The Fallen And The Felled

 An Elegy

My beloved Kadam tree whose final farewell took place two days ago - seen here a few months before Amphan felled her

The thud of axe on dead wood 

An eerie ring when it chances upon a still-living cell -

sap-filled and hope-filled till the axe deals the final blow,

and it shatters, spurting sap-blood.

Trees don't die all at once,

           they rebirth themselves many times

before you write them off as mere wood.

All around me dull, empty thuds,

Killer-axe striking the dead, till they are robbed of all dignity.

And still there are new green sprouts on them,

crying Life!

*

*

Cut to the ring of metal against a brave living tree,

that stands breathing love at us as we betray it.

Now that is a different sound!

The tree pours forth its blessings – even as it cries.

The tree can't run…

 

The executioner's axe and that of the undertaker,

the same weapon, the same hands,

different strokes ..

Weren't undertakers meant to give dignity to the deceased?

Wonder where these fallen trunks and limbs are destined to go?

To light the pyres of the non-covid fallen,

For the covid-felled need hi-tech to save their

souls - and our bodies?

Or will they light the hearth fires of those who scrounge for

leftover scraps from vegetable carts

and warm them on the street over heaps of twigs

and trash?

The ones that fall through the cracks in every

system - another kind of fallen ...

*

*

Will that fallen neem be the chosen of the Lord,

and come to life again as images of Jagannath, 

who rides his chariot in splendor, come July?

Will our stalwarts' hearts ring out once more under the caress of a dhaak-maker's hands,

or those of a wood carver who would bring their grace to life?

Albeit one frozen moment of that life with stories enfolded in its curves ...

Will that breath of life dance in eddies
through the nuances of a Mrindangam, 

fine-honed to echo  the cries and whispers my senses were tuned to pick up in their last birth?

*

The grain looks me in the eye,
 leaving a farewell message for me as they haul the log away.

As I stop to caress a limb of my beloved fallen, I see history writ between those bleeding lines.

History that I will, maybe understand,

when I too am among the fallen.

                       

-        Chakra Incognita

I am reading it here

 

PS - see the gap in image #2 where the green tree was bumped off while I was writing this. And the fallen kadam(#3,4,5) turning from gold to russet to brown, detaching itself slowly from this life and location

Uprooted on the road

Post and poem edited on 4/2/2021 as we let our tears nurture the soil for new life

Lockabout Chronicles - "Fear Is The Lock"

No this post is not about fear. It is about  creative ways to unlock and move past this deadlock (literally) to a more meaningful life.

"Fear is the lock and laughter the key to your heart" - the lines from one of my favorite songs came to mind today as I sat down to journal. Yesterday they opened liquor stores and the hordes descended on them, masked, unmasked and shoving one another around. And as you guessed it, liquor is a mood elevator. People lose their inhibitions. People dare to smile.

Maybe that's what the booze binge was about? Designed to disarm before coming down with a new clamp?
Clearly EVERYONE had a smile this morning. The smiles were so broad they were pushing and prodding the edges of masks to burst out. It's only a matter of time before the masks fall off but watch it - fetters may be clamped in their place! Meanwhile one can hope for the best while preparing for yet more nasty surprises. Henceforward my posts will be about co-creating that "best" with like minded people. 

I for one, decided not to surrender my power to words pitched at me by others. I will not own them or let them own me. Lockaround, lockdown, lockup and lockaway are old hat.
Walkdown-Walkaround-Lookaround-Walkup-and-Write is the new mantra. 

I am tired of counting days, forwards or backwards. This circus has crossed its sell-by date and inch by inch people will take back their lives. All's good as long as people don't inch towards me, which is the one dread I have. One thing we need to learn from these agonizing couple of months is to keep physical distance from fellow citizens you don't know. To respect their space. To be warm without being pushy. And to show concern and consideration. Staying three feet away from a fellow shopper needn't be connected with  a virus. It's plain courtesy and decency. Today a mask has become an excuse for inching closer to the old ways. The mask feels like a cure-all and the wearer feels safe and armed with special powers. 

