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New Post - August

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New Post - July

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Money Poem – 1

Who lives without money? Even a beggar who lives under a city flyover does not.  His alms are money/money-equivalent.  Otherwise, he starves. 

On the other hand, one Anil Dhirubhai Ambani, once the sixth richest man  in the entire world, pleaded in a London court that he had become bankrupt. Not a single penny in his name.

My God! Where does he live now?  In an iron shade under a flyover? Does he starve?

[arunparia]

Can You Not See She’s Struggling

The bone of my bone, the marrow of my marrow, not the same, of another kind, for her calmness, consolation await.

I know her.  I do not know her.   She is – as I am beyond belief – beside herself; and now, how am I?

Can you not see she’s struggling? Can you not? I am indifferent, turning sour.  Beyond any felicity, repair, dressed in silvery hatred. How stubborn —  we love martyrs.

[arunparia]

Good Woman

Alexei, Alexei dear, good- ness vile. Dear Alexei, why, we’ve a son. Autumn-winter, dear, where’ve they gone? Alexi Alexivich, it’s July again.

As steam hisses, shoot fills up the eyes, as ice thaws in the summer sun, as cities appear and fall behind, I am riding, riding, dear, a wild horse.

The veil, the veil, Alexie, of knowing not what’s good, what’s bad, in whose land? What’s harm, what’s sin, what is love? Who hasn’t loved yet in Moscow-Milan?

It’s a dilemma — or is it not: what a heart wants, and wants it bad? A moribund heart, a housebound heart; I am Scherzo, Alexei, I am Majorca dance.

The opera star — the chase of a rake. Such love a love a’ways wants to be. A flawless love, an ageless love. Boundless, careless till eternity.

Who can have it, dear, and not pay the price? Can we have it,  have it all? Neither you, Alexiei, nor I can. You, a coward, I, for other reasons.

As my hopes faint so do the stars. I am galloping, galloping in a starless night. What is living if not in searing pain? Searing, searing is my flight.

And when this old mare breaks her spine; aimless, loveless, smeared and stained; bring her quietly back in an oak coffin; in a black, whistling James Watt train.

[arunparia]

Can’t Talk of Love 

Miss those days:

The foot soldier of patri-

mony and you prisoner of war 

could have children.

Now we cut each other 

to size. Our children be 

polemic, must fight.

[arunparia]

What Ails You, My Silly Heart?

My silly heart, what ails you? What is the cure for this affliction?

For there is no one else besides you. Yet, what is this clamour, my God!

I expect fidelity from the one who knows no fidelity.

Even so, I offer my life to you. I do not know how else to pray.

My silly heart, what ails you? Really – what is the cure for this affliction?

(This is my translation of a few couplets of Mirza Ghalib’s famous ghazal, “दिल-ए-नादाँ तुझे हुआ क्या है”, as sung by Kavita Seth for the TV series, “A Suitable Boy”.)

[arunparia]

Old TV Shows Rerunning

Lost sweethearts

In daydreams.

Sand in my eyes —

It baffles me for a while —

Mostly I am 

Annoyed with myself.

[arunparia]

Tokyo

Pune, 2020

She shaves her underarms else a cactus garden. With a blue pint of Riband he waters the plants. Mops the floor with an ‘I LOVE YOU’ T-shirt. Ironing, she notices her panties have rips. Notices her skin is pale under nails, with fungus, while he burpees, squat-jumps in front of the wall. Let him fall, let him fall, the obstinate boy: she prays. For his ears are full of wax.

He takes out the ukulele in the evening. Just like that. Strokes and strums. She sees a bunch of babies floating and a branch of Chrysanthemum in the sky. Is it safe to go to Tokyo? She asks. Tokyo? He snorts. At this time it’s not safe to go anywhere. I know, I know, I am just curious about Tokyo, she says before yawning.

In the night, in a dream, a sweet gourd moon. A dark car whooshes by, a man in Irezumi- tattoo screams and he points a gun at her. Going some place, sweetheart? He barks. I don’t know. She smiles, Tokyo. I am going to Tokyo. But, my face is blistered, my soul is red beet black.

My heart is trudging along the indifferent alley of love. Where are you going? She asks. The man laughs, says, I am going with you.

A rainbow cat above the stars – suddenly a dragon dancing. An ash-clad girl flaunts a heart and wants a vicious man in sobriety. Tempting in his temporariness. Her body is trembling against the hint of a pagoda-full of love. Where a soft stream has ceased to be to an ocean, at the brim, under a bridge of bamboo stems. She is laughing: Tokyo, here I come.

