The night is full.
It is simply in its element.
The clouds invade the dark universe,
Curtaining the stars and their moony mother.

Down here the cars don’t **** by much.
The roads are perfected,
Down to bits of fresh-hot tar rocks
And Chinese-lanternesque streetlights.

Houses yawn and drag logs of dreams
Into them. The patrons need it (it’s its excuse)
After a long hard day.
Everything else creaks and blooms. It is dreamy.

This dark hour asks nothing more than creation
Of something. Something eternal that rings us
In this golden circle of mathematics,
Complex and unintelligible.

It is child-like, this algebraic world.
It is simply in its element.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

“What do you do for living?” I asked, examining the bronzed boy.
“I love,” he said, with a smirk and a slight touch on my fingers.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

From all tiled corners they eye me.
They are still, very still with ceramic poses
And values. I round them and gaze

At the jaundiced and sea-coloured beings.
Their silky clothes and gold ornaments
Shawl them rich, like an afterbath of milk.

These godfolk are a myriad: elephant-headed,
Lotus-chaired and the crescent-haired one that
Stands bluely with a coiled cobra necking him.

They annihilate me with their icy stares.
They almost know the refusal
Of my belief system.

A ring of fire-dews burns in front of me,
I bless myself. a little vermillion eye finds itself
Deathly in between my brows.

The bell is being whipped in fatal threes.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

It whispers to me everyday, wide and deathly.
The heartbeat of it never fades.
The garland grows rounder and vague.

It’s like a warning, only you cannot avoid.
Where it will descend: on the dandruffed hair
Moping the pimpled cheeks? or on the

Origin of the thumps itself, losing the will to beat?
They do not speak, but their act volumes like nothing else.
The black magnolias bloom and bleed

Odours of life. Do not believe their
Scented breath. It is almost beautiful
Like ten minutes of peace.

I’m no longer afraid, my flowery enemy.
The buds sleep while monoecious parents
Mother a silent death.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

The candy-cane stripes mingle freely among the
Saffron-clothed C moon and fourteen-handed star.
They swim navy-like in the blue.

The reds and whites alternate
Till the states are properly represented.
They ask of nothing more, nothing more.

What does it hold? What does it teach us?
The wild history of it roars and thunders
Like a hurricane that never stops.

But it did. How did we overthrow
Something so mighty, so white
As an unstoppable hurricane?

And the purpose of it all? Freedom.
Freedom and independence. Two righteous
Morals so hard to obtain.

At what cost did we attain them?
Bloodshed, shrieks, lies, torment and tears.
It was all worth it, love, all of it.

When Jack finally crawled down the beanstalk,
We never flew higher, braver or breezier
With such dignity and unfaltering spirit.

We have come so far to this place, this place
Where hatred shreds to little warm hearts and people
Are just people no matter how colourful they are.

We’re a rare hybrid of ethics: the sarong-laden man milking the rubber tree
Is no different than the blackened faces down in the tin mines
And the ones that hand-built the train tracks, woody and sturdy.

Seven chants of it that fateful afternoon
And we cried knowing, knowing we have made it.
Toiled sweat never tasted sweeter. Merdeka!

Most of us laughed and rejoiced.
Some were heard wailing and flying off to where
They rightfully belong. We don’t want you here. We never did.

The dove’s free now,
Free of thick metal bars
That caged it for centuries and

It flies now, wings spread into
A feathery horizon, windily flapping back and forth
Into a new world, a new promise called Malaysia.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

The meat stinks of sticky blood.
Ants fear the red flood, they flee;
Abandoning their mountainous
Playground-cones.

The gazelle stares, shooting blanks after blanks
Blindly and stupidly.
Its stained teeth grins and screams
But it is voiceless like the desert itself.

Lazily, a lion paws the earth.
His mane bloom a hairy sun,
Illuminates the scarce ground to bits of gold.
He sniffs, and turns away yawning.

He is used to this plate death serves him.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

My skin goes up in flames
Incinerating the fine fibers

That hold too much history.
Too much pain!

The water rushes down like a modest waterfall
By the rocks, cleansing the shiny soapy edges.

The rocks hold their breath
Until bubbles germinate.

Those dews of contradicting virtues
Flow off my burning skin, gently crossing each other out.

Like warships in full reign,
They torpedo ragingly, missing their marks,

Bombing themselves. The ash suffocates the sea.
The fishes gossip and their ryes burn, burn, burn.

Oh, the agony of a misfire: incineration, gossip, untimely death.
Too much pain!

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

Another four legs and a tail fall prey.
The pink tablets are too believable.

