Landfall!

The breaker crashes on the shore,
digs deep inside the surrendering sand
and sucks them into its own fold
bringing huge chunks of land
collapsing into a permanent ruin!

The breaker, with its sweeping embrace,
moves thus, to another part of the shore and
brings havoc with its maddening roar and
destruction, unheard so far
during its milder sunshine time.
The reflection of the moon
loses its shape and lays stretched
and contoured like a mark of
injury, on the fuming waves that
pushes the breakers forcefully from
shore to shore.

The breaker relentlessly works,
spraying its salt, sand and rain,
trying to undo what it did, ever since
it mated with the shore years ago,
in an unknown lane,
with an unknown face
and an unknown feeling.

Thus, even today,
as the sound of breakers keep you
and me awake through the nights,
nature keeps silently creating new lands,
building new lives and a new earth,
a new you, and a new me,
in unknown new shapes!

Ruby Rai, revisited....

I have written thousands of words and poured hundreds of my emotions in these pages to understand the real meaning and power of 'waiting'. I have now probably exhausted all my energy and my limited stock of vocabulary to glorify 'waiting'. Here is a song, which I find most appropriate to place here, which will serve as a reminder, that I will still be waiting:

Thanks to Rupankar who has done exceedingly well in rendering this song and thanks to You Tube for making it available!

Ruby Rai revisited....   

Unforgettable feel

Year goes
just as you went.
Year will also come,
just as you will come back
being you, or in some
other form.
Love will always find you
in anything, anywhere
wearing a mask not looking
like you, but in spirits
and feel, just like you.
Your touches
will unmistakably expose you
till you are unmasked once
again,
just like the last time in the
wilderness of the savannahs.  

Breathless love

She was like a dune of quick sand,
but due to torrential rains and floods, 
she was covered with 
moss and colorful algae
making her look peaceful
with extended arms,
welcoming travelers to step
on her.
But underneath, just like the death trap of
the quick sand, she hid a massive
one way journey to the graveyard
where hundreds of corpses are
still taking their deep breaths
in memory of their love.

Love and death in her
lived one in the other,
either as a breathless corpse, or
as a last breath,
still trying to escape!

Desire

Death gave me a
passionate kiss.
When compared to yours,
it tasted bland. While
death took me away
and ended my journey,
yours started another,
by keeping me burning
with a desire to live
every moment.

Thoughts and truths

I, for years,
believed in you being
there,
seen or unseen,
felt or not felt.
And in reality in the end,
you always came true
like what I
thought you to be,
shaped by my wishes,
realized by my dreams.

But from the beginning,
your thoughts for me
were unreal,
like a bad dream and
a curiosity of a sin
yet not committed.
Thus your deep belief
in my being only an imagination,
often comes true
when you don't find me
anywhere near you,
either in your sleep,
or in your waking hours.

Afterwards

The Gulmohor still stands tall 
and blooms in front of my house and
it perhaps still misses me gazing 
at it and at times, touching it to feel
the morning dew on it. It perhaps wonders 
why I am not seen any more, walking
over the red carpet of flowers that it
spread every morning for me.

Perhaps the owner of that  tiny little kiosk
on that highway to Malawi wonders, if I have
stopped buying cigarettes, since I don't visit
him any more. Yes, I have stopped the vice
long ago, but thoughts of him still makes my
lung heavy with smoke. 
My cat Mano, who left home and got lost in
the wilderness of Chongwe, perhaps came back
and sneaked in through the window, hoping to be
once again sitting near my neck while I watched TV.
Perhaps, he even waited for me after I left
home without saying "goodbye" to him.

As time passes through the desolate Savannah,
the breeze that dances over its tall grasses, perhaps
still looks for me to hold its hand to take it to the 
horizon and dip it into the free flowing Zambezi
to come up again for a fresh breather.
Looking at the empty tent next to the centurion
Baobab, the group of wandering Warthogs perhaps
still sniffs for some movements inside, expecting
me to come out any time with my cameras. They
perhaps, still keep posing for a photograph.

And you, perhaps still wonder about me and if I
was really ever there, or was I just a figment
of your imagination!

