A song for the One not chosen.

Marked in existence dual
From the closed door into the open.
Peeps the other life
The one that was not chosen.

A carpet bag of moments
Spilling what could have happened
Lying on the path not taken.
My other reality, of identity mistaken.


Otherness of reality lives and longs.
Wallowing in the dust of golden songs.
A fond requiem that we play along.
Consolation for the one not chosen.

For the Gulmohars that wept for Us.

We will meet for one last time
and go our ways from there.
You your way
And I mine…

We will say the unsaid.
Deliver a parting wish.
And just meet for no reason,
Like we always met.

We will contain ourselves.
Just a casual meeting,
for tying up the lose strings
Before this fate intended parting

That was the plan…

We set it up for the Gulmohar Grove.
Our fondly frequented rendezvous.
I imagined you in my favourite white.
You appeared in your deepest blue.

The winds hummed our rain song,
as clouds wept woebegone
Terribly sad and numb we stood,
in silence and in cold rain …

Knowing full well.
We won’t sleep tearless ever,
Thinking of us and our fondest thoughts

For the Gulmohars that wept for us.

Humming a moon song

The night is quiet.
So is the world, and worlds within.
Time is in the arms of somnolence.
Except a thought that prefers silence.
Silence to wake up and speak.

It arises in my half sleep.
Born to a sleepy moment.
Wrapped in the fondness of past.
A thought apt forgotten.

Today when the moon is full
And night past mid
From a vague dream it stirs
Smiling, young and virgin.


Walking back on that moonlane
Humming the same moon song…

Seeking absolutely nothing.

Communion

We had lost ourselves.
Our souls split,
Our spirits vagabond
Had lost meaning.
In the absence of the other.

Aeons later we meet again.
Our faces have changed,
And so has our demeanor.
Yet, I think I know you,
In one eloquent meeting of our eyes.

Black

Gold fish ain't gold
Color of sky isn't blue
All the seven colors
of rainbow aren't true.

For I see only dark
Cold, mute and stark
No colors of imagination
No flights to embark.

Bobbing in the sea of black
In sounds of emptying drain pipes
Cacophony of confused voices
In shadows of dimensionless lives.

Betrayed by god
Deprived by nature
Incarcerated in dark dungeons
Cursed in life forever.

For the lost Neverland.

Waking up to an eerie thought
On a morning of a no place
Wedged between unfamiliar
A cold sandwich of unknowns.

Staring at the blank ceilings
Looking at the stark dark walls
Wakes up the peter pan
Crying for his lost neverland.

Ini, Mini, Mynie, Mo
Ringa ringa ringa rose
At the end of a rainbow
All gone like a Disney show.

The gaily laughter
The giggling brooks
The happy endless blue skies,
All is lost to this cold morn.
And more…

A thousand umbrellas of daisies
The drunkenness of freedom
Flushing meadow of pansies
Unchained unrestrained Liberty

It was a dream of last night
The thrill of an uninhibited flight
Scooping swerving gliding flying
On a jet plane of dream that wasn't.

Staring at the ceilings blank
Three wings of a stopped fan.
Wakes up the Peter Pan
Crying for his lost neverland.

Wedding - 2

Solemn vows in solemn eyes
Unuttered whispers and lonesome sighs
Unhummed dreams, communion’s desire
Fuse together in sacred fire.

Mango tuft sprinkles nectar
Marigold wafts fill up the air
Grains rain, smoke dances
For Love, harmony and abundance

Stars shine, moon smiles
Celestials in the heavens align
Ancient order comes alive
As sacred string between you and I

Souvenir of an exalted moment

The thrill of a uninhibited flight is known only to a incorrigible romantic. White is the colour of his sails and blue the colur of his ocean. The azure emptiness of his skies when he sets out to sail is coloured by the rainbows of his illusions.
The imagination is what colors it…
And when the mirage is broken all the colors he spilled in blue emptiness fall to the ground as some illegible, gauche, dimensionless black scribble. Only as a reminder of a thought that soared right up there, in the skies staring blank in wonderment, bathing in the beauty of the moment.

Art will always be an imitation. Literature would just be a counterfeit of what a human feels for existence or the way it should be. Just an incomplete reproduction of man’s metaphysical stance. Even the most skillful of masters cannot capture in totality what they felt when the idea dawned on them quietly or with the blaze of a stricken matchstick.