To return to the weirdest six weeks of my life (nope, I have seen more bizarre things but not the whole world in one manic sweep) halfway through the tamasha, cops wearied of swinging their sticks at people. Methinks it's back to "your cops and my cops are having tea with our cops". And halfway through the tamasha people started looming over other people and breathing under their collars :P 
Today I thought I felt somebody else's nose slip into my mask. Fortunately I am nimble enough to skip aside 10 feet in one leap. Now THIS has to stop forever, the world over. 

Yesterday's booze bash has certainly changed the mood but is the situation changing? It may be another TRAP and something more horrendous could be slapped down on us. Methinks this time there is no submitting and getting away. There is no time like NOW for the long awaited revolution - one that arises from a creative wellspring. Because the monster that brought on this unprecedented and monumentally (should I write deliberately?) mismanaged predicament, is slowly slipping away from the foreground sans any evidence of either its containment or the  devastation wrought by it, while the noose just keeps tightening in its name.

Returning to my report on today's feel-good outing I leave you with a Lockabout Lookabout :)
Today was interesting. As I turned into the passage on my way out for the milk, I noticed cigarette butts - plenty of them strewn on the ground. Looks like somebody had enjoyed a smoke-binge there. Was my nose blocked? Or was it one of the neighbors simply emptying an ashtray that had filled up after weeks?
I headed out and found people walking by with a spring in their step.
I sniffed the air just to make sure my sense of smell was active - I'm told that losing it could be a symptom of the C-demon.

Rajkumar Sabji-and-Phal-Wala

Rajkumar's Squat-Spot aka Shop

Headed briskly to Rajkumar Sabji-and-Phal-wala's little squat-spot and was greeted in passing by the dude in the green T-shirt who lives down the lane and sits under a lamppost with his brown bread seated next to him 3 inches from the road, reading the paper and ... yes .... spitting. He Goodmorninged me through a tight black mask which I saw expand as he grinned behind it.

At Rajkumar's I chose my booty of two bananas, a couple of limes, two carrots and a baby pumpkin - not much today - and trotted Mashiwards -  the milk booth womanned by Krishna Mashi for the uninitiated. Found out that shops were opening up in the morning hours and it's best to get there between 8 and 12. Now tell me how many times does one dash out of the house, dash up again, soap and scrub only to head out again an hour later?

Two good friends greeted me as I cantered home. One was Jogindar Sabjiwala on cycle - lest we forget he's the original one who used to home-deliver before this crisis left his partner stranded in his village - with his cheery Namaste and ear-to-ear grin that all but popped off his mask. I was delighted to look into the warm brown eyes that were illuminated twice over with his smile. A few yards closer to home I saw a familiar figure lumbering towards me. It was my good Christian neighbor and friend of sixty odd years. We raised hands in salute and grinning through his mask he called out "Heil Hitler". I was smiling all the way home recalling an episode in November '16 soon after Demongate. Our man was heading down the road carrying, to my amusement, a long handled broom of the sort that the KMC staff use to relocate the trash on the road from point A to point B and then back to point A :) "Who are you planning to flog with that?" I'd called out, feigning amazement. No doubt he had been hauling it back from Jadu Babu's Bazaar to use in his yard. And bang came the reply - no prizes for guessing what the reply was! Of course the Villain of Demongate! Thank goodness for a sane neighbor in these times of strife. This brings a memory of me holding aloft a gigantic sugar cane plant and marching home from the same bazaar one evening in 1978. And a later memory of me holding aloft a jhool-jhaaru and marching down the same road in broad daylight, attracting a number of curious followers. It's time now for the neighbor, myself and all like minded folks to march - 10 feet apart and masked - carrying flags of protest. And change that our minds and hands take charge of.  Time for the revolution - yes I mentioned that earlier in the post


PS1 - Lest we forget that keys relate to locks, I am naming this series Lockabout. The inspiration is from Kanchana SS whose "lockaround-roundabout" I abbreviated.

PS2 - All references are to my country, happenings are from my area in my city and the goings on here. 

