MY GRANDFATHER
(Rajendra Garg)
The castle–capped hill
Brooding alone, nonchalant
Lost in reverie
Looks like my grandfather
When for hours in his bed
Motionless he sat
Eyes half closed ears unhearing
He gazed into a dim hazy world
Where voices were only sounds.
Now I am sure he saw
With hoary eyes he saw
Glimpses remote –
The ball hurtling in the air
Which he or his cronies kicked
The rivers he swam across
The faces of his grandparents
The proud Peepul tree
At the door of his ancestral hut
And…and a face that refused to grow old
When the world around him
Decayed and died everyday.
His deaf ears heard the distant rumble-
His grandpa chanting morning hymns
The rhythmic rattle that rose
When his mother
Washed and milled and swept and milked
And sang lullaby to his ears
And…and he heard an endearing call.
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
HE
(Rajendra Garg)
Last evening
Strolling along the river bank
He quoted Bhartrihari
And likened life to a bubble
Then in a café we sipped tea.
This morning on our shoulders
We have brought him here.
He often felt dyspeptic
Arthritis plagued his joints
Persistent cough spoiled
The rhythm of his morning recitations
Amid vague fears he taught in the class
"Stand up O Arjuna, shed fears
Fight and conquer the world."
Son's stupidities
Daughter's contempt of good repute
Wife's obstinacies
Leaking roof and bleeding haemorrhoids
Gave him no moment of respite
But who could sit unmoved
When he dwelt upon
The rise and fall of empires
The rebellions and massacres
In Delhi and Chittor
And the Freudian world of dreams.
In recent years he often grumbled
For none agreed to marry
A poor man's daughter
Living in a house
Where ceilings leaked.
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
MY NEW DINING TABLE
(Rajendra Garg)
My gorge rises
Nauseous is the dinner
When I sit at my new dining table.
The tree still peers through its synthetic veneer
And all its shiny gloss
Oh, such a disconcerting gaze of the tree
It upsets everything in me.
Since my grandpa brought a sapling home
Proudly it had stood at our mansion gate
Last month I felled it
And the joiner framed the table
Whenever it finds me alone
The table mumbles, ' Et tu child ',
Yes the tree murmurs the prayer-
'Forgive him my Lord for he does not know'
From the table rises the rumble of three generations
Their hopes and illusions and gossips
Their heartbreaks and fears and pains
All whispered to this tree
Deep into the table I see my mother
Bowing in solemn worship to this patriarch
And hear my father's holy recitations.
What itched me to wield the axe?
What egged me on to cut your throat?
My gorge rises
When I sit at my new dining table.
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
CLOD OF CLAY
(Rajendra Garg)
Spins the potter's wheel
Clod of clay I reel
I'm clapped and slapped
And thumbed and thumped
What blows his fingers deal
It's a game of hide and seek
I laugh I cry I creak
I'm yoked and knocked
And rocked and poked
As carrion in vulture's beak
They say I steer my way
I plan and determine my day
It's right I fight
With might and insight
Things happen come what may
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
MY METAPHYSICS
(Rajendra Garg)
Long summer days
Scorching sizzling sun
Every leaf singed
Sweating and gasping I muse:-
Chaos will overtake harmony
What has been tuned will be untuned
Being will be devoured by non-being
For death rules supreme
And life covers in fear
The pageant will fall apart
Things will unweave themselves
Strife pollution epidemics….
In a tiny crack of an ancient wall
In the fissure of a brick
There it was
Sticking its neck out
Smiling at me mischievously
A fresh green infant shoot
A microscopic sprout
And my metaphysics ran out.
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
A CHANGE IS DUE
(Rajendra Garg)
Though with every passing day
My house grows friendlier to me
I am going to demolish
This old familiar structure
And have a new one built
On a different plinth
With walls of different hue
Doors and windows new
Letting the sun and the moon
From new angles peep
So that in every room
New shadows leap
Oh how I long to see
The hills and trees and riverbanks
Behind and beyond these walls
The old house gives me a view
But I feel a change is due
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
MY GRANNY
(Rajendra Garg)
Even a draught of air tickled her
For laughter and joy
Brimmed over her being and oozed
Dance of a bear or a monkey's antics
Or the street magician's game
Into wild ecstasies threw her
Her plump sanguine shape
So often convulsed with guffaws
Never in low spirits no phlegm
Always in gusto always aflame
In grief untamed as in joy
For weeks for months
She wept and fainted and beat her breast
When her son's boy was brought home
Never lukewarm never sedate
Passion throbbed her heart
It's the month of ashwin
A shraddha for her we observe
Nine Brahamins dine in my house
In my gloomy attic I sit
Drowned in morbid thoughts
Dull dampened depressed
Breathing away a sapless life
Nursing old anxieties
Filled with a hundred apprehensions
Muttering prayers in fear
ignored alone stranded
An unworthy heir
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
COLLEGE CORRIDORS
(Rajendra Garg)
Dark dreary and damp
Exuding a melancholy academic smell
These grim corridor walls of my college
Dumb witnesses to a long era
Sucking and absorbing the humming and buzzing
Of the vivacious young boys
Their guffaws, their gossips,
Their scandals, their hilarity,
Their violent quarrels, and heartburns,
Their rivalries, their pangs of jealousy,
Their thrills of winning
Their pains of losing a prize
Day after day these corridors echo
The giggles and whispers of comely girls
Coy or vociferous but always coquettish
With bewitching smiles (or frowns as the case may be)
As they pass through these college corridors
Effusing the primeval female smell
And disturbing the elemental equilibrium.
