Five-days' untouchable

Is this blood of life
Merely to mark me impure
For Genesis says
I am not a creator, but created
Created from a man

For five days
Quarantined from the rest
By this unholy fluid
Wrapped with untouchable phanek
Phanek after Phanek
Carrying my untouchable-ness
Accused piece of cloth
Contaminated for a lifetime

Neither nocturnal tryst nor daytime assault
Defile the hands that tore it away
Yet lying apart from me
In the pale weatherbeaten bamboo polankhok
He watched the muga fabric
Soak up the rain
Droplets after droplets


[For Shreema and Chaoba and all the evening talks- anger, laughter, coffee and other stuffs .. Hoping for more such days to come]

Houdong Lamboiba

Ascetic cat in ochre robe
He is holy, he has given up ngari
Though in the night he is seen
Drinking blood from wine glass
At the Mantri's party

Morning he stands and judge
Our every deed
I saw him in I.S. TV
Chopping a mother's tresses
Mother's face swollen blue
She hid behind worn out hands
Smaller crooks he can't stand
Bigger ones are his friend

Ascetic cat heard the news
Preying has taught him patience, he waits
For him to be released
Or to be found dead and discarded
The body was found
We stood in 2- minutes' silence
Tharet Makhai news read out
Organisations condemning the killing
The list ran 5-minutes' long

The righteousness of chopping
A mothers' tresses
Burning a father's wine shop
All disappeared
Ascetic cat stood lamely and says-
Marileinaba authority-na thigatpiyu
Surrendering the 'case' to 'concerned authority'
Smaller crooks he can't stand
Bigger ones are his friend
He has exchanged his ochre robes
For a neta's suit
Concealing his black heart
Under a white coat

For the dead and the discarded

Easy to blame
And hard to understand
Words pour so does tears
When we see your smile
Assembled together

With stubborn cries
Men and women gather
Outraged by the battle of love and hate
on your face;
To think they entertain themselves
taking you apart piece by piece;
To thinkyour blood amuses them…
One eye luminous with love
Another blinded by hate
Crushed crucified discarded
For you we congregate
Yet we can offer
Not fire to extinguish
All that you bore
Nor earth to bury
all that you have borne
---------------------------------------

March

It began with a drizzle
We try to sight the moon
Our mini-panek held gingerely with printed joypur
Near the fire of dried straw crackling up the evening sky
The yellowed mass of an afternoon's effort
billowing into the thin air
Tinging the evening with blue smoke

The aftermath four days
Succumbing into riots of colours and assault
Creeping beneath skin
Bluish bruises of transgression
Trespassing my innocence

Water pistols resembling giant member
Sprinkling hues of spring
Droplets streaming from my palm towards my elbow
Drenched coloured clothes clinged on
Tearing them from my body
I found my skin stained a nameless hue

Footsteps

Lavender sky
Before the gold
Then the deep impenetrable evenings
Warm glow from houses
Sends a shiver down my spine
I returned- to a dark house
Waiting for me
In the dark inkiness I waited
September came and left
I waited on Partaking shivering cold dinner
in my bed.

Time indifferent of me
ticked endlessly
Each morning I strike off a day
In the Manipuri- English calendar
Tattered during transit
The calendar showing thasi and purnima;
when not to travel north
I gazed at the calendar
Hoping to revive-
An acoustic memory
Of footsteps against wooden staircase
A soft thud and the sound ascending
Hesitating, a tense lingering silence
A footstep that stops to knock
Stops at my door.

I, Icon

Droplets of Carbonic acid
Clears the fume laden sky for awhile
Smog hangs in the air like a feeble verse
While they transgressed me in a diabolic rhythm
With a strange memory-less nostalgia
I wept at the putrid smell of flesh and fluid
Staring at the mouldy leaves
Amongst which I was cast away

I once had a name
Now I stand mutated by pride and pain
Amidst the acid rain
My tears became raging flames
The self no more me
Yet my pain, they say, is my triumph
Now I am put up for display
Cemented on a pedestal
The icon of womanhood
Covered with pigeon's droppings in a park.

Island

Deer Park

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river.... -Neruda

Grihang

The Health Minister was travelling to Grihang to inaugurate a Health Sub Centre. Grihang (in Ukhrul) has not seen one for the last 3 decades. The Minister and his assortment of guards showered everyone with a layer of dust..especially neatly dressed children walking on the road.

Memories of another day

Pictures of home; Ingkhon, pukri, - pure nostalgia

On forgetting

Gradually he stopped visiting
My nocturnal dreams
I fight against the overwhelming burden of remembering
Time mercilessly dug a grave
And I unearth everyday
Lest the present cover it in thin layers
Rendering dull the edge of my memories,
bury slumberless nights
and smoothed sharp reminiscences
Until a vacuum of nothingness covered the grave
Yellowed by time like those dry autumn leaves,
Mercilessly shed by sunburnt trees.