1992

1992

I had loved you baby, in 1992.In 1992,

when in strobe-shaded light I had held

your hand in open-air theaters,

in theaters with maroon, velvet chairs,

watching cinema unfurl like

a bright-parrot’s wings.

In 1992 I had discovered the potency

of chai and chips on

a cold night.

I had loved you baby, in 1992.

when pizza cost a fortune, and

LPs were achieving novel status

telephones were

still taking baby-steps to our homes.

I wrote to you at the back of a leaf,

which I dropped in your postbox,

and smelt you from the mud in

which you had rolled.

I had loved you baby, in 1992

when your grandfather was

whining about liberalisation

and I nuzzled deviously

against you in the same home,

where talk of politics and economics

and hard-nosed right-winged dicks

was becoming full-throated.

I had loved you baby, in 1992

Anil Kapoor’s poster wasn’t kitsch then

Madhuri’s blood-red dress still fashionable

and I sang you love songs using dil, paagal,

sajna and pyaar in different

combinations, I had loved you, yes

with the whimper of an Archies’ kitten,

we would soon find romantic.

I had loved you baby, in 1992

when my battered Konark TV had

aired Hum Log with the loyalty

of a fan and we had burned bright

because we thought we should have

been born into Buniyad’s high-strung

drama. Yes, I had loved you in that

year, specifically.

It is 2008 baby, the millennium has sneezed

But baby, I can only love you in 1992.

Fictions (Draft One)

My fiction hardly compares to yours.

My fiction is pale with envy, with its boring

Far-fetched, sloppily-etched, lightly-sketched

metaphor, awkwardly-sized paper-cups, mostly

empty. My fiction has no friction, is poor diction,

it is empty, cruel, low-yielding fuel.

I crawl across the floor sometimes, to watch you

sleep and gaze at your fiction that finds itself

breathing when you exhale.

In your sculpted, imperfect face I see the tilt of

your arrogance, your eyes blinking beneath the

cover of sleep like the familiar clink of keys.

In your blushing, blood-gushing face is the

frame of war come and gone, the pride of a soldier

the conquest, the aftermath.

When your lip quivers, it is the replay of epic love stories

rolling through the years you have lived.

The twitch of your balls, sagas of harvest

and happy-endings. Your fingers slightly tapping

in the lightness of your long sleep, while I am

served mine in portions.

The rubies in your dilating pupils dancing with

the giddiness of speed-drunk traffic,

that is your fiction, as steady and as mad as your

sleep.

My fiction is as weak, as bleak as the waking hour.

It is plain-slated, ill-fated, iron-gated, with

nothing to build, burn or bury. It is the blurry past, the

very last shape in the geometry book. No one is hooked.

Don’t wonder still,

why I want write about you.