There is no individual person in us per se. We are all patterns of multitudes that we carry within. A vague pattern of which makes an individual. So in ourselves we have the capacity of feeling beauty and creating beauty. The part which Apollonius rules.
In ourselves we have the capacity of turning into beasts with the urges of the flesh and the hunger of our insatiable bodies and souls. Everything that would be base for the privilege of being a human as there is surely a division based on certain attributes what makes an animal an animal and human a more developed expression of nature. When the base human takes over, in certain collusion with Bacchus Dionysius rules here.

There are times in life when you fall completely in the realm of all the sublimity that a human can experience. Communion with God or the sense of God , Oneness with nature, madly in love when the ego is razed to the ground, an idea which stimulates the innate delight of discovering something new, a feeling akin to standing on a precipice perhaps on the edge of a mountain or may be while meditating on Vivekanad rock.This is when art might peek in. Just to keep a souvenir of that exalted moment. That is the time when Apollonius smiles.

Seperate lives

Severed by gaping distances
And by percepts Of immediate concerns
Separated by years of being busy
In the otherness of our realities.
We exist...

I in my world
And you in yours.

Perhaps a few breaths would help
To reconcile us in brief repose.
By pictures of our realities
We sync up...

Only to find that we have grown apart.
on the wheels of endless dawns and dusks.
Yet the images do invoke
What within me, was my own.

Or so I thought...

- Pushkar Gunjan (Jan 19, 2009 - 4:30 P.M.)

Laoshe Tea house and Beijing Sunshine

Shivering in the winter chill
And rolling in your laughter
Unaware of the puzzled stares
Mindless of how would we fare
We walked across Tiananmen square.

Strawberries glazed in the fruit candy
Eye glazed with happy smiles
Around the Bare trees of maples
Under the bare blue skies
We frolicked and flirted like there is no tomorrow.

Our faces bright with lovelorn smile
Shining in the Beijing sunshine
A shot of the moment
Frozen and glazed as a wistful smile
Fluttering forever like a happy butterfly.

-Pushkar Gunjan ( Beijing trip, based on the photograph in front of Laoshe Tea house and recalled images of the sunny walk through Tiananmen Square, March 2007)

Divine musician’s pond

Feels like…
Baby steps by the giant ocean shores
Fluttering sails in the blue calm
The height of mountains proud
Longing of vagabond clouds

Embracing Ecstasy, frolicking agony
Touching Sublime, flirting humility
Wrapped in myriad tinkling notes
Spread across canvas of consciousness.

Soaring beyond the frontiers
Of sentient and sub consciousness
Far from this insignificant existence

Reduced to a flippant stone
In the divine musician’s pond.

If the night is so enchanting,What would the morning be like!

If the night is so enchanting
What would the morning be like!
A celebration of blessed reunion
Or a dowsed ember morning.

Fondness of yesters has come alive.
Unaware of inveigled longings.
What has taken eons and fate,
Would it pass by, as silent nothing?

If the night is so enchanting
What would the morning be like!

Longings wish to find utterance.
In verses that wish they had been written.
Yearnings long to find sustenance
In what seems unreal, evanescent.

If the night is so enchanting
What would the morning be like!

Close to dawn a blessed somnolence.
Put to rest the storm within.
The white shroud that it wore,
Was my vague love wrap from the yore.

If the night was enchanting,
Morning was somnolent and sweet.
I slept with fond dreams.
Smitten, cold and smelling of you.

-Pushkar Gunjan

The hymn of communion

I will stand by
Starry eyed and expectant
And sprinkle on the black you paint
A million twinkling stars.

I won’t blink until you paint,
Half a million more
And make them rain below
As downy flakes of snow

I refuse to let the moment dive
Into the cold oblivion
Until we weave the strings
Into a silken magic wing.

I muse and wonder
About my otherness that’s yonder
Would a solemn hymn do?
To make it co-believe communion.

- Pushkar Gunjan

Solitary another

Paint the sun crimson
Trees with curly locks green
Brown for thatched roof hut
Gold burnish for the sheen on stream

A banana tuft peeking above the roof
A school of happy salmons or maybe tadpoles
Half a dozen strokes in the blue
For birds that ride the westerlies

Before you forget and I shy away
Before the moment is gone
And colours dry up

A brown boat, a fishing pole
A boy with butterfly net,
a girl hopping the ropes

All that we muse about
All that we relish in thoughts
In bliss, in love, in communion

Bunch up the spectrum on your canvas
Before the moment blinks
Before the butterfly flutters
Crumbling our world into a solitary another.