A human song

As the days pass me by,
and the nights still
halt at my door steps,
the seven chakras act
in unison,
rendering its own ragas-
its own unique solfege in
human form.
In the end,
love spurts in an
empty space, filled with
hope and hopelessness.

Shades

The colour of the ocean
when I was there yesterday,
was a deeper shade of
Blue than it is today,
just like the sky
which changes its colour
with the advent of the
clouds in it.
But both the ocean and
the sky remain intensely
original in all its shades,
keeping inside in their
huge embraces,
the beginning of life and
its end.
Likewise,
my mind's colours also
change only in their edges,
while fiercely remaining loyal
to all its inner shades,
as you relentlessly keep
appearing and disappearing
in my dreams,
as also in my waking hours
where you remain an entity
no where to be seen.

Man & woman forever...

There was this man
and there was this woman.

There was this man
and there was this woman.

There was this man
and there was this woman.

There was this man
and there was this woman.

There was this man
and there was this woman.

There was this man
and there was this woman.

And they remained as they were.
Forever.

Salt and sea

Watching the sea gull flying away and

no other form of life around me,

I realised that I was my only stake

which I could exchange with

no one as a barter.
Apart from the roar of the sea
that silenced everything on the shore,
there was only the sound of a call 
from deep within
and the voice sounded familiar and far.
Hearing this,
I deliberately jumped into the ocean
to remain anointed in salt
and in order to make my last efforts
somewhat tasteful.

Unseen

Did you hear what I said
in my silence?
Did you see what I saw in
my dreams?
When you hear my silence
and see my dreams,
I will wait to hear your
footsteps on the dried leaves
in my driveway!

Stain

The stain, like a mark
a sort of a drop of
mixture of oil, curry,
lentil soup and sauce
on my blouse,
stares at me.
Acidic, corrosive but
odour less enough not to
distract much,
it sits quietly on its own.
After several washes and
vigorous use of bleach,
I failed to remove this one
small patch of dirt, from
my overtly sanitized cover,
that hides my own self,
until one day, when I saw
a tiny drop of blood oozing
out from a hole near
my heart and
staining my blouse where
the old mark still showed.

I realized, that while
I was bleaching my blouse
everyday, an wound unknown to me,
kept bleeding from my heart
leaving marks on my
blouse, making it into
a permanent feature.

While the stain changed its
colour several times
as I washed and bleached,
the wound remained as it was,
staining every blouse that I
changed.

Leased life

Moments and days
were like years
when you were not there.
And when you came,
my few hours turned
into a lifetime.
Life thus, I get
on an hourly lease
from you. Every hour!

The untitled song

Like a dog I sit and wait
sniffing around me.
Like a bird I am hung in the
air, flying around my own
small sky that never left me.
Like a conductor I wave my
baton and the orchestra moves in
a wave, and then freezes.

And when all these burst into
a song,
I remember everything that you
spoke. And everything that was
left unspoken.

Unnatural

I tugged at the creeper
not knowing that it connected
all the trees like a mesh. 
First, there was a roar
as the branches shook in
pain and their natural
balance tilted, with most
of the creeper coming
in my hand.
And then a moment later,
the whole jungle was
On me,
crushing me to the
ground,
for unknowingly pulling
something that belonged to
them,
naturally.

Day & night

There is nothing
outside
that I have not found inside.
Sunlight till now, so brightened 
my senses,
that I just forgot 
to switch on the lights 
deep inside my home.

My own world

I am my world

and there is nothing outside

of it,

which is not there inside me.

Thus, looking for love

is easier now,

since digging deeper

within my own self

is neither an unknown act

nor does it need any validation 

from you.  

The art of an artist

The artist loves
and draws,
paints and pauses
and stops and looks back
and picks up a new
canvas
to suit what he wants. 
Just as the gardener digs,
plants, trims and cares,
all, for his garden to take 
a new look,
weeding now and then,
as he must, changing his
tools as suitable to him,
just as the artist changes
colours and his brushes, 
just as he must..
The weeds and the plants,
the colours and the brushes 
thus remain their tools
in pursuit of their scapes. 

