New Delhi, 13 September 2008, 6.21 pm

The first newsflash must have been

Beamed about 6.40 pm

As my brother called me up from Kerala

To see all was well with me and mine.

Bombs, he said, had gone off

At Gaffar Market Karol Bagh,

Central Park Connaught Place,

Barakhamba Road, M Block Market GK I.

At first count the figures were

20 injured

Soon it rose to 30-40

Within a few minutes

3 dead

Then

5 dead

7 dead

10 dead

I switched off the TV.

28 and Counting

28 blank picture-masks

In the TV screen

To get a face each…..

A pretty face…

A distraught face…

A ravaged face…

All the rest

Contorted in mortal pain,

Stilled

In a deadly freeze-shot….

Young men, earnest

In grisly irony

Carrying

A pretty body

Limp, lifeless

The shapely legs,

The slender waist and the buxom

Bosom and comely face

TV cameras instinctively zooming in on…..

The Terrorist’s Mind

When he wages a war

He must certainly have

His enemies in his sights.

So, when a two-year-old bundle

Of blood and tender bones shudders lifeless

In a rescuer’s hand

Does the terrorist score off

A name from his list?

Does a face loom up in his mind?

When an 80-year-old patriarch

Lies like a sieve

Bleeding from hundreds of

Pellet wounds,

Which Merciful God

Is the terrorist propitiating?

Saturday, 27 September 2008, Delhi

The mobike snaked its way through

The narrow, crowded gali

And the pillion rider seemed to drop a parcel

Accidentally. The four-year old

Girl-child picked it up and ran after

The slow-moving bike

Piping, “Uncle, uncle

You’ve dropped something,

here it is…” Before she could complete,

smoke came out of the parcel

and the explosion blew her to bits,

her tender brain scattering all around….

This was at 2.30 pm and

The TV visuals repeating

The scene of the disconsolate mother

From whose finger the child

Wrenched herself away

Being forcibly lead towards elders

As she refuses to leave the spot…

This is another Saturday

Fifteen days exactly after 13/9.

My heart is hardened like a criminal’s

i can’t fail to remember it isn’t me out there…

somehow i manage to be not there

i escape nuclear bombs

and rise like a cockroach

the day after the n-holocaust…

i escape earthquakes

and thrive on the debris,

looting what is left…

i escape all accidents, bomb-blasts

all my limbs intact

my heart rubberised.

victory to the great survivor!

I Wanna Go Home

My heart yearns

To go back to my childhood greens.

To the tiny mauve flowers

The succulent eraser-weed stems

The tear-drop grass-roots

Hanging below the tiny gushing cascade

In the rivulet…

The cracker-grass shoots…

The dragon flies…

The hosts of mist rising to the cerulean skies

The giant silk-cotton tree

Glowing at dusk…..

I don’t want to see this cityscape

I don’t belong here…

I don’t want civilization…

Let me run far, far back.,..

Farther and farther,

Till I fall back on earth’s pristine bosom.

These poems appear in the current issue of The Little Magazine(Vol.8, Nos.4&5) pp140-143