Painting by Sri Mahadeb

Be Gentle with Yourself

I keep hearing this line from a song:
‘… be gentle with yourself’.

How can I be gentle with myself?

There’s an irrational fellow inside me,
who quarrels with women and children.
Excitable and unreasonable,
always going off half-cocked:
he’s a pressure cooker with a malfunctioning valve.
Always unstable:
he’s a boulder on the edge of a precipice.
One day he will fall to his doom.
His anger with its thunders and lightnings,
its tree-uprooting winds and whipping rains,
is most despicable.
When it blazes, it scorches,
excoriating like a child abuser’s whip,
with a tongue spiked with words
drawn from the cesspit.
And friends fall away from him
like hailstones from the clouds.
His lust has brought me to the brinks of ruin;
his cowardice has dumped me in the pits of despair;
his insomniac angst has wrecked my health.
I despise this pigheaded fool,
this aggressive, impulsive half-human—
small in body, small in mind,
ugly of face, ugly of heart.

It seems there’s another irrational fellow,
hating the irrational fellow inside me.

How can I be gentle with myself?

Shall I say, thank you for your natural charisma,
which has attracted admirers
and lovers throughout your life?
Thank you for being so active and dynamic:
haven’t you climbed the ladder of life
with its snakes and slippery rungs because
you are strong, and at times, contradictorily,
you are brave and fearless?
A consoler and solver of people’s problems,
thank you for being so generous and caring.
Your love extends beyond this mystical woman,
to birds and bees, to stones and trees.
Thank you for this pantheistic heart.
With such a heart,
will we not try to save the earth?
And thank you for your empathy:
it has given us such creative gifts!

All the good people
with their prayer books and their greed,
their gods and their genocidal deeds,
show them what they are,
show them what you think,
then put them where they belong,
in the garbage pit of memory.

Forget all the pettiness and all the petty people:
the men with their prejudicial awards;
the women with their tyrannical syllabi.
Though they seem like this yellow pollen
sticking everywhere, staining everything,
the first spring rains will wash them away;
you will see them no more.

Like the rains, our blessings have their seasons;
your season is imminent!

Dwell on the youths, overheard in eating places:
‘Because of Funeral Nights, I’m a born again Khasi.’

The young are the moment and the morrow.
As they say, ‘You have written a forever book!’
You belong with them.

…

Will I be able to be gentle with myself,
if I comfort my soul
with many such self-soothing caresses?

In abusing and praising ourselves,
we tend to go too far.
I will at least, forgive myself.

Stray Thoughts on Award Night

Girls in red Tripuri dresses
standing with folded namaste
on both sides of the cement path.

They are blood-red roses
he cannot pluck to possess.
They are the madness of instincts,
checked only by the antidote of reason.

Rameshwar is thanking us on the microphone …
Ananya whispers,
‘Tomorrow, they must drop us at the airport.’

Whereas Ananya is eager to depart,
man is reluctant to let go:
his blind faith in heaven can neither
allay his fears nor console his losses.

Anubhav cannot comprehend the words
of a fellow poet. He, too, the poet in question,
cannot appreciate the splendour of spiders
seeking refuge from the heat in his bathroom.

He, who seeks the soul of poetry, also seeks to destroy
creatures who would weave a star for Neruda.

While the crowned poet of the festival
takes his ‘North East Poetry’ trophy home,
his fellow poets seek self-torment in extra-literary reasons.
This, they say, should bring them an early death.

Ananya waxes eloquently on the podium.
The lights go off … he loses his voice.

It seems somebody is holding a switch
over our lives.

Poem Hunting

My mind is a shrew; whatever I do,
however rigorous my labour, it only nags:
you are doing the wrong things;
you are only trying to earn a living.
The matrilineal Khasis have never
remembered a man for building a house.
When you die, they will only exclaim,
‘Oh, that is his wife’s house!’

To humour my pestering mind, one day,
I went to the forest to pluck a poem,
as people do to pluck mushrooms.
I began to look for a likely spot, where, perhaps,
I would find a poem dangling from a tree.

But the forest was scarred
by the soot of innumerable dead fires
and the treacherous fragments
of innumerable broken bottles.
How could I find a poem amidst this nastiness?

Then a tree suddenly spoke to me:
‘Shall we say that picnics in the Khasi Hills
are full of drunken orgies and violent fights?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but bandhs have been called
on national holidays, and there are all communities
of bottles scattered here: black, brown, white, yellow
and even red.’

‘Then shall we say that picnics in the Khasi Hills
are cosmopolitan by nature?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but since entering these depths,
I haven’t felt quite myself. Not Khasi or non-Khasi,
not even human, just another living creature
with the freedom of the boundless forest, as if the earth
is neither meant for possession nor control.’

The tree fell silent. It understood
the terrible contradictions of my soul.

And so we sat on the windswept floor
of that tenebrous pine slope,
thick with rufescent pine needles.
A mountain breeze, freshly showered,
crept up quietly, lapping our faces.

Confession

There are sentiments
an anthill of thoughts
I cannot share with anyone
for sharing means letting myself down.
However, I will tell you this much:
the cohabitation was an unfortunate mistake.
But, you see, there seems to be
a little nobleness
in sticking to your choice
and flaunting your foolishness
as an act of courage.
No question of happiness here!
Oh, how the world loses itself
in drab days, you’ll never understand
you, who never understood my love.
How I strain beyond my strength
whirling away the hours
in this whirlwind of headlines and deadlines
because I cannot backtrack
to change the story, or the woman
because life is not a story
to draft and redraft
you’ll never understand
you, who never understood my love.

But of course, there is a measure of success.
Having so whirled away my sorrow
I watched helplessly
as the writer-statesman, my best friend who died,
became a scoop.