On Making Love

If it pleases Your Highness
Please have a seat!
We were about to start but
Thought should wait thee
We have read the law books
And have memorized the lines
For foreplay we recited them
To each other twice
Yet being mere citizenry
We are bound to err
Love, (Pardon me!
I said it out loud)
Advises our counsel
Is still running loose
Shall we budge up a little
Are we blocking thy gaze?
Oh,yes..We plead guilty
If  ever to passion we deviate

Have I ever told you ? ;
That, when I shake off the sleep from my eyes,
I wish you would hold me and lull me back to dreams.
That, I thought to tell you how the rain fell on my face
As I left the shade of a sole tree on the slope.
That, how it is that I want you to know
I curl up in my bed just as you do.
That ecstasy is a bicycle ride
with the night in your hair and stars in your eyes.
That we were on a path that briefly met
And I abandoned it for a hike up the hills.

She cannot anchor where her heart belongs
Her love catches the wind like sails
Can never steer clear off the storm
She rips open on jagged rock edges
And among the sea weeds she is entangled
White crystals of salt settle on her scalp
As the ocean breeze tousles
Her gray and black curls..

The Tezpur Pin-Up: Kaziranga

“It will be just like Kerala”, is what quite a few of my friends told me before I started for Assam. During the next few days, peering out of the train window, riding on Jeetender’s auto and strolling around the university campus and the roads of Tezpur town with Anju, I would be reminded of this statement time and again. The vegetation was the same shade of deep green, complete with the same wayside bushes with their little yellow and violet blooms. Leaning on to the bamboo fences of their village homes, middle aged women chatted with each others, One end of the top piece of their off- white attire  tucked around the waist and the other thrown over their right shoulders in a similarly careless manner. The bulky brown sacks piled inside the roadside shops of Tezpur, emanated the known ration shop smell. It was a familiarity that was at once exhilarating and slightly disturbing. For what the sights evoked was not simple recognition, but a faint nostalgia mixed with images from disparate sepia frames of old Malayalam movies.

The Tezpur Pin- up

There once lived a young woman in possession of varied powers and an immense strength of character by the name Chitralekha. Her powers were paralleled only by her commitment for her friend Usha, daughter of the daitya king Bana. And as stories go Usha fell hopelessly in love with Aniruddha, grandson of Lord Krishna, who appeared to her in a dream. Chitralekha then undertook the long and arduous journey to the yadava kingdom, abducted Aniruddha and carried him in her arms all the way back to her friend. Then there was the inevitable war where the titans- Lord Siva, in aid of his devotee Bana and Lord Krishna, the Vishnu incarnate- clashed. Myth is that blood soaked into the battlefield and coloured its soil red and the town came to be known as Tezpur (City of Blood).