खुली किताब के पलटते पन्ने

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Sunday, June 5, 2011

ज़िन्दगी कहीं और भागती मालूम पड़ती है
सड़कों  पर दिन रात रेंगती दिखाई पड़ती है
मंदिर के घंटो और गाड़ियों की चिल्लाहट
के बीच... कुछ कम सी सुनाई पड़ती है .

अँधेरे कमरे में खुली खिड़की से आती रौशनी
तो कभी बागों में पेड़ों के झुरमुट से झांकती गिलहरी
सभी एक जानी पहचानी भाषा में बोलते लगते हैं
पर न जाने इस ज़बान में कोई अर्थ पनपता नई दीखता है

या शायद सही कहती है वोह की दूर का चश्मा 
लगाकर के भी मुझे कम ही दिखाई पड़ता है .

घर से निकलकर जब मेरा मन चहल कदमी करता है
तोह एक तीन माले की इमारत से कुछ झांकता आभास पड़ता है
शायद दिल में मेरे कोई वहम है
पर लोहे की उन घुमावदार सिडिओं  को देखकर
कुछ चक्कर से आने लगते हैं.

शायद उसी में उलझकर मेरा मन ऊपर नहीं  जा पाता 
उस झांकती सी छवि को अपने अन्दर से नई निकाल पाता.

खैर आगे बढते हैं.....
आजकल मकान कुछ ज्यादा ही बन गए हैं
पर घरों की कमी अभी भी खलती है.

खोखली नींव पर पक्के ढाँचे 
दिन पर दिन खड़े होते जा रहे हैं

थोडा जोर देकर  देखा जाए 
तो बाहर लगी शिला पर नाम भी लिखा रखा है
सालों साल बारिश और गर्मी से कुछ अक्षर 
कमज़ोर से लगते हैं
अपने अर्थ को बड़ी  मशक्कत से संभालते हुए से दीखते हैं.

आँखें ऊपर जातीं हैं तो 
कुछ रेखाएं आपस में लडती  रहती हैं
शायद मानव की ही तरह
खुद का अस्तित्व बनाने की कोशिश करती रहती हैं.

नीचे समंदर की मज़बूत लहरों से लड़ते पत्थर 
एक कहानी सी बयान करते लगते हैं
ऊपर दर्पण में खुद की छवि ढूँढ़ते  हैं शायद
तारों की रौशनी सोखकर
सूरज से आँखें मिलाते हैं यह

साइकिल रिक्शा को खींचते हुए
मजबूरी का भार उठाना भी दिखाई पड़ता है
ठेले पे बैठकर मासूम की चिल्लाहटों   
में भी कुछ बल मालूम पड़ता है 

सब्जियों के दाम पर ज़िन्दगी बिक रही है यहाँ
फिर भी जेबें खाली करने में
तोल मोल करने से नहीं चूकता कोई .

अब थकान सी मालोम पड़ती है
वापस आ गया यह मन अब घर

ध्यान आया की खिड़की खुली रह गयी थी गलती से
मेज़ पर रखे पन्ने बिखरे हुए पड़े  थे 

कुछ कोरे तो किन्ही पर ज़िन्दगी के 
कुछ अनकहे अनसुने पल लिखे हुए थे

हर पल आपस में बातें करता हुआ
खिलखिला रहा था .
जिंदगी को ही जीने का तरीका समझा रहा था

कलम भी खुली पड़ीं थी
शायद कोई रचना उगलना चाहती थी
पर अब लिखने का मन नहीं था .

पन्ने समेट के रख दिए
कलम बंद करके
ख़याल आया की कहीं सूख न गयी हो !
आखिर अगली बार लिखना जो था .

बरामदे से चिड़ियों ने मन को पुकारा
तो उठा
तो मानो लगा 
अब तो कुर्सी भी भार उठाते उठाते 
थक सी गयी है
पैर उसके अब जवाब दे चुके हैं
बैठते वक़्त आवाज़ भी करती है ज़रा सी

शायद मेज़ पर राखी ज़रूरी चीज़ों को नींद से जगाने के लिए.

