The winter has set in early; monsoon a memory now,

the trees are all dusty by the all-day din.

This morning, the taxis ply early, eager to get the office-goers in.

Tea fumes in the mist.

The lady in the bungalow alights from her car

with her child, early from school.

Vegetables still asleep on the pushcart.

An eighties number mingles with the wind.

A van loaded with kerosene cans parks at the gates:

there is a tenement at the basement.

I.  The event wall:

The quarters going coloured:
Red, yellow, limpid azure,
white unalloyed;
at the center, a dark void
lightening, radiating outward -
never breaking the event-horizon.

Reverent circumambulation
by tradition, is done clockwise.

II. Reading the tiles

Is peace in expansion
or contraction?
Incarceration. Staring at the tiles.
Acceptance or rebellion?
Time doesn't tell.

III. Prospect

You are free now:
making a mascot of you,
we have set you free.

While singing paeans
to your greatness yet,
we bemoan how
coolies and ******* are
be-spoiling our home.

Rest in peace!
We'll wait for Christ.

The song of the ney blends
with the dunes:
as ancient paths
follow footsteps out,
into the wilderness of the desert,
seeking a truth greater
than constricted life settled allows;

The percussion of the drum,
missed heartbeats:
stopping at wells
dotting the scape, where,
the earth pours her agony forth
from her sorrowing depths,
the prophet's sons wept for God.

The grieving oases mourn
an unhealed
wound, of long
a heart searching the
sands, for one who gave his life
for the love of his Lord
here and his humble fellow man.

Night, the oldest of mysteries
settles, spreading like hunger.
A pall of mist
shrouding over the world.

Siren sounds and firefighters,
drunken brawls, and
receding beats.

Eyes of wonder asleep,
emerging out of
the network of shadows
growing creeper-like.

Stray nuggets of light
also reach the eyes shut
in meditation.

Furtive shadows of passion,
elsewhere. Muffled joys;
Shades of bottle-grey.

Cricket-song. Ululations
faint.  Raspy owl-calls,
intermittent.

In the deep, secret
rites of initiation.

Somewhere in the far
highlands
the stars and
the broken moon peep in.

Old song on a highway truck.
Little lamps adorning the hills,
courtyards in the distance.

Sliced orange shades,
your visage in evening light;
Bright forehead, dotted red,
Chandelier-ring, square-cut
ruby, on either ear; silken
streaks in hair flowing over
cheeks by the wind;
Ripples in the pond at night:
dimpled smile, broken
as in a dented mirror.
Lost from the front, lost
from behind; doubt rising,
like incense, ladder-like
the rib cage in x-ray vision;
Broken pots, moss-filled,
collecting the last rain,
bits of moon in the puddle
skinny-dipping after.
Totem pole, towering
light house, Zeus-thunder
zipping past the sky, my
Babel ego. Zorro moments.
At the center, a fulmination:
spreading front of a quake
ripping space and time apart.

And when the days grow on the soul
like a shadow at noon,
the night sets in deep, after
the stars retire,
the winds go silent in the valley,
there yet comes a time,
when that throb
of nameless pasts comes alive.

You have everyone,
yet, I know, you have no one:
is this how I love you?

I see you disappear:
the last bird into the swallowing
cloak of the fast-setting night.
After the rains, you disappeared
into the pond, hopping on lotus leaves.

An anger at my lapse,
smoulders on in winter's moist depths;
An anger at yours, hovers over
like the last cloud of the late monsoon.
Yes, when the sky weeps her
agony out,
all the hidden embers glimmer.

Now I open the window and sit longing
for the mellow autumn rains.

Day and night vie for each other
now, but the darker is winning;

The moon mourns in her ruddy veil:
tonight, the garden's wet by tears.

Incredible, the attraction,
of carbon for carbon.
Even more, the attraction
of carbon for gold.

In the wild, they rarely bond.
But in man, inseparable.

Carbon and mammon: be not yoked,
says the jewel diamond of our race.

Who cares? The cross,
an adornment nice.
Mammon in mud? Silicon
too, says the IT guy.

Fullerenes in the sky: on this
Guy Fawkes night, sparks truly fly.

Carbon will **** for gold.
This the oldest maxim of old.