From the Insider’s Den
My home is a tag---
In the shingle of a half-naked hut; coarse hays, rotten betel nuts and an orange stain
Weave buri aai’s hadhu in a ceramic vase.
Tejimola crying at the periphery, unseen, unheard is a mere cliché now.
I am a clandestine Tejimola of Assam.
My ritualistic conversion into one twists and turns,
Every year, the nails in the coffin of a flattened history.
In cycles, I cry in the montages of my village, along with you,
Attuned to the salsa of the red oleanders, I sob.
Armed with delusions about my dwarfish identity…
I stopped trimming my “bonsai” roots. Near these stunted branches--
I lose my sacred threads, one after the other.
Familiar landscapes, a cinematograph and a mind: all gone now.
You know, at Kamakhya, near the saffron-coloured yogis,
A scrolled-up archive of a schizophrenic mother
Scatters some dreams---here and there.
Some vague non-proliferating dreams, dry and dead.
Mad dreams. Labyrinthine dreams. Her dreams.
I, instead, plant some gram saplings in the wet garden bed.
My home exists nowhere…Not even in the prisms of fiction!
Geometric shapes create an artificial map of my land;
There it is! A fake replica, empty of anything.
I stand still, motionless. Where is the bog of death? I am rootless again.
A leaflet of protest lays placid with my tainted gam kharus.
Reduced to a dusty bundle of unfinished articles, I slash deadlines.
Linguistic errors of a cartographer are thrown to the wind.
Language, they say, is an academician’s eccentricity---
Elusive and dark, I cannot make myself understand.
Stranded in a pool of alternative meanings
I lose my language of a single closure.
My home is a nomenclature---
Of implicit threat… of an orchestrated ending.
Sinister, grim germs penetrate the bed of green moss…
On the slippery walls of Shillong cottages, I spin and fall.
In the orchards cross-germination is underway. Beware.
In ghettoes, wolves of night captured in the sieve of moonlit nights
Dancing agape with frothy mouth and dark contours,
Beat drums in a frenzy.
They gyrate. They pound. They break records.
An asterisk looms large on their forehead; a publicity stunt goes haywire.
Between valleys, dews on ferns, hyacinths draw maps on a woman’s body…
Inner folds encrypt, hide, explode…
Look. I am tired of media reports. Who is “she”?
Can a typewriter, hot bath, and a mug of coffee
testify Joymoti’s transgression?
In my land, the bluish green feather of the peacock
Traces the line of shadowy hills;
Up the grey sky burn two spots of sun...Nay, not two, three, five,
Perhaps six.
A mythic river boasts of a pit of bones, all fragile.
Luit is just a word in popular songs. Forget about it.
Osteoporosis and fragments of yellow nails, without effort,
Can change and mutate the genes of my reverend Luit.
Luit, like a fluid tradition, changes its shadows in autumn.
Believe me. My Goddess of autumn is beyond repair!
In my land, people say, she creates a pattern of glass voices…
Repetitions of half-truths
Recitations of rebirths
hold a collage of violence. About you and me!
