New Post - March

What Ails You, My Silly Heart?

My silly heart, what ails you?
What is the cure for this affliction?

For there is no one else besides you.
Yet, what is this clamour, my God!

I expect fidelity from the one
who knows no fidelity.

Even so, I offer my life to you.
I do not know how else to pray.

My silly heart, what ails you?
Really – what is the cure for this affliction?

(This is my translation of a few couplets of Mirza Ghalib’s famous ghazal, “दिल-ए-नादाँ तुझे हुआ क्या है” as sung by Kavita Seth for the TV series, “A Suitable Boy”.)

New Post - January

Tokyo

Pune, 2020

She shaves her underarms
else a cactus garden.
With a blue pint of Riband
he waters
the plants.
Mops the floor
with an ‘I LOVE YOU’ T-shirt.
Ironing, she notices
her panties have rips.
Notices her skin is pale
under nails,
with fungus,
while he burpees,
squat-jumps
in front of the wall.
Let him fall,
let him fall,
the obstinate boy: she prays.
For his ears are
full of wax.

He takes out the ukulele
in the evening. Just like that.
Strokes and strums.
She sees a bunch
of babies floating
and a branch
of Chrysanthemum
in the sky.
Is it safe
to go
to Tokyo? She asks.
Tokyo? He snorts.
At this time
it’s not safe to go
anywhere.
I know, I know,
I am just curious
about Tokyo,
she says
before yawning.

In the night, in a dream,
a sweet gourd moon.
A dark car whooshes
by, a man in Irezumi-
tattoo screams
and he points a gun at her.
Going some place, sweetheart?
He barks.
I don’t know. She smiles,
Tokyo.
I am going to Tokyo. But,
my face is blistered,
my soul is red beet black.

My heart is trudging
along the indifferent
alley of love.
Where are you going? She asks.
The man laughs,
says,
I am going with you.

A rainbow cat
above the stars –
suddenly a dragon dancing.
An ash-clad girl flaunts
a heart and wants a vicious man
in sobriety.
Tempting
in his
temporariness.
Her body is trembling
against the hint
of a pagoda-full of love.
Where a soft stream has
ceased to be to an ocean,
at the brim,
under a bridge
of bamboo stems.
She is laughing:
Tokyo,
here I come.

(The poem was first published in Anthropocene Poetry Magazine: https://www.anthropocenepoetry.org/post/tokyo-by-arun-paria, and then in Outlook: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626. 

Anthropocene has nominated the poem for the Pushcart Prize 2023.) 

The Boy Who Rode a C-17

Kabul, 2021

I am flying, I am falling,
as some go to behesht,
some to dozakh,
I am in limbo, watching
the plane to paradise
flying above.
The engines growling.
Two pale wings
from one sky to another –
its fat belly – a slippery slope –
too wide to embrace –
To tie myself
to it with a turban cloth
failed – made me topple.
Unlike the embrace
a brother gives, a mashooka –
a flying boat is impossible
to hold on to.
With the nervousness of a refugee
and in a tearing hurry,
it’s going up, up
above the mountains,
indifferent to my plight.

Leaving me where I am:
midair,
flying and falling at the same time:
like the autumn’s whirling dust,
an orphan kite
from Friday’s kite war, the flying chaff
of the wheat-thrashing season.
A farishte
cast out of jannat, hurtling back —
As my brothers
are egging me on,
on the tarmac.
They will carry my laash home.
When my insides will be out
of my stomach cavity,
blood will seep out of my body
as latex seeps
out of the stabbed poppy stem.
Even though I will remain
in Kabul,
reposed till qayamat,
they will tell each other
I have escaped the city.

(The poem was first published in Outlook India: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626)

A Gambol in a Paris Tram

Paris, 2018

In Paris, a Chinese woman lost her way. Looking at a French woman in a Paris tram, who sat cross-legged beside her in a white blouse and beige skirt, she laughed.