The family does not contemplate.
They only eat and eat and eat: disemboweling.

They run along the white
Tubes, filled with grey straws

That spawns red, yellow and black.
But do not drink from them.

Their ears rise up like antennas
Picking up signals they worry to decipher.

They only run and run and run.
Hear those patters. Hear them chasing death down the stairs.

Their buckteeth carves through the pills,
Lulling them into dehydration. Death craves for thirst.

And when their stench bleeds itself across the room,
It ferments electronics and shuts noses.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

The moon cracks and blooms.
Its grey nowhere to be seen,
It shawls itself with a bleak cloud.

The floating pearl biscuit
Busily dictates orions and dippers.
One travels, and people start wishing.

They are hopeless: the people and their pretentious wishes.

The jackfruit tree bears only death: dead leaves, thorned fruits.

Under the nocturnal skies,
It is the great witch.
Silent and black. It is voiceless.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

while waiting,
a brown ***** stares.
unshawled, it barks.

the seat next to me remains seatless.

the tinted glasses slide without a sound,
painting a portrait of a lonely girl.
heart sunk, eyes preying on sleep.

Sylvia comes tip-toeing, and sits next to me,
spewing verses like a venom-spouting python,
encrusting and refusing to let go.

i see the tinted glasses reflecting back amnesias.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

“How do you want it?” the hairdresser asked.
“Bald.” I quipped.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

remember the chilly night
when we floated across the bright pimpled moon
penetrated the stardust-fog,
and sighed at the sadness happening down below?
remember the rainy day
when we stole morning glory dews
spat out seeds that grew into gallant shelters
and sighed at the sparrow that had no place to go?

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

Is this love then, this red material
Issuing from the steele needle that flies so blindingly?
It will make little dresses and coats,
It will cover a dynasty.
-Sylvia Plath, “An Appearance”*


Is this love
The crashing waves of scattered memories
That laughs and giggles along with my schoolgirl silliness
Only to be choked by reality?

Is this love
When every minute smells of you
Even as I try to immobilize my senses
My heart flutters helplessly like a caged butterfly,
That is wingless and beautiful?

Is this love
The aftertaste of bitterness
That lives on the edges of unpleasant dreams
When I couldn’t feel the way I used to feel?

So is this love then
A tapestry of escapism only our feelings can weave?

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

He sits in angle that is just perfect for me.
When I first see him, he rises his head to hear his friend speak.
I think he’s bored. Or engrossed.
It’s hard to tell when his specs don’t reflect back any clues.

It was the way he was in control of the situation.
Calm, disciplined and confident.
It was in the way he ate, it was the way he drank his coffee
And his eyes met mine.

What do you do next
What can you make out of this situation that’s beginning to bloom
How do you contain a beating heart that says
JUST KEEP LOOOOOOOKING…

He bows his head as if searching for the right moment to prey
When I wait and wait and wait and wait
And he looks up
And this time, there’s a slight smile dimpled on his lips.

I’ve got a feeling we both already know what each of us don’t really know for sure yet.

Shalini Nayar
© 2006

Her song swims in waves into the river,
The swift current cradling it by.
Her melody stumbles across the rocks,
The quavers settle offshore till the wave-bubble
Licks them back.

The scattered ashes come to life.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

Death cringes at the doorstep, saying,
“We’ve come to the wrong house.”

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

I remember the red flag symbolizing the sun,
With white and black horses running through
The meadow, their hooves destroying everything in sight.

The mist seeping into our blood,
Tingling us both.
It was the duet of our blossoming romance.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

My head shivers from all the thoughts
Swimming without clear destinations
Clashing their tentacles to produce
An inky, brutal conclusion:

My ex-aunt is pure evil.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

Duryodhana throws a fit in the back,
Making war tactics that Karnan already knows.
Arjun and his charioteers await at the battlefield
While Krishna looks at the horizon, laughing.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

You exist in my fabric of imagination.
My every cell throbs for your presence.
My fingers long for partners to intertwine with.
My mouth opens up till the poison air drinks it dry.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

I am no longer interested in your fallacies.

No matter how hard you debate
Justify
Shout
Demand
Prosecute
Investigate
Conclude
Cry

Y­ou’re just a child.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

The ground stinks where you have slithered.
The saliva gum ooze suffocate the sand pores

Till they bubble up boiling like grand stew.
The shiny scales reflect back its annihilation,

Its menace to the things that it once used to own,
Once used to love.

Once bitten twice shy, they say.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

No matter how much you deny it,
You’re just like your mother.
And so am I.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

The vein bleeds into routes on the flower,
Spreading rivers of nodules and colours,
Fastidiously opening up its body
To receive the ravenous bumblebee.

