You come back,
Like a line from
Ars Poetica:
Ut pictura poesis;
A lost fragrance,
Wafted from the
Dilapidated public garden
On the wings of
Summer winds
From Rajasthan,
The seeds of coffee
Being roasted in
The back of the kitchen
Of the New Madras Café in the
Revamped Connaught Place;
A fragment from an
Old conversation:
--My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a
Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself.
We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out
twenty quid?
Athens?
Yes, I would.
---But who will invite an obscure Indian reading Homer and trying to find parallels, in the year2013? They are watching Homer Simpson on TV, the family, while I lean out like an Eliot character on the parapets in half-shirts, while evening uncoils like a lazy cat ---
The trees whispered,
Near the Jhelum,
And we quarreled,
Patched up,
To disperse,
Never to meet again.
But,
These days,
You come back---
Involuntarily,
Like:
The smells returning from
An earlier life,
---I am a mere shadow of the original self, like a crazed van Gogh
Looking from his self-portrait, eyes piercing---
And forgotten
Lines from the
Past,
Now receding,
Those years,
Smells, sights, sounds,
Fleeting fast,
Like the evening long-distance train,
Thundering down the lines,
Amid the flooded rice fields,
In the grey rains,
Whipping us by,
Like an invisible giant-hand. |
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