कोई आया था क्या?

कोई आया था क्या? नहीं? सफ़ेद सांझ में अपनी धमनियों का चलना सुन रहे हो तुम. क्या यह सही है? या फिर सब कुछ यही है? पता नहीं। पता होने के बावजूद भी कोई धमनियों का चलना कैसे रोक सकता है? एक अजीब विस्मय है, और उससे भी अजीब एक खोज।  रोज़ चलता हूँ, रोज़ नहीं मिलती।  फिर भी चलने की आदत का मैं क्या करूँ? सोचने की आदत का, याद की आदत का मैं क्या करूँ? शायद कुछ नहीं।  या फिर बहुत कुछ।  पर निर्णय की घडी अभी नहीं आई, या आई थी क्या और चली गयी ? मुझे तो बस इंतज़ार करना कहा गया था , बस इंतज़ार।  पर तुम इतने जड़ कबसे थे? तुमने तो सुना था रात को आते हुए, तुमने उसे सिमटते हुए भी देखा था, तुमने रात के अँधेरे कमरों में गुम हुए लोगों को भी महसूस किआ था, तुम देर तक कुकर की सीटियों को फ़ैल कर दीवारों पर चिपकते हुए भी देखा था, तुम वहां - वहां भी गए थे जहाँ पके खाने की सुगंध फ़ैल जाती है, तुमने चाय की प्याली में बैठे हुए पत्तियों को भी देखा था, तुम देर रात भटके हुए पंछियों के साथ भी भटके थे. तुमने सन्नाटे की दीवारों को घर करते भी देखा था, तुम वहीँ थे जब खालीपन अपनी जगह से थोड़ा सरक गया था।  उसने अपना नाम नहीं बताया था , पर तुमने कई बार दीवारों को पोछ कर कुछ मिटाना चाहा था, तुम अपने बिस्तर को बदल कर नयी चादर भी डाली थी, तुमने उस कप को भी तोड़ दिया था, और कई बार उस खाने की महक को भी भूलने की कोशिश की थी जो उस रोज़ तुम्हे आई थी. फिर भी कुछ बचा था जिसे तुम ढूंढ रहे थे।  क्या? 

रात वैसे ही सरक रही है

कुछ टप-टप सुनाई दी फिर घुल गयी शोर में. मुझे लगा जैसे कोई आहिस्ता से आया मेरे एकांत में और हलके आहट से समा गया हो मौन में. धीरे जैसे कोई दरवाज़ा खुला, एक आधा निमंत्रण देकर छोड़ गया हो. जैसे कोई कह रहा हो अगर इस एकांत में भी तुम मुझे सुन पाये, अगर अभी भी कोई खाली जगह है जिसे तुम भर नहीं पाये तो चले आओ इस ओर. मैं देर तक सुनता रहा. खिड़की से एक सुनहरी हवा ने किवाड़ को आधा खोल दिआ था, और छन -छन कर कुछ टपक रहा था. मैंने सोचा रात है और बेमौसम की कोई बारिश। शायद वह भी खोई हुई है. पता नहीं की बरस जाना है या फिर गुज़र जाना। मैं आवाज़ के पीछे पीछे हो लिआ और पहुँच गया अपनी बालकनी पर. देखा आधी सड़क भीगी पड़ी है और रात वैसे ही सरक रही है जैसे मैंने उसे कल छोड़ा था. 

Love is not room of rumour

Play,
play on.

Trip on the shadow.

Break.

Sieve,

sieve the fragments.

Be residue.

Arrange,

arrange the empty spaces.

Disperse.

Return,

mark the endless distances.

Wait.

Longing is another knowing.

Anticipate not, be.

Let your pauses unfold.

Love is not a room of

rumours, a crack in the

dust, it peels not

like rust. You cannot

wipe yourself clean.

Its the recurring wave that

fills and empties you

at the same time. It leaves

a mark on the stone.

The script takes long deciphering.

...some infinities do meet

I fail everyday,

a failure that marks
my obsolescence.
How many infinities
must pass before 
I am born again?
 