It is the beginning of a friend ship, a love
Consummated wholly with carnal desire
And mutually symbiotic congress.
The bee drinks up the nectar like its last supper.

This connection doesn’t demand anything.
They give and receive, void of expectations and desire.
The animal and the flower exist in their au naturale state
Long after the romance of spring **** them by.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

Sepia thoughts fade to black in my mind.
The hope I held on to lies withering,
Rendering staccatos of asthmatic breathing
Like the dying lion of Lucern,
Shedding one dew of tear that takes
A million years to wet the universe.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

The right frame of mind doesn’t discern
Right from wrong.
Only truth from lies.

I’ve learned a handful but the true mastery
Lies in unlearning the learned.
And learning again.

I constantly worry myself with
Unnecessary notions because I do not want
History to repeat itself.

You are there, and you will come to me one day.
And I will say to myself,
“There, it wasn’t so bad, after all.”

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

Do you think it affects me? It doesn’t.
Its spindle tail hisses me a warning,
Stay away before you poison her.

If the cave we dwell in forms quietness,
Despondency, ego…who do we have to turn to?
Who would save the last remnants of abiding love?

These are not trivial things or questionable matters.
And yet the ties are inexplicably shred torn apart
By asking Who are you? and What do you want?.

If it goes on this way, I don’t want any part of this.
You can’t touch our souls and destinies. They are forever
Bounded by our fathers’ blood.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

It’s always about the games we play, isn’t it?
Always about who comes out on top,
Who rakes in the most attention.

The eyes have it. They always have, windows to our souls,
How deceptively they can let a friend down,
How egotistically they can take advantage of a loved one.

In the end, how can you determine the winner?
Who keeps track of all the points you’ve raked in?
And most importantly, how can you tell a heart’s broken from the outside?

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

The colours seep in my throat
Coating it crimson. Staining the wells.
I fear it is a sign of things to come.

I want to feel them all, let the mixture
Taint my senses, each giving birth to a
New hope, a new promise. I long for this.

When I look inside myself, it is black and hollow.
How unpalatable. The newborn feelings orbit the pit lanes
Wanting to burst out in a flurry of colourful butterflies.

But, I hold them in. The fizz of anticipation dies out,
Bubble by bubble slowly retarding, as I tell them
“It is not time yet.”

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

It’s funny.
I never knew the kind of power I had until
Other people recognized it first.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

My heart aches a thousand times more
Each time my mind wanders.
It is the voices that rage me.
I hold my chair tight till it tattoos marks on my palm.

Because of you, because of your *****,
Your *******, *******, worshipping the ******* blue ******,
You have made me so jaded.

The naivete that I carried on my sleeve,
The sweet innocence looking forward to wonderful,
The trust I invested in total strangers,
The belief that there was good in every mankind,
All lies. I am now blinded by brutality and deceit.
I lost trust and I lost God. Both never existed.

How manipulative, calculative you were.
Not to mention your sister-*****, who later became your own concubine,
How she'd tricked me, lured me into believing every move.
I nodded, smiled and laughed along with the deceit.
All along a big *** knife was ****** into my back.

Who knew backstabbing was your favourite sport.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

I would flutter around the wind,
Twisting my soul in all its directions,
Falling in and out like I do with love,
Hating, swallowing every single spit.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

Love has made me foolish.
The joke, har har har, and they go.
Carrying you, and you, and you
Has taken a toll on me, my heart.
It is the emotions I miss, the rush of it.

Whenever I think of you, I think of lies.
This was supposed to be our year, you remember?
The art galleries, the plays, the orchestras,
The million meaningless things we said to each other,
We promised each other. Laugh! All lies.

Whenever I think of you, I think of foolishness.
For you’re still a young boy at heart, so naïve.
When you find love, you let it go, and settling for less
Every single time. How stupid of you.
Your smile melts me, but I’m undaunted. I laugh everything off.

Whenever I think of you, I think of bravery.
Bravery that got me through the mess, the rude ordeals,
To finally say it to your face what I really thought of you.
I hated you as a person, every atom of your stinking presence,
So much so it choked me at times. Now I laugh, thinking back.

I would fall into it just to feel the surge of everything alive,
Just because I really missed it pulsing in my veins,
And not because I pride myself on finding my soul mate.
I’m too cynical for that.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

My hands, my knees.
Look at it jolting out of me,
Cavemen clubs with nowhere to go.

The passageway now hurts, pushing out
Whatever that went in.
Liquid, solid, knives,
Lies, lies, lies, grievances.

