Tedium, his idiom

Her face was sallow, gaunt

Her eyes – pathetic - oozing want,

The shriveled frame slaved in concrete and dust

The unrelenting sun,

Sweat – an odorous miasma

Stickiness and discomfort in its pale

No respite to the brow and the glowing entrails.

Stunted aspirations, frustrated urges,

Tiredness and trepidation

Unsatiated yearning, unslaked thirst,

Of hopes, an obfuscation!

The work is back breaking, gut wrenching, spirit searing

The surrounding are asphyxiating,

tone deafening and soul corroding!

There is so much gaiety across that wall

Happy frolicking children one and all.

Blessings and bounty seem to be their birthright

But just across the wall, remorse, pain, woe betide.

Who has sentenced her to remorseless strife?

Suddenly the heart is moist.

The inner eye wept in shamefaced, inconsolable profusion.

But drudgery, habit, and tedium

Indifference and sloth – his idiom

Features set in inscrutability,

He turned his sight

And marched away with the procession!

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Banality

Give me one experience – dazzling golden

Give me something beyond the jargon.

Something concrete, something tangible

Rejuvenating and entirely plausible.

Spacious interiors!  Scintillating performance!

Climate control, GPS, Reverse Assist, and Bluetooth,

Genuine leather, Auto-Driver, and Bose surround sound

Of cosseting material comforts; a preponderance.

WAP, GPRS, streaming videos, e-mail on demand,

Will the dulcet charms budding in the heart never cease to enthrall?

Tantalizing luring thy sting be, Lucre.

Devouring gluttonous thou mak’st man.

Wheedling, voracious, and utterly capricious.

Of the stainless existence,

Of ethics, integrity, and abstinence,

Dignity and love for labor,

Are swamped by thy insistent clamor

For wanton satisfaction,

Corrupt usurping titillation!

Is there a total transcending

A complete U-turning,

A liberation from the vice of hoarding?

Are we destined to spineless shepherding?

Give me a stringed fiddle,

Let the soul flow

With alternate foot tapping,

With accompanying drone notes,

And heavy accents of “Shuffle.”

Sing with me, clap, jig, and weep a tear

At the gentle ballad reminiscent of the yester year.

Rise my soul,

Above menial mentality

Purge thyself of trivia and banality.

Make way,

Here I come Posterity!!

Persona Non-grata

Across the flickering mirage,

The tempestuous gyrations of the nymphs,

Beyond the azure skyline

And beyond the sandy dunes; the sweltering heat

Lies the wondrous wood

Tinkling streams, humming bees

Green – a byword.

Lush vegetation supports and nourishes life

Birds, insects, pisces – a rife!

At once, soothing and ethereal

An abode of angels

Next overpowering and overwhelming

In its sheer ambience; a realm of a ruthless creator-destroyer.

Soft music wafts over the scent

Of mildew, thrush, and pine.

The lumbering brooding oak

Hymns with the wind’s rhyme.

I floated in this haven

And buffeted my soul with

The sight, sound, and feel.

Time trod noiselessly by

Leaving me on uneven keel.

The lyrical environs and dark foreboding

Led me inexorably to the Temple of Doom

And the priest with a skull garland

Approached me with slow menacing.

I could see blood and gore

Of human soul offered to the monstrosity

And the mutilated bodies at the altar of the deity.

The axe swung heavily over my head

I woke up with a start and sat perspiring

On my bed!

Ostracism

This is the story of Dhamni, a tribal woman living in the Deccan plateau of India’s South somewhere in the decade of the 40’s.  Dhamni was married to a pot-bellied good for nothing, who reveled in gambling the night away. They were a childless couple.

On the pond, the women taunted Dhamni. “Keep your distance Vanzoti (Infertile).  Let not your shadow fall on us.  It made her sick and extremely irritable.  “Who do you think you are calling Vanzoti?” She rushed at them in furious rage, throwing down her own pot of water.  Frothing at the mouth and shrieking with blind rage, she hit out at one of the acrid younger one.  But they were all off and in the distance; she heard their mad raucous laughter.  Angry, hurt, and suddenly drained, Dhamni walked to her hut. Her husband was waiting for dinner.  Immediately thereafter, he was going to the ruins behind the temple, where there were four from the adjoining village coming today.  He was salivating at the thought of turning lucky tonight, so he could drink himself silly this weekend and gorge on succulent goat mutton!

Dhamni entered the hut fuming and enraged.  He was about to ask for lunch, but one look at Dhamni, and he started to put on his shirt and leave the hut.

“Where is the dog for Chris-sake??” Dhamni’s tone rang warning bells in his mind.

“The municipal workers were poisoning all strays today. Quite a few have turned turkey at the corner of the street.”

“Oh is it so?  Why don’t you poison me and finish off once and for all?” “I told you to look for that dog and all you can tell me is some cock-and-bull story?” yelled Dhamni.

She entered the sleeping place in the hut and shut its door with a loud bang.

Her husband made good his escape while there still was time!

Dhamni lay on the rug tears welling up in her eyes.  Why did the village women always behave like this?  Even when sifting grain in the lazy afternoons, the women cringed as she walked along and sat at the edge of the room to help them sift.  A pall of gloom would hang in the air in their otherwise animated conversation.  Dhamni could not take the insults anymore. Today, even the stray dog that she had petted, left her.

“Why me?  Why me?”

Her mother was a Devdasi – one whose life is offered to the temple god and one who lives on the alms offered by devotees in the temple. Her hair was rough, matted and extremely smelly. Custom decried that she not wash her hair. Her features were coarse and she was very dark.  But the whites of her eyes were pure and in the eyes was a fondness, reserved for Dhamni, when Dhamni lay with her head on her lap.  People in distress came to her mother and asked her questions regarding many things. She applied kohl to grains.  Within the blackened grains, her mother saw figures which talked to her of the unknown and unmanifested.

During one of her predictions, Dhamni heard her mother tell a prosperous fat lady with loads of gold on her, “Go to the temple on the No-moon night and bury a large fruit in the soil in front of the temple.  But take care, you must go alone.”  Dhamni heard the woman draw her breath in sharply at the very thought. “Follow it word-to-word and you will obtain your desire. A bonny baby will visit your womb.”

And in the blackness of that lonely and ululating night, Dhamni decided to test what she remembered of her mother’s words.  She decided to take the trial by fire.

Is there a Deja-Vu?

An eternal thrall for the human imagination

What do the stars foretell?

Glory, mediocrity, misery,

Facts or bagatelle?

Juggling with celestial idiosyncrasy

Resorting to piffle and prophecy.

While submitting to profilgacy

Delving in to the circumstances of yore

And beyond the nonce.

Reading in to ordain,

Bracing against the relentless callusing rigor

On the destiny domain.

Man’s eternal desire for reassurance and complacence

Leads him to rake the heap of memories and association

And the causality of events and phenomena becomes his indulgence.

Mired in theory of probability

Talk of coincidence and culpability

Reincarnation and Karmic belief.

What does actually reincarnate?

Can the pot which was mud, is mud, and will be mud

Ever reincarnate?

Can the deluge of emotions and feelings experienced in a lifetime

And the actions based on these strong undercurrents

Be ever attributed to a grand conductor sublime?

Beyond the realm of thought

And the power of the mind’s verisimilitude  machinations.

Is this a shibboleth?

Or Janus-faced duplicity

Masquerading as a modern waywardness?