I travel between parallel
lines marking various 
points of meeting
challenging the certainty 
that only infinity makes 
parallel meet

I dress my finitude in 
uncertain colors, perhaps 
life will skip me 
by, but every effort 
completes the circle 
where desires die

Some infinities do meet,
but a life time passes or 
perhaps a second before 
we realise the difference 
in breadth, realign 
the lines and rehearse
another day

...to the new year

Dissemble the words you collected the year past, piece together the slippages, the silence, and the un-thought pause. Parse through the sentences you spoke, the voices you heard, the hesitations, the curiosities, the wishes you desired, the bits unspoken, the memories you could not stitch. Peruse your dreams you kept at bay, the sleepless nights of wandering, and the soliloquy of all passing hours. Trace a boundary to the solitude you refrained from and the meetings you betrayed. Caress the seasons that touched your lips and fainted with an unbecoming promise. Touch the curves of the words, of all misgivings, you noted tirelessly in your diary. Treat the winter of longing with a hibernated bliss. Disentangle the year, one piece at a time, like discarded clothes on a dreary day. Renounce and then collect all that is left of the renounced year. Coalesce the things we broke, not all that was broken needs fixing. Some we will discard, some we will go back in search of. Begin the new year in a zeal that it deserves. You will be old in your newness, and new in your oldness; a delight as pure as the spring air; a delight, as the poet said, we must risk. Happy New Year.

Every night, tonight....

Tonight somewhere far from all our confusions we will taste failure and return home subdued, defeated, carrying like sisyphus an unknown load. We will harness for the moment the time that divides itself in seconds and stare at the old wall clock perplexed, the azaan and the church bells disturbing the reverie that we will enter, perhaps we will wait for an uncertain knock on the door, but nobody will come, as usual, in this empty house..we will track the dust as it spreads over the fingers that caress the bookshelves, feel the touch of the pollen and let out a reluctant sneeze, perhaps the spring makes demands on the body that we will deny and walk into parks with golden yellow leaves and violet flowers, the bright red of amaltash and the dusky orange of a sun burning itself out, we will not enter the house till the remains of the day sieves itself of the colors, we will enslave a bit of us in this time and return missing the part that never made the whole but merely suggested a timely goodbye for us to rust among the concrete piles of this city...we will await the rains, and bide our time trying to fake another beginning where people lay their fears across coffee tables where nobody listens to them and merely messages are exchanged in conversations turned futile, we will serve unlimited bottles of wine for our new found freedom and be turned away from houses for the money runs thin....there is no sunshine worth remembering where the sweat that lingered on your brow failed the wind, its a city that perspires at its margins, in crowded trains turning people everyday, in bumpy taxi rides smelling of cheap petrol and the chaotic traffic lights jumped by people returning to alien places called home..perhaps the night will deliver where the day disappoints, the moon lingering thin in the polluted sky, the stars a dim reminder of misty valleys, the yellow street lamp the lone witness of your return..you will tread your shadow for a while and come back home to sit on your computer and gaze for long on the screen, shuffle through windows and absorb the loneliness of others poured out in a moment of ecstasy or perhaps you will sit down to a diary and record your writing of a failure that you never sought as a child and turn to the poet for practiced words that do not make your dictionary..another day you will seek familiar images, another day is an apparition of non-existent things. 

October 24, 2015

Broken silences

Sometimes its not good to shelve silence for words, wrapped silence is a gift that breaks a promise you made to yourself. But often out of a boredom or a desperation you want to hear your own word as an echo, to part the air of noise that hangs lazily like the pollution in hazy cities. Before you begin to speak, you discern each noise on its merit and place it out of a memory; memory has a small place for what happens everyday. It merely archives those unknown to you, for what you knew you go searching in the shelves and you find it lost. You want to scream and recover the day, but it distances itself like a hurt lover. But slowly with a temptation of a child you partner the voices that surround you, the tap on the keyboard, the eerie noise of the lamp and the slow whirring of the fan, you see the spider crawling but register no sound. Here is the time you want to put on a tune that you wanted to hum, but no tune comes to mind, none that will save you from speaking. Fallen, defeated, and tired you put a hand on your lips, drink a sip from the cup, curl up your nose to see if it can come to the rescue, take the finger away from the typing board and caress the lips to silence them. Here comes the scream....then the silence pervades.