By Ashwani Kumar

Pandemic Day Dreaming  

Wolves roar in the factory
Workers cough in the bed
Women scrub ankle dirt in the bathing tub
I have never told anyone,
when my blood turns black,
smelling like overripe watermelons.
There are times,
when stone elephants guarding highway catch viral fever
and travelling migrants are plundered by pot-bellied goats.
There is no evidence
unused library books are good manure or
patients in isolation wards love protein biscuits.
I have never told anyone
survival rates are higher in pandemic or
there are more risks in eating brown rice
smelling of quinine tablets. 

A Book of Rains

These days,
I long to write a book of rains.
Rains are like mural wounds,
from which happiness flows
speaking to us in the same tongue
but in various languages of seasons.

Humming in myriad sounds of wild geese in clear sky
Morning rains are seeds of life  
pouring over women in parched lands
who scramble to collect forgotten love song in pots and pitchers.

Afternoon rains are
old poems on a blank page; turning docile, stammering
at the knife point of murderers before they crawl back into
sun-roofed mud houses for untimely siesta.

Evening rains come in dancing figures—
stark naked peacocks with sapphire anklets shiver
in the fox’s startled eye corner—
The secret illusion
of another sky bursting out on the distant indigo hills.

Night rains are like embroidered
Brows of courtesans with rounded breasts;
spurting incessantly into deep-throated cones
slaying  fears of liaison with veiled joys from moon light till dew light. 

A mynah on my morning prayer mat sings;
I am raining, I am writing …

Sunflowers at the Village School

In the village school,
we never carried bagful of books.
Only our bamboo reed pencil like a hoe or spud,
digging up nocturnal potatoes in the school compound.

Our headmaster Munirka Choubey—
a middle-aged part-time volunteer of
Hindustan Socialist Republican Army—
repeatedly closing and opening his eyes,

Occasionally coughing, dictated
History lessons. After saying everything
about the origins of Indus civilization, his eyebrows
would turn into ill-fated pages of Tolstoy’s novels.

In the spare time between classes,
He cut his half-grown nails; right, left,
and counted them innumerable times
on the study table.

Whenever he went out to relieve himself
behind the berry shrubs,
we smoked seeds of sunflowers,
secretly hidden into the buttonholes of underwear

and laughed about Ibn Battuta’s tattered shoes.
In the mathematics class
strange birds, beasts, and Beethoven walked into the class,
kissed our lips and breathed folk songs into our lungs.

During the unseasonal school hours,
we loitered around the abandoned shrines,
chewing new languages
of limestones and liquid tobacco.

As soon as the sun dipped,
and the day’s dust stopped
accumulating in the paan shop’s mirror,
we returned home with flocks of sheep and water-buffaloes. 

Road Trip to Ajmer

We met him in the Rajasthan roadways bus.
He was a handsome God. Made in
brass, and wearing a red-petticoat.
An old amulet was tied to his rugged waist.
Some cheap medals also pinned to his chest.
For hours, he talked about rains,
snows and crops in the desert town.

Amidst all this, he offered us morsels of ragi-bread, and
fermented sap of the wild date tree.
It was in the middle of the hot weather.
We did not travel very fast.
After crossing several violent dust storms,
and police barriers,
we reached Ajmer at sundown.

With a tap on the side of his hook-nose,
he instructed the driver to stop
and staggered out of the bus.
Before we could bid good bye to him,
in a flash he disappeared
into the open gates of the Dargah,
leaving us stunned!

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, writer, policy researcher and professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai). His major anthologies include My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter and Banaras and the Other. Recently his select poems titled Architecture of Alphabets have been translated in Hungarian for a special volume. He is one of the chief editors of Global Civil Society at London School of Economics and the co-founder of the ‘Indian Novels Collective’ which aims to promote the translation of Indian language novels. He writes a regular book column for the Financial Express.

Banner image by Alec Favale. Downloaded from Unsplash.com