चलो, खैर चश्मा लगा लूं 
अरे साहब ! दूर का भी जो देखना है .

वैसे आजकल तो पास से भी हर चीज़ दूर
जाती मालूम लगती है
शायद पूरी दुनिया ही
मेरे चश्मों के हिसाब से चलना सीख गयी है .

चलिए, ज़रा बाहर टहल के आते हैं.




The Girl Who Found Her Shadow..

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Wednesday, March 16, 2011


Yes .. she could be seen..
From the little crevice.. where the infinite had once been..

It was her dark torso..
Entangled in the hands of blinding light..

Being followed in the lanes of her murk and mess..
She slowed down her steps..
Hoping to fade off unseen..
She melted off..frightened of her own being..

Clueless she walked..
Deaf with years of mourning..
Each night another void..
She couldn’t stop..she wanted to..

Maybe then..her veil fell off ..
For a moment her eyes met the hazel around..
Not more than a glimpse..
But more than enough..
A new way to trust.. she felt her blood..
This time within her veins..

She was in a strange land..
An uncanny alien feel..
The air known somehow..
She pulled back her veil..

The lanes now crossed..
From nowhere to nothing..
Stuck in her own conundrum..
Melting in all possible directions..
Dissolved in foreign realms..

Exhausted she was..
Out of breath..
Somehow ..
She had lost it all..
And she did not know why..

Yet another turn..
Yet another breath..
Numb now…
She stood amidst the unknown..




Hoping for a hand..
She moved along alone..
Another stolen breath..

She reached out for her pyre..
Praying for an end..

Struggling with own blood..
The unchaste passions now overwhelmed..
The stench of her sins strangulating now..
She was burning.. it was unbearably cold..

And then it happened..
The forgotten..
Something she had vouched against..
The sting gave way to some sensation..
Another beginning when she thought it would end..

Crawling through the crippled lanes..
She hoped she’d make through..
The lanes engulfed every possible bit of hope..
The wilderment underneath a lesson..
Every story a piece of trust falling as it broke..

The fears in shape now..
She stood nowhere somehow..
Yet a face stared back at her..
No words..no thoughts..
She hated not being alone…

She wanted her void back..
Her hands stained once forever
New words were frightening.. she refuted anything they could mean

She stepped back..
Exposing her frame in the imposing lights..
She did not have a shadow.. she was neither black..nor white..
She looked at the shadow right next to her..
She stared at the traces of moving life..

Deafening thunders..
A hundred reasons for it to not be right..
The ground of reasoning she had finally learnt to walk on.. trembled once again..
No matter what she vouched to hold on tight…

Times came..she wanted to scream..
She chose silence for a little more while..
She wanted to let go..
She couldn’t ..
Do not know who stole the words right off her mouth..
The bitterness she had so laboriously gathered started to fade..
It felt nice somehow..
She did not want it to..

Tried a lot.. the veil wouldn’t come along..
It wouldn’t stop the flutter..
It wouldn’t stay in place anyhow..

She couldn’t see why..
Why it didn’t matter..
The scars on her face exposed..
She was scared.. she could feel someone near..

The silence did not threaten with any storm now..
Her eyes uncomfortable with the gentle green..
As the landscape brought back colours somehow..


She turned away..Yet again sun light..
Her bowed head stealing strength ..
Her hands now raised..the heavens blessed..

The clouds with unreasoned joys…
The downpour was ecstatic..
A happy victim..
She ripped off every bit of the veil..

A smile drove past the face in front..
She smiled through her tears too..

She closed her eyes.. her leap of faith..
She stepped out in the rain again..
The ground beneath her gave away to clouds..
The infinites now calmer..
A lightning bolt brought her closer to his embrace..

