Category: Uncategorized
-
Poetics / A poem by Manuel Bandeira
I’m sick of cautious lyricism of well behaved lyricism of a civil servant lyricism complete with time card office hours set procedures and expressions of esteem for Mr. Boss, Sir. I am sick of the lyricism that has to stop in midstream to look up the precise meaning of a word. Down with…
-
On Mayakovsky and Raduga Publications, Moscow.
One of the few things I remember reading as a child is Mayakovsky’s poem What is Good and What is Bad in Hindi. I had a beautifully illustrated copy published by Raduga Publications from Moscow, U.S.S.R. There used to be mobile vans all around Jaipur selling books published By Raduga. The prices used to be…
-
Tonight.
This evening, I wore a melancholy dress. And each time the sunlight almost disappeared, I thought of you. I haven’t told you, dear, that I have never had a kiss that I liked. And that each night, before dreaming, my memory plays Schubert’s Valses Sentimentales. And sometimes, not always, I think of the love we…
-
Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day. From Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet
-
I have been visiting cities.
No dog on the road? I had a dream today in the afternoon where I point at all the streets and teach a child this song: “Nothing happens on this street. Or on that. Do you see that road going uphill? Nothing happens there either and bored it comes back down.” And repeat. Trees have…
-
Rain.
I have an exam tomorrow. But, it’s raining. I feel a little cold. Cold, now, will always remind me of London. It was drizzling the night I landed. The person who came to pick me up (a relative) took me on a walking tour of the city right from the airport. We got off the…
-
I remember a handmade planchette board. My parents and my uncle and aunt. I sat there with a notebook and a pen in anticipation of a spirit. And, someone suggested we call Mirza Ghalib. Mirza Ghalib! After some minutes, a spirit arrived. “My name is Ghalib.” I noted it down in my notebook. My…
-
Nirmal Verma: चीड़ों पर चांदनी
Perhaps, it is this — and, I think so, that we travellers never arrive at a place for the first time; we only return to see those sites again which we, at some time, in some strange moment, had discovered in our own rooms. Is it ever possible to not suddenly meet an Ibsen character…
-
.
I met an old Englishwoman in Bristol. She shared a room with me at night. Her eyes looked older than her body. She talked a lot. Too much, actually. She told me how much she hates England even though she grew up in Brighton. “The English are cliquey”. She liked her two hundred year old…