How often these corridor walls are filled with nausea
Hearing the tremulous husky tone
Of old phlegmatic professors
With senility and paranoid schizophrenia
Perched on their stooping shoulders
With sighs of regrets and old frustrations
Their choleric tongues pour out vitriol.
All these voices lay frozen and asleep
Between the bricks of these corridor walls.
Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170
PURGED AND CALM
(Rajendra Garg)
People- you haven't brought rain
o king of clouds
To this thirsty land
you rise from distant oceans
Amble over hills and dales
Groves bowers and towers
Palaces and castles perched on hills
You look pale shrunken small
But no drops fall
cloud- i am purged and calm
The brute in me subdued
What beatitude what bliss!
All my water I have poured
In gusts of tears
on a woman of seventy-eighth
who daily washes the swaddling clothes
Of her infant son
And keeps his toys well arranged
For though six decades have passed
When he died and was taken away
He may return home today
All the long summer days
All the long winter nights
She waits for him
and stares at the distant path
Every whimper of a baby in the neighbourhood
Sends a quiver from her breast
deep down her womb
And beyond the infant's tomb
Rajendra Garg
54/8,Mansarovar,Jaipur 302020 Phone-9414646696
Ancient Fears
(Rajendra Garg)
Swarm after swarm of bats
Rising from the dark caverns
Of this ancient castle
Nine thousand bats in a minute
Like rings of smoke
Winging their way in dusky gloom
In the drowsy melancholy air
In days of yore they fought battles
Or they were killed in palace intrigues
Now metamorphosed into bats
Often with a smothered cry
Spine chilled with fear
Limbs quivering
Sweating and gasping
I see swarm after swarm of bats
My ancient fears five fathom deep
Entombed in dark dungeons of my mind
Break loose and flap their wings
In a drowsy melancholy mood
Rajendra Garg
54/8,Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
Phone-0141-2785170
darkness
(Rajendra Garg)
Take me to darkness
Light baffles me
It evokes a nightmare of shapes
A labyrinth of forms
Light trembles on the surface
It illumines the shapes the contours
And thus floats the finite world
Darkness is infinity
Where hills and eggs and trees
And men and rocks and oceans
And north and south and near and far
Delude me not
In darkness the me and the not-me
meet and melt and fuse and lose their boundaries
Here nothing begins and nothing ends
Nor is here past or future or red or white
In that silence of brooding eternity
I hear the cosmos breathing
In my breaths
Rajendra Garg
54/8,Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
Phone-0141-2785170
Communion
(Rajendra Garg)
I gazed at a star
And the star gazed at me
A midnight communion
A holy trance
With a smiling face and blinking eyes
The star came down to my bed
Pinched my cheeks
Whispered my childhood name
Oh my dear dear friend I gushed
After sixty years I see you again
We used to play and laugh and weep
Seized with one impulse
One afternoon on their shoulders
Towards the riverbank
Among the boulders
They took you away
In vain have I searched for you
From pole to pole
You still a girl of nine
And I a man of three score and ten
Rajendra Garg
54/8,Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
Phone-0141-2785170
After the nuclear holocaust
(Rajendra Garg)
They groan spit blood and tumble
Dark purple clouds black-barred
Rise like mushrooms
They too groan and spit blood
What silence!
The oceans boil
Surging waves devour the sky
Fish molluscs whales dolphins
Shriek vomit blood and down they go
Birds drop from the trees
As fruits roasted on the boughs
Trees are in flames
They shriek vomit blood and tumble
Death rained from the heavens
From the stars from the space from the seas
From the distant continents
How accurate are the computer hands
My lungs burn my skin erupts
The air is all acid
O that I could groan vomit blood and die
The earth is a clod baked in fire
A charred clod hurtling in the space
Life was only an accident indeed
Rajendra Garg
54/8,Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
Phone-0141-2785170
My friend
(Rajendra Garg)
So much of me in you
And you in me
Deluding words
You and me
We frisked along the streets
Played hide-and-seek among trees
Jumped into pools in summer
And every so often
With grinding teeth and quivering lips
Breathing like bellows
Showered our small fists on each other
But the very next minute
We ran along the streets
Hand in hand
One impulse propelled us
Now at seventy-eight
Here on the banks of yamuna
In our native village
Where the ash of our ancestors
Is mingled in the air
Here under the mango tree
I sit on a rock and meditate
I feel a twitch of your thoughts my friend
And all that you may be
Grieving or longing for
Though for half a century
You have been in Vancouver
Rajendra Garg
54/8,Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
Phone-0141-2785170
Healing power
(Rajendra Garg)
They shrugged
Pressed their upper lip
Their cheeks twitched
They turned away their heads
Contempt in their eyes
They walked on
While wounded I lay
Groaning on the road side
Life ebbing away
Through the city streets their caravan passed
Nor do I complain
For everybody is lonely here
But a balmy glance
Of their pitying eyes
Could soothe the wounds
That I received defending them
Glances I feel have healing powers
Godspeed my friends
To your places you go
At my place I lie
Rajendra Garg
54/8,Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
Phone-9414646696
