This poem

like all poems about loss is about
dislodging the pink bullet from your heart.

It’s parting anyone, anything, like when you part
Siamese twins in a horrific, beautiful sexual act,
deeply engaged, entangled, like the time
I gave you my neck to wrangle, mangle,
like when you forgot to untangle, that is a lot like loss, you
know, loss makes me want to be with your ex,
and with her ex, and his, and hers, and hers, and his
and six hundred others and hold a candle light vigil,
I want to protest at Town Hall and see a police shootout
see this great big rally teeter on two degrees of separation
and ends in a bloodbath of sweaty groins and hot wax,
skin on skin and sin in bits rolling town stony steps,
so the news of loss plays on a sputtering film reel, mapping
the city’s veins, its minarets and wires and old
buildings and pigeons, in cities big and small
dilapidating at the rate of heartbeat, dhak dhak,
at the back of autos, dhak dhak behind trucks
sound okay please horn please, hum ek humare do, it has
had me ponder the back of vehicles.
and made me guzzle ghazals
and sitcom after sitcom,
no time for lightness,
all the time for lightness.
I hear an ektara.

Loss is a bit like this poem.

Just like the hours

what was it like to wake up, again
and again and again
no vein loving bone
no blood spurting fountain - just
waking waking again, again.

one white Saturday morning
after another, born in bare bathtubs
eating brittle toast from the time we were five
always Sigur Ros playing always them saying
you love death - maybe we did
so we walked into a lake
and called it a life.

Playing Monopoly

The building soars seventeen floors
the freewheeling free-will-loving Pashtun
and the fair-trade-loving Indian born
America-gone-commie play Monopoly -
a game that spells doom for both
(ideologically speaking.)
my lazy eye watches through swirling smoke,
as the dirty ceiling melts in a haze of
rain sweat and pigeons.

The Pashtun tells me I cannot play
- only people who have soul can – so we fan
out into Chennai’s red chutney sun blazing
over church and beach and promising alley
and count our footsteps in search of soul.

I have cried for Palestine – the commie
says in a measured mumble.
- that is soul. We stop.
The Pashtun has watched Russians rip the
heart out of every hanging star
what is your pain compared to ours ?

Love has me broke, I whisper, I'm ashamed
A sham is love, love is your fault, they say.
Where is your soul, anyway?

So I cry for Palestine even though
my geopolitics is blurred beyond doubt,
I avoid any mention of Russia by day
even if I'm Pushkin's princess by night
and every time I am broke with love
bent on ruining, with no cause to cry for
I play Monopoly.

A Ghazal In Autos

(A Ghazal I wrote five, maybe six months ago. A bunch of problems with metre, etc.)

A Ghazal In Autos

A good part of our waking-lives has sighed in autos.

Cities have been and gone, fleeting guides in autos.

Yellow and black - a magical machine, in which tales were spun
cigarettes smoked, shoulders dusted, make-up applied in autos.

A room of my own, a room for two, perhaps. A warehouse of desire,

And a temple at the time of the day I feel like your bride in autos.

The flat of your palm felt gentle on my stomach. And so steady, I grew

giddy with your smile. One second, then the next I lived and died in autos.

Can you recall how it felt? 9 p.m. - Pavarotti's voice it was I think

resounding, fading. It was for a night like that we should hide in autos.

Summer came. You were gone. I didn't dream it. Not even once.

rain fell sparingly. From that day it was only low-tide in autos.

I think of you often - at traffic signals, over speed-breakers and potholes

and treacherous curves and on each of the fifty roads that I cried in autos.

I am unconvinced of you; I am angry and I have no more to mourn,

Be gloved love, the next time such frail knots are untied in autos.

An orchard short of fruit-trees.

Surjeet Singh Katyal is due to be 90 tomorrow
Don't set foot across Fazilka Darji, says
his granddaughter of twenty-four gazing at her nails.
But the mangoes look fatter and yellower and
happier on that tree he says.
They won't shoot me silly beta, I'm old and
I don't look like trouble.

Don't go there paaji, they will cut you up.
his broad, crinkly son says counting his money,
But the mangoes look fatter and yellower and
happier on that tree he says.
They won't shoot me silly beta, I'm old and
I only want mangoes.

Surjeet, you greedy man, stay this side,
we have better mangoes here, says his
tottering buddy of 94, farting through the charpai.
But the mangoes look fatter and yellower and
happier on that tree he says.
They won't shoot me silly Pummy, I'm old and
I am armed.
(thinking: shut up you senile stinker, I'm younger
than you and better-looking.)

So this grey morning, as he watches the mangoes
ripen to an orgasmic state, and threaten to
burst into little mango stars if not eaten
he tucks his white beard into his collar,
prays, takes his kirpan from the bed,
and takes that epic step over a line
he does not see, a line he has not known.

(A gun shot goes off in the distance, and
Kills a dog whose whimper goes unheard.)

After he plucks half a dozen sparkling
mangoes, juiced up to their exploding stalks,
an earthquake swallows his village whole.
Still eighty-nine and one mango down,
watching Fazilka go down into no specific place,
Surjeet Singh throws a seed into
the disappearing distance and says,
"Grow a tree for yourself down there, you stupid fucks."

To the lady in the burkha at Jenny’s parlour.

It is only hair, only your snipped hair

that has quieted the madness of your

mad tangle, your unbathed stench

fermenting under layers of black

it is only hair love, snipped hair only - that

I watch fall around your grey, slight curves

frantically gravitating into the folds

Of the floor, because gravity works fast.

Only hair that you have

Begun to accept the absence of,

and learnt there is more anatomy

more lust more more heart in ear-lobes

gone waxy covered in

dizzy dry curls and

in your baby side-burns often left

unnoticed. It is all lust, all heart.

Hair like yours, only snipped hair that causes

Your eyes to wildly gleam at the

Thought of a cigarette in your hands,

Maybe a glass of whiskey, in a disco-cab

Racing to the beach.

It is hair, snipped hair in the sea,

That is being carried away to the

amused horizon, the myth

the sea created to escape?

It is hair, just floating hair,

that will swim till late-afternoon

like your salwar-kameez

like your peeling skin and

your burning nail-paint.

What she says to her lover to make him cry:


If you had only tasted our scab-backed love,

drip like hot pus and silver gleaming on Friday nights.

If you had only heard the same whispers pasted on

our peeling walls.

If you had known how fingers became snakes,

Oozing venom at all times, and that venom is a good thing.

If you only had her stealth.

Her singing stealth, tinkling like a breaking anklet as

She left bed, room, small universe.

If you only had her stealth.

In corridors, when she slithered in and out of walls,

And made pretty shadows.

If you could only play stealth like tennis, like the guitar.

If only stealth spelt breathing spelt stealth spelt style spelt love.