The forcing, the cough, the blow
Right here, into the middle of my stomach.
The stupid things I do sometimes
Just to feed the pressure.

The oil greases over me,
It’s hard enough to breathe in here.
Hear hear, I speak. It is you I want.
Mr. Grape’s hair I gently stroke away in that trailer,
His lips I gently kiss to an ******.

Right there, in my neck,
Between the pulsating veins,
The urge hissing on my tongue.
That’s where you must belong always.

Mamma, won’t you get off
Your fat back and your fat haunch,
Off that sweaty couch, off that shaky little house
And get me out of this god-forsaken land?

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

Everything is ruined.
The plan, the plans.
Every ******* thing is torn
Shredded. The hand is poison,
The mouth is a gate that never shuts.
The body, the mind,
A mismatched pair. Utterly senseless.

I’m a hypocrite when I do this.
But then again I might just be fickle.
They call it changing minds,
With the hypocrisy riding on it
Like a wave, up to a froth-filled
Bang on the sandy shore.

The smell of salt annihilates.
I do not wish to live for this.

There, I’ve said it. I’ve sent the
Package to you like I told my head
I would not.

Crumble, crumble oh Pliny.
Vesuvius’s wrath spews here again.
Choking us with its mountain of black ash,
Rushing towards us like a news in hurry.
Salvaging our bones among the ruins of Herculaneum.
We, the organic, getting eaten for centuries.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

How can I ever hate you?
Crashing waves, over and over,
Like a group of cymbals clapping each other
Never reaching me.
You blend in with the wave, the sun
Lighting on all that is clear and sweet.

Down there, a heart blooms.
Stinging red and beating,
Roadkill that never quite died.
They’re stomping all over it,
Can’t you see, the damage,
The spill of black oozing from it.

Find a drum beat for me there,
A chord of bass flowing through the music,
The flawless voice singing “Are you in?”
And us, sitting there, in our own spaces,
(The sand with crab-holes, you fill them in one by one)
Bodies in the same proximity, head somewhere else.
Listening, listening.

This is the way it’s supposed to be.
Meant to be. The pitfalls eating us alive.
The morning glory saying hello again.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

The parsimony chokes like a
Heart-shaped balloon tied at your throat.
The guilt, the grief.
If I could meet you just once
I wouldn’t say a word.
I’ll grab what’s mine
And leave you hollow and empty.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

I miss your white glow.
The ethereal being that was you
Before He took you away, so soon.
The crash, the shriek.
Formulas stained with blood
And a crushed future lying there, lifeless.

I hold you crumpled in my palm
Seeing you walking with me,
And surrounding us is just bright white light,
Nothing else guiding our step.
You’re mute, but interested in me. I smile.

The trick in the calculator, the laughter
Afterwards. The letter you showed me proudly,
The kindness that was you, you, you.
No one can replace you,
Not even if you had come back alive.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

I must have a stupid face.
The smiles, the cold hooks
Tugging at my heart like a lunging fish,
Narrowly breathing to keep itself
Alive, only for the moment.
Then gone.

I love this, this resurgence of things
That may come. All true, you believe,
Till they prove you wrong.
The murmurs, do you hear it?
Through the steel, the pages,
Shakespeares I and II.

Cold, but loud. They buzz all around
The years, old and new,
Stillborn and cursed.

Don’t stop, they want you too much now.
I turn and turn, I do not hear anything.
No one comes up to me,
I don’t want to hear anything else.

The cold surfaces, the white acetylene tables.
Burp burp, who goes there?
Who’s arranging all these?
Yours, yours?

I mock you,
I mock your noise,
The silent shudder of you deciding
To leave me.

The hurt, the stinging pain.
The loud crash of it.

This is the sinew of my curse.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

Hear them rush through, the magic splinter of it
Cutting through the stars, clouds,
The roars of the leaves rustling.
It has been too long.
I don’t wait for you anymore.

Round, my love, the ring, the globe,
This whirlwind of things we remember of each other.
Round and perfect, it never ends.

What more do you want –
The bones, or the memories,
Piled up together in that hut,
Husk brown and wild,
Smelling like some wild beast bleeding to death.

The promises, the promises.
How I believed the words.
Exiting off your mouth like gold watches
Gleaming with fake glamour.
Lies, lies, who would thought I had it coming.

Mud-thick, they plop to make a scene.
This one, that one.
They’re all the same.

Your legacy is torn, just as you decided
To do away with me.
Taking her, the sister-*****,
Who held your heart before I began to.
Overshadowing the very being that drew
You away from me.

