The Laughing Woman

Her laughter was loud.
Like a man’s laughter…
Her mother had always told her
“Women never laugh loudly.”
People used to turn away embarrassed
They pretended she did not exist…
For, her loud guffaw would reverberate in their closed rooms
where good women moved quietly
Weighed by gold ornaments
And absolute obedience…
But…
She only laughed more.
For herself, and for them…

She started laughing
To hide herself.
To pretend a confidence that she did not quite feel
To tell the world she did not care.
In a world where she met other laughing women like her
She felt the suspicion finally…
That she was accepted
With her guffaws and loud entries.

Yet…
She knew deep within.
That, it was not a pure laughter
Her irony was the cloth that she clutched
To cover her naked desperation.
Her guffaws were only there
To hide her sentimental tears…
She had inherited the fine art of convoluted speech
From the dark side of her suicidal family
Where...
A smile meant revenge
A tear, victory!

Home

A music strip
Binds the brother and the sister…
Through an alley of their common language
Of childhood tunes and forgotten memories…
Where, you wandered
Thinking you were alone…
But, discovered each other
Just before you turned
To finally reach home
Together…

Mortality through Text Message

The text message which flickers late at night
Waking me into a dazed world of alphabets.

It was him…
The untold words between us
Flood the short message
Peeping through the tiny window of the cell-phone

His words are all about his lover
Whom I have never met…
The imminent death which waits the corner
For all of us…but, for her, now.

I let the insistence of his message
Rest for the night.
Not wanting to hear the need behind it
Not knowing what to do if I hear it.

Working Women

The Whore and the hijra
They shared a seat
In the early morning bus.
Going back after a night of tired work.

They were both speaking animatedly.
Friends meeting after so long,
Grabbing, savouring that moment of respite
After the labour of the night.

The Hijra wore cheap gold-plated ornaments
They dangled against her glistening, black skin.
The whore looked dishevelled.
She was not more than twenty.

They must both have blotted out from memory
That previous night of desparate gropings
Where time sucked rhythmically
Their youth away.

That night...
Like any other night...
Of sweat, labour, police whistles
And hard-earned coins.

Male Autobiography

The woman in his life
Appeared before him
With her spread out legs
And cavernous black hole
Trying to fill her interminable vacuum
With his sprouting seeds.
Stifling, smothering…like water around him.
He would surface once in while at stag-parties
For that breathe of fresh air
But, like a water animal
Would soon crawl back home.

Once the young ones started coming
He felt strangely relieved and relinquished.
For the first time
He understood the emptiness that she felt till then.

With no one now smothering him
He tries to sleep alone.

Being a Teacher

The everyday hostile mob
Hateful looks, sneering laughter,
Questions which do not demand answers
But are asked only for approval from behind
Displays of pride and arrogance
Where wealth and its words articulates...

Peace, Hard-Earned

The light winter sun
Filtering through an early morning window.
A lover bidding a reluctant farewell
A piece of hard-earned peace!

The Body Remembers

The body has ways of remembering.

While massaging oil into your scalp today,
That careless knock on the head
When you bent down yesterday
Resurfaces again,
Surprising you with the memory of a wound long forgotten.

Wiped out by daily life and nagging chores,
The endless cigerettes of loneliness and pain
That you lit long ago,
Breaks into cancerous nodes inside your tongue today
Surprising you with its ferocity in keeping your past.