She felt his power.. she felt her pain..
Each sin fading off into a promise of forgiveness..
She gave her hands..he rubbed off the stains..
She closed her eyes.. the dreams.. the rain

Finally her heart smiled ..
The deciphered lanes..
At last.. she could breathe.. for she lived again…
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Saturday, December 4, 2010


I love u more everyday...

My love is more than wat i say...

Do u knw how it feel...??

Do u knw this love is real..??

sumtyms i wonder wat do u think....

when u hear my name, ur cheeks turn pink...?

Do u dream about me every nyt...??

Wish to hug me and hold me tight....

These are the questions dat through my mind...

ur way into my heart, u do find...

It drives me crazy as to wat should i do...?

should i risk the friendship and propose u..?

I love u more than u could knw...

and i don't want to ever let u go...

so evn if i m just a friend...,

i will luv u till d end...

i will luv u till d end...
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Friday, December 3, 2010


Here I stand on the edge...

So frightened and depressed...

List of blamers and not to blame myself...

coz i'm a fool....for not understanding my own mistakes....!!


With tears in my eyes and feeling of repentence...

I was arguing with my own parents....

Expecting changes...rather changing myself...

Coz i'm a fool...for not understanding my own mistakes...!!


With thoughts drifting my mind...

and an echo all around...

In the midst of things...

With no way to get out...

with no way to get out.... !

Back into the dead..

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Saturday, September 4, 2010


As the sun sets..
The golden drop melts into the dead still of the sea..
And as the stars suck the infinite’s blue ..
Her corpse surfaces out with stoic tides..

A dagger forced through where her heart must be..
Holds lose..for the cavity stands hollow..
And maybe the assassin did not know..
Hence no blood touches air.. The wrong place..A very wrong hit..

Thrown out on the shore.. She drowns into the grains of sand..
A façade rises from where her body must have surrendered..
Her ashes sprayed across with still winds on an even ashen land..
She walks through her grave..By her tombstone.. Bared..With bleeding hands..

She looks out .. Looks inside..And closes her eyes..They sting..
It’s weird.. How it feels when you feel nobody else can feel you…
And how it refuses to heal..Even when you have everything ever needed to cure you..
So she closes her eyes..Her lashes of thorns.. She’s blind now..

Her eyes bleed with dreams..
Dreams of happiness in shape of whispers..
Pouring out orphaned like milk from a widows childless breasts..
Praying for a parasite to suck off her red ..For white now stings..

She is stripped to nothing..
And it hurts how she does not care..
She walks around naked..
Soulless anyway.. Her stained flesh now bare..

She wishes to fall down…
So hard ..with no one to hold..
She prays each night..
So that she never sees a new tomorrow..

And hence each day as she opens her lashes..
And makes way for the sun..
She curses herself .. Cursing the bed..
A failed pyre which refuses to burn..

It is senseless..
She knows nothing about why it should pain..
Though she fears death wouldn’t be the end..
And this holds her.. Till she hopes it explains..

Maybe you’d return..
Maybe you’d bring back life..
But till then.. She’ll lie raped..
This corpse forced to survive..

My Favourite Book!

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The Moor's Last Sigh

By Salman Rushdie


In 1957, Moraes Zogoiby was born. And in 2006, I fell in love with him.


Treat this composition as no mere essay, reader. Because through only my words am I now going to express the unprofessed love that I have for Moraes, my Moor, the unlucky heir of an unlucky dynasty. Here is a tribute to a book which changed my life, and along with it the way I think.


Perhaps the most fundamental way in which anyone can question my madness-yes, my uncontrolled obsession for this book, is that, WHY do I call this novel my "favourite"? This masterpiece could have surely been termed as "one of my favourites". The answer to this question would be, that when perfection comes your way, everything else stops mattering. This book is perfect in all senses. I call it my literary paradise, my sea of philosophy only in which would I love to drench my soul. This is Salman Rushdie at his exceptional, admirable, phenomenal best.