(The poem was first published in Anthropocene Poetry Magazine: https://www.anthropocenepoetry.org/post/tokyo-by-arun-paria , and then in Outlook: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626. 

Anthropocene has nominated the poem for the Pushcart Prize 2023.) 

[arunparia]

The Boy Who Rode a C-17

Kabul, 2021

I am flying, I am falling, as some go to behesht, some to dozakh, I am in limbo, watching the plane to paradise flying above. The engines growling. Two pale wings from one sky to another – its fat belly – a slippery slope – too wide to embrace – To tie myself to it with a turban cloth failed – made me topple. Unlike the embrace a brother gives, a mashooka – a flying boat is impossible to hold on to. With the nervousness of a refugee and in a tearing hurry, it’s going up, up above the mountains, indifferent to my plight.

Leaving me where I am: midair, flying and falling at the same time: like the autumn’s whirling dust, an orphan kite from Friday’s kite war, the flying chaff of the wheat-thrashing season. A farishte cast out of jannat, hurtling back — As my brothers are egging me on, on the tarmac. They will carry my laash home. When my insides will be out of my stomach cavity, blood will seep out of my body as latex seeps out of the stabbed poppy stem. Even though I will remain in Kabul, reposed till qayamat, they will tell each other I have escaped the city.

(The poem was first published in Outlook India: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626)

[arunparia]

A Gambol in a Paris Tram

Paris, 2018

In Paris, a Chinese woman lost her way. Looking at a French woman in a Paris tram, who sat cross-legged beside her in a white blouse and beige skirt, she laughed.

                                          Thee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee                                           Thee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee

Just like that. Then she held up before her a Paris map.

It took a while for the French woman to get the joke. The wall between two strangers now suddenly broken — her indifference, too, which a city dweller saves for a tourist, was quietly gone. For she imagined if she resisted the laugh, the joke would be on her.

She said,

                                         Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha                                          Hick, hick, he, he

Like an unfettered girl who finds levity everywhere. Taking the map from the Chinese woman, placing it on her lap, she smoothed it with an impatient hand and pointed at some place distant. In an extravagant show of mirth, she blew her nose, laughed, and laughed. The Chinese woman, too, with impunity, poked her new friend’s arm.

Thus, without exchanging a word, these two had made such a gambol that the RATP called the day, the Day of Paris’s Babelesque Blur.

(The poem was first published in Outlook India: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626)

[arunparia]

Arun al-Rashid

Mannheim, 2017

This clean-shouldered bottle of baby oil, the smell of jasmine with the child-proof cap came for three euros. For another three and a half a warm döner from a Turkish döner shop

to halt the grumble of an empty stomach. The day’s weariness — The carping of the empty pocket doused with the cheap charred meat. When the shop girl of Netto asked my name.

When I was only killing time. Oh, but I’m only killing time. Yes, yes, lady, I’m only killing time. Wait, how much this oil?

Thereon the smell of baby on me. This year’s winter is dim — infectious. Dry meat is boiling in the kitchen in an unfragrant night of plague. Making me feel unloved, like an imp, who’s aching to burn down this city after repeating his name:

Arun al-Rashid, Arun al-Rashid, you are in a jasmine dream.

(The poem was first published in Outlook India: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626)

[arunparia]

Tephra, 2019, 1943

A pebble hits and smashes  my morning mirror. Now I am cold as a stone,  stand so remote, before the household’s four-oven fire peering at the glow, imagining —

what a strange block of coal  my great-grandmother poked out from the belly of the earth  in forty-three’s summer.

Instead of being dour, she carried the flaming charcoal home to cook for her boys  burnt taro roots.

(The poem was first published in the May 2023 issue of Poetry India: https://www.ethosliterary.org/poetry-india/may-2023-issue/poems-by-arun-paria)

[arunparia]

Groom, 2000

Soaked rice, onion with green chillies by paddy field. Dal, anchovy fry at noon. Gur in winter, bael in summer, death in every season.

Drenched in the sun, Sahu-bride ran to the sea, to hunt Pola Giri, to drown his fishing trawler: she didn’t return. Her callow groom on a tuberose bed bayed at the moon.

(The poem was first published in the May 2023 issue of Poetry India: https://www.ethosliterary.org/poetry-india/may-2023-issue/poems-by-arun-paria)

[arunparia]

Bride, 1970

A new bride has come, the palanquin has left.  Those who’ve come late — the old viewers: grim. Brittle-finger mothers measure the skin of the girl. Her ornaments’ weight. Hair. Teeth. The onlookers grow. This new girl’s laugh — Tell me, tell me, ma, will she be tame?

