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Today my house is all spruced up

Festive and decked up

House proud am I

It has been a while

Since our last guest

Just for today it can pass any test

It suffers often, of unintended neglect

Tradeoffs, a career’s priorities

Discomfort with intrusive possibilities

An inability to be minimalistic

Admittedly ‘magpie’stic

Tumbling over the functional

A refusal to get clinical.

Resisting a consistent theme

Unbracketed, a gentle overflowing scheme

Corners that spill out longing 

A controlled chaos of warmth, a little indulging 

Of little things, many a distant moment 

Little pieces of every where we went,

Trinkets of time, of the world experienced

Selected, sequinned and sequenced

Stamps of moments spent in other places

Littered across walls and surfaces

All members registered 

Admitted and nestled. 

A little unwieldy, these growing collections

A little accomodating, sometimes abandoned

A mosaic of nostalgic connections

A stage for constant readjustment, a steady theatre of shifting sand

The rambling order of a crowd

A collective whispering when you play your favourite songs aloud

A community of our indulgences,

A miniature world of us

An interpretation, a culmination

Of our past, present and future

A reflection, to our soul a mirror, 

To our eyes a window

A garden to nurture and to grow

A library of books, celebrations and scars

Laden with the dust of our thoughts, of hopes and of stars

A little rested and contained.

A coccoon for our dreams, our world inside a dream

An immersion without restraint.

An umbrella, a base camp, an address for a passport stamp

A world within a world, where bruises heal, hopes are unfurled.

An invitation to the familiar, an acceptance of the unresolved

A place to start from, a place to return

The nuzzling of the known, the balcony to view the unknown

A taste of our cooking and the aromas of the kitchen

A set track for routines, a lounging den

With each milepost and decision

Shifting with us, our caravan

Evolving and anchoring,

Protecting and embracing

A mother ship. A recharge station

A cave it certainly is not.

A house to live in, to breathe out.

A place safe to chew the cud of life.

Moments low and high, happy and sad

Sometimes a refuge, sometimes a launch pad.

This shared world, the storybook of our life.

 

September Rain

When this rain is more than a rain

Raindrops force flowers to join them

Blooms of the season, of late monsoon

Wet earth littered with decorations

Perhaps it wanted to pluck the stars and the moon

Those tiny wisps of light, stars are now sky jasmine

Carelessly tossed, I imagine

Just for a night, And the suns are African tulips, frangipani the moons

Basking in the ancient light of dead stars, radiant

Willingly separated from their parent

To perfume and colour this night.

A universe freshly laid out on this earth

Perhaps you too are among them

My lost brother

A deliberate coincidence,

A season’s reminder,

Of the blessing revisited in our lives.

Immigrants

A dry windy monsoon night

Am late for my walk tonight

Clouds chase each other

Against the brown city sky

The rushing breeze’s scatter

I stop to pick frangipani blossoms

Before my feet can crush them

My ears strain in surprise,

Unknown yet familiar

Folk notes float my way, make me linger

The watchman smiles sheepishly

Looks away from his mobile.

He was perhaps looking at the hills

Dark silent silhouettes against starry skies

A few occasional lights like fireflies

Of campfires and hearths on the hill below

Perhaps a studious child preparing for her exams

And a haunting strain of a village song mellow

Wafting from the little hamlet nestled in the terrace farms

A cell phone woven immigrant’s mobile home.

A city girl, I miss the mountains too

An intruder, a visitor, a shared moment of longing.