No remorse, love, no,
That’s not the right way to live.
This cycle, this viciousness,
Proud and naked like the night sky.
All round and fat.
They never end.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

This aloneness has no morals in mind:
Only white emptiness and the black of it
Fall like hexagonal snowflakes with deer-horn edges,
Piling, tumbling till they fuse water. They purify me.

Love never made much sense to me anyway.
The mystic it is made of: the stellar parallax of it
Tempts me, a loveless woman, to its orbits of unknown.
Queuing kisses exit and de-exit from it like civilized people.

The moon is pregnant and partner-rich tonight:

Its stars of many flashes sing and dance
Thundering sky-melody comets,
As the world slowly turns.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

These layers are inconspicuously
woven together with regret and some great loss
that has arched a cave in the sinew of your heart
beating anxiously, to not let the stalagmites stab
as they drip with every memory.

What was it about the electrical storm that mattered the most....
Was it the arrow through the heart?
Was it the bubbling of innate care?
Was it the act of sharing?
Was it the brewing of love?
Was it the sudden slip of all of those things through the cracks of your fingers,
like sand grains returning to where they belonged?

Do you think it's achievable again
This great cardiac wave that runs through your soul
enveloping the other person with nothing but unconditional love
or do they long to belong to the earth
where they never break and love flows like a wild current, stopping for no one?

Shalini Nayar
© 2014

This is a special typhoon of sorts.
It revolves and turns;
A windy conch-shell blowing in a
Random, disorderly manner.

The patrons that travel in them
Are enviable. Unclothed and unashamed,
They are useless to be reminded.
They remain oblivious throughout this

Journey, that demands so little out of them.
They get a whole world of ***** love in return.
Yes, it is love, the sick purity of it
Makes them feverish. It’s like being

In the middle of a tornado of
Hot-coal, with no control of the temperature.
It is quite a traffic in there, with hordes of
Turned-on traffic looming together

With the cheekiness of rotations.
Clockwise, counter-clockwise,
Either way, they look comfortable being
In their own skin.

This twister are more like telephone cords.
Not so black, but with the same
Terrible, manic curls, each concocting
Its own love story. The lovers are wind-bathed

And pampered. The flawlessness that resides
In their hair, faces, bodies! They are so white,
They’re almost perfect. It is so pure, so magical
In there, it is heaven!

If only the wind lasts forever
In this eternal sea of people,
The world would start
To utter more sense.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

It is a Russian dish, they say.
A plate of two diecious moons
Rising on different waters.
They reflected a common bond:
The mushroom sauce that
Goes with anything unmushroomy.

One side was a pile of rice,
Yellow fleshy seedlings, brown
Chunky gravy for headtops.
They mountained over like uneven Alps.
They kissed the air, like good army boys
And rose their spice to dance firely

Within me. They spoke a foreign tongue,
That deciphered itself in my mouth.
The credibility lies somewhere my love, but try
Finding a speck of truth in a death full of lies.
It was painful to hear its story,
The way it winces and rolls over to convince you.

Being genuine is something special, sacred.
It can’t be too hard. Just when my fork
Scooped up a bite, the lambs started hooing.
They were in juicy threes, each with
A bone and a bit of marinated flesh.
They smelled like grazed greenlands.

It is something else with mint sauce
But I hate it. Truthness lies somewhere
In the nervous system of its body,
That is bloodless and tender. They too, attempted
To lull me with an anecdote, fallibly in its juices.
The grain and meat are proud godfood
      with histories tailing like dreams.

Whom should I consume and believe? They
Withered and tempted me like a candystore does
To bored children. It is too agonizing, I’ve become
The middle woman. Two moons, jaundiced and stony
Stared back boney, and sick. The overcrowded trash
Had acquainted two odd friends that night.

Shalini Nayar
(c) 2002

It is time for me to shed tears now,
Those fragile dews that hate to mirror anything;
So afraid it'll come out misjudged.

There is beauty somewhere in this:
My tears and sighs that fall hard, protected by your
Own brand of freebie umbrellas.

Unguarded, you tried to flee from this misery that diluted us.
But haven't you learned, love, that there's no use in running away?
It'll catch up with you like a manic breeze.

I knew long before, that this crossing was laid out
For you and me. Those white flecks don't mean anything;
It is how we cross that matters.

It has become morose now, this road. Too wet and unhealthy
For both of us to roll on. But I see the possibility
That lay ahead, that mild flicker of hope under those shared umbrellas.

That frailty that subdues our world,
It's only a vicious mind-game the weather plays.
Look how the clouds blacken and groan, the acid drops coming to reign.

Shalini Nayar
(c) 2002