- Pushkar Gunjan (Nov 15, 2007)
[Talking about how painting could translate into a poem and poem into music or the other way round and how it would be great to display all of them together. The moments passed by that morning a little hesitant a little charmed with longings of it never ending. Bangalore. That house was aptly named Sneha Kunj]

Tum Se Hi

Eyes cast on destiny’s shoes.
Tiny tiptoeing feet.
Dancing on our gaze’s lane
Like mist wishing to be rain.

Don’t spoil the magic this time
Or ever again
Our charmed gaze will bring
Enchanting flames of Gulmohar spring.

Yet again…

Charm of China

Will the cherry blossom again
In the greens of Hanshan hills
Like a garland thrown from the heavens
On crown above the mirror still

Will the woodpecker peck again
Willfully on the woods of pine
Roving from wood to wood
In the search of tree sap fine

Will the shrivelled boatman sing again
The songs of Jiangsu on a moonlit night
About the girl flower Jasmine
who withered in love as she pined.

How can it be forgotten…

The pearl and peonies
The wisterias trellis in the pavilion of moon
The poem about a girl’s fingers of jade
Songs mellifluous on the melancholic flute.

Carrying in the cauldron of soul
The senses and essence of the east
To wistfully muse within me
In the company of solitude.

- Pushkar Gunjan ( Nov 18, 2007)

Unsaid Muses

A verse that talks to muse
Shakes it head on life’s ruse
Hapless in hands of divine will
Something that writes itself until…

It loses itself in muse again
Wishing it could feel
The form, the spirit and rhythm.
And be born like divinity’s will.

Or will it be aborted
Unborn, unfeeling, unsaid.

Perhaps…

Love - 1

Under clear blue skies
And honey coloured sunshine
Gazing on the vast plains
Of green grazing pastures.
We breathe in…

The wonderment of our imaginations
Our wanderlust passions
And something really significant
For each other, a pleasant enchantment.

Embracing our new found intoxicant
Love for ourselves and the cosmos
We open our arms to embrace
The sublime in us and existence.

Or simply stated
The idea of being loved.
Immensely unconditionally.

Shalimar The Clown - A Casual Critique

Well,writing a review for Salman Rushdie or any such heavyweight is like telling Lata where all did she falter in her rendition and how square should the bat be for a square drive to Sachin.
However, since I spent close to two weeks reading it please let me feel like a John Updike or a Pankaj Mishra for sometime.
The whole book is divided into five sections – India, Boonyi, Max, Shalimar the clown and Kashmira.
Generally, in three of the sections namely – Boonyi, Max, Shalimar the clown…Rushdie pirouettes, dives, scoops, trapezes, somersaults with words as usual, conjures magic, casts spells, philosophizes and paints such a romantic picture on his canvas that you are spellbound by this man’s capability to conjure up what is call magical realism. In another breath you can say he has at times brandished his genre and capability in that art a little too much. Perhaps, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and James Joyce from whom Rushdie sought his magical realism inspiration, both would wince at such an opulent magical realism if they were to read it.

In fact, this piece of his has a lot more sanity and coherence than ‘The Satanic Verses’(understood just 30-40% of it because it insanely shuttles between myriad scenes, settings and locales. Its allusions to Greek Mythology to the characters from British soaps and advertisements and more…my own low general awareness being one of the major factors) or for that matter even ‘Midnight’s children’(Midnight’s children would score heavily in terms of the narrative which is not as fragmented). ‘Shalimar the clown’ reads like a different book in the first and last chapter. In the interregnum is where he justifies his literary giant status.

One problem with his allusions, references and opulent, at times forced magical realism is that his characters become puppets and that quells the development of multi -dimensions in the characters. A touch of lyrical quality in his writing, he careens a lot towards determinism which makes it awkward to take with his liberalism. With references of Rahu-Ketu the invisible antagonistic forces shaping up things and other invisible phantoms, sorcery, demons and prognostications he renders his characters helpless. Perhaps, that is the worldview he wants to share with us and to an extent most of us would agree that however much we might want to be in control most of it is beyond us.
A little of his usage of portent and omens is a reminder of Shakespeare (whatever little I have read) where certain spooky bizarre events would augur the forthcoming devastation and destruction(It happens on so many occasions in this book . Rushdie does it beautifully and you can at times feel that like an involved raconteur he holds the audience charmed.