Lockabout Chronicles - Creating Our Post-Dystopian World

Welcome to the New World (Dis)Order!

"What?" you ask. We are all tethered behind our masks in this mystical land called Dystopia.
We are asked to live for the most part in the virtual realm.
And those who have ordered us to "work" from home, seem to have forgotten several things
We the People, need FOOD. And we need at least a plastic sheet over our heads. That's ALL the people.
As for the people privileged to have a home from which to carry out such orders, homes don't run on food alone. A home is not a home without a basic functioning infrastructure. Back in the day the shops that served to maintain such an infrastructure were called hardware stores.
Welcome to the IT age.
Cyberspace relies on something very tangible and real called - you guessed it, hardware. Functioning hardware.  And you get that stuff in stores, you got that right.
No it does not work if you pump some Old Monk into it. Nor do rations of rice, dal and atta magically turn into edible food unless something called FUEL is available. Yup that stuff that the wealthy tank up with in their cars. It works somewhat like Old Monk. It puts a smile on your face for starters and in the end it makes everyone crash in a heap, wasted and lost.
No prizes for guessing that for a month and a half We The People were separated from the devices that make incarceration bearable Be it a washer for a leaky tap or a length of fuse wire or a plastic sheet to save our bodies from this untimely monsoon. Or a battery for a phone - hey we need phones to function for those pesky apps we are ordered to load 😎
Before  you ask what this is all about, the above sums up my rants over the past 45 days. The message is loud and clear. The system (or lack thereof) is riddled with broken links. Because the thinking of our Rajas and Mantris and their courtiers is riddled with big gaping holes. And the past several weeks have been spent in jumping over those gaps so we don't fall into an abyss, fixing the broken links with play dough or pieces of string and falling almost reflexively into a pattern of daily jugaad. Something we Indians are so good at and so ready to be reconciled to.
And with those words of indignation let me introduce you to a new series featured on this space. This has its genesis in the Lockdown Snippets - segments of my personal journal - that I had shared with a limited audience during the worst days of incarceration.
Here we incorporate insights from those snippets, gathered in quiet reflection into a bunch of ideas for a saner and healthier future.
Stay and play. I am not naming names, we'll treat this as a movie we're all acting in and that will hopefully bring detachment and perspective to our thinking.

This blog can be viewed by the public and the public includes trolls. And the best of us can turn into vicious trolls if something makes us uncomfortable. Hence comments are moderated and will be mercilessly thrown out if I don't feel good about them, even if they're from dear friends. My blog, my whims! That said I'm a warm and welcoming host as folks know. So for the most part you will get away.
I write so readers may absorb, react and reflect, then articulate and interact meaningfully. Even as my mantra here is "Don't leave it unwritten" I will chip in with a corollary "Think Before You Ink". I am done with viruses and their containment so you will not see any references to Coronagate in this series. There are spaces enough to discuss the etiology of viruses and time enough to actually understand what was/is/will be going on. And this ain't the place.

My post is interspersed with green images, the green of hope. These are from bits  of green, growing quietly in a leaky mug that I shoved a handful of earth and a handful of seeds into, on an impulse. I set some intentions while doing it and my plants and I are both having a creative surge. When the creative impulse tugs at you, embrace it!

Here's to a Beautiful and Brave New World!
PS: The image at the start of the post is of my irrepressible lily grown from a handful of bulbs that were gifted to us by my brother's friend from his garden in Behala way back in 1995. Year after year at least one will come up to remind me of continuity and resurgence, of the enduring and the ephemeral sharing space. Behind you will see the Ugly Exterminator Building, the continuing bane of my life and symbolic of these prisons that threaten us. The lilies will break past those looming walls. My faith, hope and love (in and for all good things) tell me so.

And the final image is a leaf of the Saptaparni tree that chose to plant  itself in my flower pot on one occasion when I'd left my plants in the backyard while going out of the city on a long trip.

There are two such. They tell me that they will find ways to grow if we rob them of land that is rightfully theirs.  On that note - thanks for reading. Do follow the blog - I am hoping to keep it updated.