Will she not blind our boy (for how long they themselves could)? But a new girl shall possess new new tricks! Carrying paddy from the paddy fields to the paddy pots, pots to the oven. Oven to the mill. The animals of the flower-bed night bathe  the cattle, feed the cattle, smell of cow urine.

Love. Who calls its obtuse name? The clarinet calls. At the midnight play, Majnun bawls. The girl, too, weeps with him.  Till her man appears. To bring her — to bed. Till the birds cackle, the sun appears. The girl wakes up to sweep  the floor for another ten years.  Now when the cowshed is clean, her daughter goes there to read.

(The poem was first published in the May 2023 issue of Poetry India: https://www.ethosliterary.org/poetry-india/may-2023-issue/poems-by-arun-paria)

[arunparia]

The Cobra Eaters

Hanoi, 2022

When it’s cut from the body with one chop, in Hang Ha Noi restaurant, the king cobra’s severed head yawns. In the death dream, the fangs come out to bite, then hide inside the sleeping jaws. The headless body leaps high from the metal pan, gets tangled with the wiggling tail. Minutes later, it’s skinned, slit with kitchen knife, dripping blood into a plastic cup.

It’s still alive. In a way we’re alive when we recuse the body to sleep, tuck our fangs in in a helpless yawn, poison hid in the nook of the heart. The sleeping torsos jerk at the thud of a chop, thump the ground with a fuming tail: when we cobra eaters crawl in the hollow of the night slowly serpentine between dream and death.

(The poem was first published in Issue 15 of HeartWood Literary Magazine: http://www.heartwoodlitmag.com/the-cobra-eaters , and then in Outlook: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626)

[arunparia]

A Day at the Sea

Sunday mornings were kept aside to visit the beach — that was the family’s weekly picnic. The men wore short shorts looking unfashionable, fat; hopping on the boiling sand barefoot, chappals in hand. The women took time to have their pick from the opaque salwars, to make inconspicuous bathing suits.

Later, they claimed they were late because they were making coffee, filling up two Eagle flasks for the family.

I led the family platoon – an unabashed little corporal – even though I was not a man yet; a mere boy of five. In an Awara hat, a maternal uncle had bought from the Mandir market, after the film was a hit. I stole it under his affectionate gaze, matching it with an un-ironed cotton shirt and pants, and a pair of Bata chappals grandfather bought me before the Puja.

On that day, it was a fierce summer sun. The sand was hot.

Keeping Deven Dutta’s clinic on our left and the Puri Hotel on the right, we marched to arrive at an iron gate leading to a cement path. The path led to the sea. I opened the gate in a hurry and raced down the path toward the sea, ignoring the furious warnings of my grandfather.

Expecting a visual of blue water, and the sound of its incessant roar, and the foamy end of the sea jingling briskly on the beach. A burning sky getting wet in the mercurial water. And the wet sand thickly strewn with seashells patterned in accord with a child’s whim.

Nothing. There was nothing.

I looked back at my grandfather and cried, “Dadu, Dadu, there is no sea!”

Grandfather, panting far behind, could not hear what I had said.

He shouted back, “What?”

A minute later he appeared, towering over me, still panting, still looking at the vast stretch of sand that laid before him, like a desert — mile after mile, without a hint of water or salt, without fish, without a school or the skeletons of whales. He nodded sadly.

“Really! No sea. Should we head back to our quarter then? No chance we could swim today in the sea.”

That night we came back to Bengal travelling by the Puri Express. A night made of dim station lights. A moody engine hissing, gulping coal, pulling six maroon bogeys leisurely across the furious Brahmani.

I have never gone back to Puri.

My grandfather, who retired as the station superintendent, died in Bengal within a year of his retirement. Neither he nor my grandmother, who died in Pune, in 1998. Two maternal uncles, one in Pune, one in Kolkata, are still alive. They are not keeping well. My mother and my two aunts, knotted sullenly to their families and tired with life, have no wish to return to the house of their girlhood.

Who knows who is living there? Who climbs the guava tree that stands in the courtyard? Is that house still erect or has it been pulled down to make a station-facing mall?

In a bid to return to the summers of my childhood, every year I browse the train timetable and look at the map to find the blue of the Bay of Bengal on the map at the rim of the town of Puri. Yet I am not sure if there is still a sea.

(The poem was first published in Madras Courier: https://madrascourier.com/art-and-poetry/a-day-at-the-sea/)