The way he shapes up his events and characters(if he shapes them up and doesn’t capture them under the effect of hallucinogens) and proceeds, tells a lot about his outlook having the reference frame of ‘the butterfly effect i.e. sensitive dependence on initial conditions an important aspect of chaos theory’.
Shalimar the clown can be rated a few notches below Midnight’s children if you consider the whole narrative but if you were to consider a third of the book it has been written by a divine hand and can compare to the best of writings of contemporary literature. Perhaps he borrowed God’s pen to write those parts, if I can overshadow in my flourish the aspect of his atheism.
His inconsistency is the failing of the book. The disappointment is most acute at the end of the book which ends like a B-grade Bollywood movie. Kashmir is forgotten, the tales and travails of the people loses grip on you and you are propelled from a poignant tale of love-betrayal and the tale of Kashmir to an inadequately sketched revenge tale.You can’t but help but remember those revenge sagas of Bollywood and Hollywood and that brings down the divinity.
There are certain anachronisms for Soap operas on the Television of Harud Yambarzal…Late eighties we never had soaps on tv and moreover there were no ‘item numbers’ then…Abdullah not remembering Firdaus’ birthday is again too urbane an idea for Kasmiri village folks.
At some places he has ignored some aspects like Hamirdev Kacchawa the army officer remains throughout his career spanning 30 years in Kashmir only. That isn’t the way postings in the armed forces work.
The tale specific ruminations:
The story as it was, should have remained the story of Kashmir which he tells beautifully through…Shalimar the clown, Boonyi, Abdullah, Pyarelal kaul, shiv sagar sharga,zoon misri, nazarebaddor, himal , gonwanti, greego brothers, Max Ophuls, Firdaus, Pamposh, Bombur, Harud, Peggy Ophuls, Kashmira, Hamirdev Kacchawa, Woods,Big man misri, yuvraj, Sardar Harbans…and some others.
Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s musings and philosophizing is beautifully captured….
Boonyi’s character developed the best, multi dimensional and the one which comes out as living the most.
Shalimar the clown however, doesn’t blossom as a character as much as Boonyi does. You can sense his undying , insane love for Boonyi when he says after they make love at Khelmarg – “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any childen by another man, I’ll kill the children also” which is taken as a sweet nothing by Boonyi. However, that is the pivot of the whole saga. After Boonyi betrays him despite the exemplary support of Pachigam for their marriage the disappointment, hatred, embarrassment has been a little underplayed. He becomes a senseless zombie in a murderous rage.
That is why Boonyi’s character evokes a lot more response in whatever happens to it.
The episode when Boonyi leaves Kashmir for Delhi and how heart in heart she knows she will never see him again and the way the deal is struck between Max and Boonyi(“Don’t ask for my heart, because I am tearing it away and…..I’ll be heartless but you will not know it because a I’ll be a perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you ‘ll receive a perfect forgery of love” ) in such a cold manner that it gives the reader a chill and disgust so deep that you can identify with Shalimar the clown’s hatred. The episode beautifully describes her disappointment with her new life and how she misses Kashmir and Pachigam, her folks.
The episode when Boonyi comes back to Pachigam disgraced…the treatment is super sensitive and Rushdie weaves in gold here. The blizzard, how Boonyi hears nothing and can see shadows dancing around her; ignorance of her father and Zoon’s telling her that they have declared her dead officially and how the living dead live is very heart rending. Later at night when her father comes over and talks too her from outside in the dead of the night is a heart breaker and could not have been dealt with better. His monologue about the living dead is a pure magic of imagery, hindu philosophy and Kabir’s philosophy about the living dead. Rushdie has touched the frontiers of excellence here and you can’t help but exult after each paragraph by sheer admiration for the master.

What could have been a tale of Kashmir by a raconteur who is par excellence
ended like a forced fusion razzmatazz.

Overall, good reading but as soon as you try and cast Rushdie into some kind of literary Godhood ,Rushdie disappoints. And there is no place for a fallen God in my personal pantheon, at least for now in my ‘personal unenlightened opinion’.

Moon Song - 2

I hum your moonsong
To the freezing winter moon
Partly to a thought far away.

Shining crystals shimmer
Teary eyed in tinkling delight
The droplets roll down
As sighs of icy vapours rise.

A million stars gaze below
At million lives littered
Making one glittering umbrella
The only abode we share.

Quite contrary to what we thought.

Moon song - 1

In the quietness of moments
A night that slumbers
Dreaming of a dream,
That lives far and yonder.

The moon is awake all night
Dazzling in its own light
Smiling at a flying bird
Hoping its daybreak…