In this pot pourri of masala, drama, betrayal, romance and violence set in pre and post-independent India, I discovered life-all shades of it. The story which commences in Cochin takes turbulent twists and turns through Mumbai before finally ending even more chaotically in the solitude of Benengeli. As I attempt at explaining the story of the novel, I am rendered helpless. It is difficult to pen down a tale which spans over a whopping hundred and seventeen years and involves a jigsaw puzzle of uncountable people. Uncountable and some very unbelievable, eccentric yet realistic characters form the foundation of this masterpiece.


I hated the "in this God-fearing Christian house, British are still best 'madder-moyselle' " haughtiness of Epifania da Gama and the way her toxic dominance devoured her husband's life. But I loved the "tall, beautiful, brilliant, brave, hard working" Isabella da Gama who was the complete epitome of young power. While I marveled over the love that Isabella and Camoens da Gama shared with each other, I could not help shedding a tear at the virgin plight of Carmen Lobo. When a husband as insensitively homosexual as Aires da Gama abandons his wife each night for his own erotic pleasures, what results is tragedy. In a patriarchal land which still believes that only a woman can be infertile, it hurt so much to see Carmen be compared to the deserts of Sahara for never being able to conceive(as if she ever got a chance to). The da Gama family in Rushdie-speak was completely Christian, egalitarian yet socially supreme and rich. Perhaps in this dynasty of contrasts, what happened henceforth was inevitable!


Genius was seduced by age. Christian fell in love with Jew. Art married business shrewdness. Aurora da Gama and Abraham Zogoiby- twenty one years away from each other's age yet so similar within their differences. Aurora- daughter of Isabella and Camoens, the inheritor of her mother's expletive tongue alongwith her infective charm that did not leave her even after she turned fifty. Aurora was artistically Goddess-like, a painter and a thinker who grew up to be the most controversial yet later most respected artist of her times. Associate with her, the shameless murder of her grandmother Epifania after which she merely "slept, as soundly as a child. And woke up on Christmas morn." Associate with her the insult she would unsparingly fling at one and all. Movie stars, Indira Gandhi, Nehru-the most famous people of the world had to surrender their esteem in front of her as her tongue whip-lashed their honour! But most importantly, associate with her, masterpieces of art. The creator of works such as The Moor's Last Sigh, The Kissing of Mohammad Ali Baig, Uper the Gur Gur and many more made even me appreciate her "oil painting, collage and water colour" genius.


Where Aurora ends, Abraham begins. Take this statement in all senses possible, reader. Abraham-the man belonging to a dying race (the Jews of India), the son of Flory Zogoiby and Solomon Castile. The man with a tainted ancestry, but with a mind that flourished over those taints. Associate with him money, power, business, undercover deals, underworld links, drugs, prostitutes and a deep deep love for Aurora. Abraham scares me with this love of his since that very love led to his transformation into an evil soul which made him kill his own wife. From being the "I will always look after you" kind of caring husband to becoming "an icy deity, who wrought havoc upon the mere mortals below", Abraham was always passionate about his love. The only difference was that as time passed, his passions progressively turned from being "for" Aurora to being "against" Aurora.


Would it be injustice if I would obliterate introductions of the various characters which adorn this book? The eccentric Vasco Miranda, the loyal Lambajan Chandiwala, the schizophrenic Uma Sarasvati, the lustful Dilly Hormuz, the greedy Jaya He, the cunning Mainduck, the stunning Nadia Wadia, the helpless Jimmy Cashondeliveri-a horde of names flood my mind accusing me of not paying the attention that Rushdie, so meticulously, gave them all. But humbly so, there is a distinction between a great mind and a potentially great one. As the latter occupies my head, I find myself incapable of compressing the plethora of lives that are printed in the pages of the novel. So right now, it becomes imperative to dedicate my words to that person in this tale who I love so much. The story is here because of him. It is his tragedy-his unluckiness-and ultimately, his last sigh.