Staircase

She often wakes up
in the middle of the night.
listens to the silence
surrounding of the big house
filled to its brim with her dreams.
She moves and tosses on
the huge bed meant for two
but which mostly remains
empty, as others have entered
their own protected world,

since with each passing year,
men, women and children,
all grow up and find 
their own world of solitude.
Her mind, in such moments of
being with her own self, goes to
the ground floor, where she knows,

awaits her soul, her own reflection,

where she can stand naked 
and bare.
Slowly she climbs down from her
bed and tip toes near the staircase
and looks down.
The dimly lit landing awaits her
foot steps, and beyond that, a semi
darkened room, in which a single
night lamp softly glows in anticipation
of her union with her own soul. As she moves
near the first few steps, she holds on to the
railing and stops. She cannot move any 
further as this strange feeling of being
watched, creeps into her and pulls
her back, as if, allowed to go ahead,
she will fall, missing
the steps, down on to the ground floor.
She stands there for a long time,
looking at the room at the end of
the staircase, and smiles, thinking
that she will come back once again
tomorrow, when the house will be
sleeping again.
This goes on every night, when she 
sleep walks till the top of the 
staircase, and then senses prevent her
from falling down at the last moment
as if by a mystery mechanism, she survives
a fall and goes back to sleep
and the whole house breaths a huge
sigh of relief.
But unknown to everyone,
at the bottom of the staircase,
await a room
and a love story never told.

State of being

A century from now,
one fine morning,
if it will be the same sky
above us, if the same Atlantic
will still be roaring in anger 
at night, as the high flying 
intercontinental flights ignore
its might. If the same duties
and obligations do not leave us 
to say all that we want to say.
If, while you will be shivering in the 
blistering cold, looking at the piled
up snow in your driveway,
Or, if an occasional hurricane wil
still be flooding your basement and making
you wonder if all those paintings will
be caught by the humid air surrounding
the County, and I will be wiping the
bids of sweat forming on my forehead.
And if you and I remember all that were
spoken and felt a century ago, 
Then you will find me at your doorsteps,
and ask for your hands for as many
lives as we will be granted by God?"

Ventriloquist

Long ago,
you took all my
attentions.
My mind and my body
were immersed in you
and in your physical self
in the realms of reality
and dreams.
Now away from those
dreams,
I have found a new
distraction and a
new passion. I have
immersed myself in
your shadow
and its various silhouetted
shapes,
just like the ventriloquist
who keeps entertaining 
with his many voices,
each time sounding
differently, while
expressing his own
collage of pain.

Borrowed Life

Sensing rigor mortise,
I stood up.
Moved my limbs out
of their lethargic state
and neatly packed my
suitcase to leave.
A box of books and
a stack of paintings
reminded me of my days
and the reasons thereof.
I waited.
You waited.
The suitcase, the books
the doormats, the room,
the walls around it and
and the wall clocks on them,
                 - we all waited.
Neither you uttered
anything, nor could I.
Time passed us.
Seasons changed.
Stillness surrounded me
as I embraced the
world inside my own self,
outside of which, was
no other possession that
I could say was mine,
except those few books
some paintings
and a few breaths that I
borrowed from you.

Life as a river

You were the meteor from which
I was born,
you are the dust
to which I shall be buried.
The time in between
I lived as a river,
flowing all over you,
sometimes flooding the
valley and sometimes,
quietly surviving the
droughts of the season,
to dance again with 
you in the rains.

In your shape

I want to become a sea.
To withstand the high and
Low tides of your
Love, and to
Sleep on your shores,
Take your shape,
And spread out far, till the
Lost horizon, or live
as the wild waves,
wetting the depth
of your soul.

Forever

The river never flowed.

it flows.

Now,

every moment

and

every day,

as it did for years unknown.

I was never born.

And I never died.

I live.

Now,

every moment

and every day,

just as I did in every life.

without death,

without birth.

Thus,

I was never reincarnated.

I simply waited for you

to take birth, again and again.

That's how, as

love waxes and wanes

in your several lives,

I stay on, ignorant of your

past,

present

and future,

knowing fully well that there

will be a full moon soon,

shining bright in your love