                                          Thee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee
                                          Thee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee

Just like that. Then she held up before her a Paris map.

It took a while for the French woman to get the joke. The wall between two strangers now suddenly broken — her indifference, too, which a city dweller saves for a tourist, was quietly gone. For she imagined if she resisted the laugh, the joke would be on her.

She said,

                                         Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha
                                         Hick, hick, he, he

Like an unfettered girl who finds levity everywhere. Taking the map from the Chinese woman, placing it on her lap, she smoothed it with an impatient hand and pointed at some place distant. In an extravagant show of mirth, she blew her nose, laughed, and laughed. The Chinese woman, too, with impunity, poked her new friend’s arm.

Thus, without exchanging a word, these two had made such a gambol that the RATP called the day, the Day of Paris’s Babelesque Blur.

(The poem was first published in Outlook India: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626)

Arun al-Rashid

Mannheim, 2017

This clean-shouldered bottle of baby oil,
the smell of jasmine
with the child-proof cap came
for three euros. For another three and a half
a warm döner
from a Turkish döner shop

to halt the grumble of an empty stomach.
The day’s weariness —
The carping of the empty pocket doused
with the cheap charred meat. When the shop girl
of Netto asked my name.

When I was only killing time.
Oh, but I’m only killing time.
Yes, yes, lady, I’m only killing time.
Wait, how much this oil?

Thereon the smell of baby on me.
This year’s winter is dim —
infectious.
Dry meat is boiling
in the kitchen
in an unfragrant
night of plague.
Making me feel unloved,
like an imp, who’s aching
to burn
down
this city
after repeating his name:

Arun al-Rashid, Arun al-Rashid,
you are in a jasmine dream.

(The poem was first published in Outlook India: https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/five-poems-about-people-across-the-world-weekender_story-328626)

Tephra, 2019, 1943

A pebble hits and smashes 
my morning mirror.
Now I am cold as a stone, 
stand so remote,
before the household’s
four-oven fire
peering at the glow, imagining —

what a strange block of coal 
my great-grandmother poked
out from the belly of the earth 
in forty-three’s summer.

Instead of being dour,
she carried the flaming charcoal home
to cook for her boys 
burnt taro roots.

(The poem was first published in the May 2023 issue of Poetry India: https://www.ethosliterary.org/poetry-india/may-2023-issue/poems-by-arun-paria)

Groom, 2000

Soaked rice, onion with green chillies by paddy field. Dal, anchovy fry at noon. Gur in winter, bael in summer, death in every season.

Drenched in the sun, Sahu-bride ran to the sea, to hunt Pola Giri, to drown his fishing trawler: she didn’t return. Her callow groom on a tuberose bed bayed at the moon.

(The poem was first published in the May 2023 issue of Poetry India: https://www.ethosliterary.org/poetry-india/may-2023-issue/poems-by-arun-paria)

Bride, 1970

A new bride has come, the palanquin has left. 
Those who’ve come late — the old viewers: grim.
Brittle-finger mothers measure the skin
of the girl. Her ornaments’ weight. Hair. Teeth.
The onlookers grow. This new girl’s laugh —
Tell me, tell me, ma, will she be tame?

Will she not blind our boy (for how long they themselves
could)? But a new girl shall possess new new tricks!
Carrying paddy from the paddy fields to the paddy pots,
pots to the oven. Oven to the mill.
The animals of the flower-bed night bathe 
the cattle, feed the cattle, smell of cow urine.

Love. Who calls its obtuse name? The clarinet calls.
At the midnight play, Majnun bawls. The girl, too, weeps with him. 
Till her man appears. To bring her — to bed.
Till the birds cackle, the sun appears. The girl wakes up to sweep 
the floor for another ten years. 
Now when the cowshed is clean, her daughter goes there to read.

(The poem was first published in the May 2023 issue of Poetry India: https://www.ethosliterary.org/poetry-india/may-2023-issue/poems-by-arun-paria