Moraes Zogoiby or Moor as he was called for most of his life forms the heart of this book, an adorable heart indeed! Enchanting me with his tale "complete with sound and fury", Moor impresses with his humility, his frankness and the purity of his heart. "Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high born cross breed…only heir to the spice n trade business crores of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty…" he says. Indeed, born out of the last salt-and-pepper fragrant lovemaking of Aurora and Abraham, Moor was special. And so, his life too was destined to be unique.


When he was ten, he found sexual solace in the arms of his tutor, Dilly Hormuz.


As a twenty year old, he began work as a high end goon for Raman Fielding. But he had to retire very shortly due to ageing problems.


As a thirty six year old, he had to battle acute asthma and health issues where each breath of his seemed like a mountain to conquer.


Reader, I acknowledge the questions that must be creeping up in your mind. A ten-year old in a sexual liaison? A twenty-year old unable to work as a goon anymore? A thirty six-year old having lungs which were ailing and ready to collapse? Well, this is the biggest punishment that Nature could ever have awarded Moor. In layman terms, my hero grew up two times faster than normal, because of, in his words, "some cock up in the DNA…premature ageing disorder…too many short life cells." Impossibly so, Moraes was twenty when he was supposed to be ten and seventy two when he was supposed to be thirty six. Perhaps it is the desperation of his to cling on to life, his attempts at looking for people who would not make him uncomfortable about himself and his vulnerability which everyone took advantage of, made me discover the fact that he was so lovable.


With one deformed hand and a life slipping away quicker than it should have, Moraes earns from me sympathy, and also awe. Awe-inspiring are his ideologies of life. All that he speaks echoes the amalgamation of age and innocence inside him, and his golden words have imparted to me various philosophies that make me think, "how come I never came up with that before?"


Who would have thought about the importance that a lung enjoys in our life? With words such as "baby's first yowl, lover's lament, inflated staccato" being attributed to something as ignored as a lung, I did think some more about my respiratory organ! Which man could ever understand the latent pains that married women go through better than my sensitive Moraes who describes their plight as the "grief knotted in a twist of fabric at the end of a dupatta." Betrayed, banished, misunderstood, beaten and misled by time, here is a man each second of whose life is a treasure he cherishes. Moraes is an inspiration, my guide who motivates me to live each second as if my life too has been fast forwarded!


The book is simply amazing. Rushdie magic for sure! Inspired I was by Rushdie's view of shooting stars being mere "unlucky rocks" and not controllers of destiny. I loved his opinion about the post-independence riots in India when he says that "when empire's sun set, we didn't kill our enemies. We reserved that honour for each other." My Einstein of literature made up a new equation of corruption "D=mc squared, where D is for dynasty, m for mass of relatives and c… for corruption" and left me awestruck! Because of him, I could see "Mother India with her garishness …who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children...stretched into great mountains like exclamations of the soul…".Indian films, Indian politics, Indian history et al thrive inside this creation by Rushdie. After reading the book, I realised that the author is essentially Indian, and I admire him for that.


Surely, "a sigh isn't just a sigh. We breathe in air and breathe out meaning." I was truly lucky to have got a chance to feel that meaning pour into my soul. I feel like a better person already! Last lines from the last words of the epic tale. "I'll drink some wine…lay me down upon this graven stone, and close my eyes…hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time."


Rubbing some of this hope into myself too, I will think of Moraes whenever I am in need.I salute Rushdie for giving me a lifelong inspiration in the form of Moraes. And also my favourite book, Moor's Last Sigh.

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Friday, September 3, 2010


Why m i so confused...
M i a big fuse..
People push me rather hit me...
M i a jerk to even excuse...
In the public, m a conscious geek...
Whom no one is even bothered to seek...
What lyf m i living...
All inside a box...
But 1 day, i'l surely break all the locks...
M waiting for that day.....
To cherish all my lyf...
May be a remembrance....
That will never pose me any fright...
And to welcome it...
With all my might...with all my might...with all my might...!