK OF WAVES...

In these times, dystopian, it becomes clear to me that
its all about tracing hearts
Like the sigh of the Ha in Mohabbat.
Ha, so singular
So luscious with breath
So contained
encompassing love.
Love, made from the cloth of god
And yet Ha is just another fibre
in the Maha weave of Mohabbat;
Like the Alif.

In these times, unsettling,
Like the earth closing itself in
with a Covid virus and other many ecological synonyms-
(past, now and tomorrow)
it is for us too, to close into ourselves-
To draw oneself out.

i understand you, O' Goddess of waves, only because i begin to understand myself.
i learn the tenderness we need to plant into our soft selves
for ourselves
for others.
Because we are alone
And because we are still together
Entwined
Interlaced
Fluid like the intricate Maha weave of Mohabbat.

In these times, in the vicissitudes of life,
i write epitaphs in gold
on our insidious invasion (by whom i wonder)
And as i do,
i who lived to survive the curse,
await it.
The waves.
No. i do not mean to thrust myself into its searing beauty
the blinding waves of nirvana.
i simply wait, hope, remember
as the wave comes, eventually,
To draw me out
that there is no need to seize me
For i am here.
Waiting, hoping, remembering
like the sorcerical Maha weave of Mohabbat.

In these times, when everything may seem innocuous tomorrow
Our hearts will still remain
Waiting for memory
for love
To exercise it to strength
You see we are pieces of waves
always on the edge of an impending doom
But while we are at it
Take care to remember
that we are birthed in a continuum
where the waves can be us
where the turquoise cerulean becomes us.
Is us.
And like all other matters of the heart
this too is impalpable
yet discernible with that hidden passage from
the eye to the heart
Like the Sun golden Maha weave of Mohabbat.

In these times, now and tomorrow
when all that the waves want
is to meet the earth,
to hug it
for the sea;
Always interceding on behalf of one or the other,
To meet
Again and again,
in Love.
To further harvest Love
like the mystical Maha weave of Mohabbat.

In these times, when all we want is
to extricate ourselves from
becoming the wave
i greet the wave, the Great Pralayam,
Writhing with life to take on me.
Because nothing can anchor one like the waves
Reteaching my heart the ways
of Expansion and contraction
Reteaching me attention, creation and release
Reteaching submission and letting go
Reteaching me on how to oxygenate
Reteaching the sublime threads we all are
a part of the alchemical Maha weave of Mohabbat
Reteaching myself that this all Me.

i've had my Proustian moments in life.
Now to see new ones
in a world that is briefly illusory,
briefly godly
briefly gorgeous                             
briefly malevolent
containing nothing but
invisible love

Undestroyed by time
Because i love more than my own self , me.
And so i am retaught,
even if it were for a moment,
that we are truly mirrors to each other
Always helping one another,
showing one another                                            ways
to remember ourselves.

Toward me come the paving waves
A pure exaltation.
Waves, translucent like life
Coming at me with a sound that shimmers like laughing stars
i listen like a being learning how to Be.

With pleasure, i too shall be that brief wave.

~

Illustration by a dear friend, Kripa Bhatia