On the 9th, I was driving in a hurry from Jerusalem to Jerico, laden with kisses for you.  A cop waved me down at the Bank junction at Aluva. Unnerved, the car hit something. All your kisses scattered on the road. My hands, legs, face and ***** blushed with gashes. My kisses for you lay around in the middle of the road. The orphan kids from Janaseva were picking them up. They packed them in their sling bags. A beggar woman who was passing by picked up one to smell it. College going kids make fun of my kisses for you. A cop tramples one of them with his boot.  A pock marked tipper truck crushes it under its wheels. A procession agitating for drinking water marches past it. My kisses for you are strewn in the middle of the road and holler for the moistness of your lips. Covered in a sheet woven with wounds, I lie on a hospital bed. Lamenting 'my kisses, my kisses’, you catch a flight and land in Nedumbassery.  You come to see me. In haste, you forget to buy me oranges.

I kept looking at you.
It was raining outside.

I looked at your lips.
Then, all the flowers in the front yard roll in laughter.

I look at your throat.
Then, a white dove takes off from a mango tree.

I look at your ears.
Then, a thrush flies off seeking its mother.

I look at your strands of hair.
Then, the plumeria leaves pick lice from each other.

I look at your eyes.
Then, the well in the court yard gives a missed call to the sea.

I look at your nose.
Then, the glare outside sketches the spring.

I look at your arm pits.
Outside, yellow woods sing a song.

I look at your *******.
Outside, bird’s eye chilies stand sharply *****.

I look at your cleavage.
A mother who bore six squats outside and coughs.

I at your navel.
Outside, a thousand bats.

I at your feet.
Then, a sweet gooseberry falls on the yard.


At knees.
At tender thighs...

Always
Always then
Outside, the drum beats of a road show grow in crescendo.

I trace pictures of our kids on your lips.

Then, in the middle of the road, the souls of kids crushed under wheels queue up with oranges to meet us.

When you and I wail without a sound, a slice from it falls on the ground. I make up a simile that tears are the slices of oranges that drop from the hands of those who have not had enough of loving. You give me one more kiss. I stash it away doubting whether you will be near when I die.  Our kisses attack us asking us whether we will abandon them again. We lie on the hospital bed covered in wounds from the kisses. A bunch of angels come with syringes and bitter pills. We run away without paying the bill. Our kisses follow us like a procession of bare bodies with running noses. Unable to bear the sorrow, you hug them right on the highway. I buy a cigarette from the petty shop nearby and, puffing on it, watch you.



Translation : Ra Sha

Kamarul is going to his village
All of us are going home with him

Kamarul is bringing
A bangle for his sister
Rafeeq almost buys up a jewellery  shop

Kamarul takes as saree for his mother
Divakaran is busy searching for a clothes shop

While making tea
While emptying waste-baskets
While feeding new paper into the printer,

Kamarul sings his own song
All of us sing aloud privately

While going down in the lift,
He learns to count
4
3
2
1

All of us leap towards zero

Kamarul  goes home,
Taking our letters

To the plant on earth
To the wind that blows in the evening
To the friend who promised to come

To everyone, for everyone

We wave our hands, wondering
What would be the time on earth

One

O spring,
You have a thousand apparel

Green yellow blue
Red pale blue light green
Greenish yellow

Why do you, who make everyone envious,
Spreading  folds worked with golden thread
Inviting everyone to ‘see see’
Come to visit only me wearing black raiment?

Are you too conserving
Your intensely hued flowers
For my tomb,
Just like everyone else?

Two

Perhaps it is to collect
Enough breath to last two- three years
That, while leaving home,
One sighs like a tornado

But
Every time
When I depart after meeting you
Why do I sigh,
Like a final prayer,
As though I was hoarding enough breath
For a lifetime?

Have we studied together?
Or some function
In the same row

Was it when you got tired standing in the queue

Or else at some bus stop
Or

Not in the telephone book
Maybe in the list of people to be invited
Among  names that are listed hoping
They might come in useful sometime
No, not even that

Were you the same before?

I don’t remember
Uttering your name
For any purpose

You are like people in dreams
The one who fell in the well
The one who was driving
The one who stopped me even before the sea,
Something like that

I think your name exists for me to forget it

To think I am mute is one way
To think  you are deaf is another ..

Intelligent believers of democracy,
Let me inform you with a great surge of emotion that I am a candidate in this election
I beg you, request you, beseech you to make us win with great majority  by casting every vote of yours for our symbol

I don’t have to recount the great services rendered by our logo in houses, by-lanes, churches, temples, offices, hotels-  why, in buses, hospitals, monasteries, cemeteries, and every nook and corner of the land

About its great desire to fill even the stomachs of those little children who sleep along the roadside, with no one to look after them

Our sign cannot ignore the mothers and sisters who work in factories of sighs, with only half their stomachs full. That’s why even after being totally spent, it resurrects itself again and again.

Its social sense which decries that even those bodies  on hospital beds, half-burnt, should get justice.

Wont the dead have unquenched desires
Just like the living?

The greatness of our emblem and its universality which embraces unborn babies, the living and the dead, without any consideration of caste or creed or ***

About its reproducibility, the sense with which it can raise or lower itself as the opportunity demanded, its will power which helps it work with a passion, its power to please, its divine gift to give peace and happiness

What about its readiness to sacrifice even the last drop? It thinks only about giving! Please do not fall into the traps of the other signs which are never satisfied whatever it got, and which are ready to split any moment.

Let me ask  you, have we come first in anything? China is standing like its great wall..let me remind you that  if everyone tried together to raise our symbol to great heights, we can at least come first in population

Please do not let go of the chance to win, listing unpolitical arguments like headache, hunger, hatred etc

Our slogan
Contentment for everyone from children to old people

A land where milk flows

Don’t know who writes  or when
Just like cinema posters get changed according to times,
Misspelt swear words appeared on the wall of the ******.

What was written using moss, coal and laterite was sometimes like this..

“The air is aromatic here. Rajiv + Sindhu
A picture of a heart with an arrow through it
Songs like “Rajan sir and Bhanu teacher are in love, man”

Walls got filled
In vengeance to the beatings and impositions.

Amidst the stench of **** and *****,
Love blossomed between moss

The girl’s ****** stood like a temple

The God of the joyful
And the God of the sorrowful
Met on the dawn
Of those who had gone for a walk

Even though they belonged to the same family,
They didn’t even acknowledge one another

The eyes of the God of the sorrowful
Were in the sky
Birds are making fun of him

Clouds ?
They stood their ground,
Stating, ‘ we are not with you’.

The eyes
Of the  God of the joyful
Were on earth
Plants on earth
Smile at him
Dogs, cats and horses
Were vying with one another to walk with him.
The God of the sorrowful told
The God of the joyful,
“Brother,
Sometime or the other
On earth, or sky,
Or in the toilet of the passenger train,
Or in the corner of the bar of the poor,
Or in some Hatta in Sharja
Or in the kitchen of the labour camp
Or in a room of a house with rent  unpaid
Or in court
Or on some strong tree branch
Or in a pawn shop
Or in the middle of the road where children die from collision with vehicles
Or in some sorcerer’s hut

My people will see you
What will you tell them?

In the storm-like **** of the God of the joyful,
The cosmos started gasping for breath.