Demand and Supply

CHORUS: Tough and long

                Is our life, but we live

               For moments of joy

                Spells of glee

                Happiness is all we need.

Person 1: what Happiness?

Person 2: which Happiness?

Person 3:  a meaningless word!

CHORUS: Meaningless?

                The truth of our life…

                Focus of our being…

                Meaningless?

P1: Qualify!

P2: Qualify!

P3: Qualify!

TOGETHER: Qualify Happiness!

CHORUS: Pleasure needs

no qualification

you feel it bone to bone

like love,

like energy,

like life!

P1: Romantic hopes!

P2: You’ll never know!

P3: Never know what you want!

CHORUS: But some happiness

                is all we want!

P1: Qualify!

P2: Qualify!

P3: Qualify

CHORUS: Qualify how?

P1: What joy?

P2: Fat or slim?

P3: Tall or short?

P1: Black or white or…….maybe?

P2: 17^th floor or ground floor?

P3: American stocks or Indian?

P1: Management or sports?

P2: Spiritual or physical?

ONE VOICE FROM CHORUS: Let me think…

                                                       Management I think

                                                        Management I want

P1: For 30 yrs ?

                Only that?

                No sports? Sure?

                No spiritual, physical?

                No American Indian?

                No slim or fat?

                No cheese or macroni?

CHORUS : No I want that…

P: What? Which?

P: Qualify! Qualify!

An open market

You can buy

But a smart buyer

You must be

That’s why qualify

What product

Is your Happiness?

168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam I Ever Had A ‘Good Tuesday’? I

Caught in the middle of a monsoon viral and visiting relatives, I was way behind my schedule for reviewing Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours. My deadline was looming large. I was stressed.

But by the time I finished reading the book I had not only recovered from the viral and made peace with a grumbling kin, but also managed to overcome a creative block, caught up on my French lessons and was still left with sufficient time to write this piece. I was quite happy.
The first thing Vanderkam, also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues, says in 168 Hours is that we have more time than we think.
To be honest, for a long time I was scared to open 168 Hours. It was probably another one of those self-improvement books that insist on a strict time-table, something I have been averse to since school days. But Vanderkam doesn’t take the conventional line, though she does insist on keeping a log book on how you spend your day.
Vanderkam begins 168 Hours with the description of a “good Tuesday” — a day when she practically runs around the city of New York without upsetting a single strand of hair — and says that it is possible to make every day of the week satisfying. She presents a new world indeed, one in which we don’t have a frugal 24-hour budget but a luxuriant 168-hour account. Vanderkam made me look at life not in compartments of 24-hour-long days, but as a week of 168 hours. By changing the cramped scenery she had grabbed my attention.
And that’s when she lured me into keeping a log of my days while insisting that the concept of time-crunch is a cultural narrative, a myth. She projects paucity of time as a culural psychosis.
I kept the log but was, of course, still unconvinced with her other argument. In two days my logs were telling a strange tale. Vanderkam was right. We are not busier than our ancestors but were reading, and internalising, W.H. Davies’ Leisure — “What is this life if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare?” — in school when we had all the time in the world. Cultural narrative? A myth? Hmmm.
My logs told me that there were some things I was doing much more than I thought: Internet surfing, sleeping, watching TV; while there were other things I was devoting very little time to: exercising, managing money, eating. But this time Vanderkam didn’t make me feel happy at all. While she was saying everything needs time, she also wanted me to believe that I had all the time in the world to do what I wanted. I felt there were a lot of things she wasn’t taking into account, like stress and motivation.
To make her point, perhaps, Vanderkam introduces Theresa Daytner who owns a large revenue company and is a mother of six. Ms Daytner goes trekking, spends time with her children, arranges a surprise party for her husband and meets US President Barack Obama. The key is not that she does so much but that she does it all with such ease. I found myself wanting the Daytner formula but Vanderkam gave me none.
Instead, Vanderkam asked me to look deeper. Defining work as “activities advancing you towards your career”, one of the things she spurs her reader to do is to find the “perfect job”: “Expecting someone else to have conceived of your perfect job is roughly similar to expecting someone else to read your mind”. Then she asks a series of questions and with each one you inch towards clarity: What are your core competencies, what job would exactly match your competencies, how could you create that job for yourself?
All this probing brought me close to the unaccountable aspects of my confusing logs. Like Sid Savara, whose story she narrates, I was spending too much time in household chores. Much like Sid, I liked cooking and keeping my house nice and pretty, but it seemed to be a drain on my time and energy. So I “outsourced” the “non-work” and committed that time to a much-needed exercise schedule. I also found time to dig up some folk music to satiate my parched creativity.
168 Hours is very communicative and Vanderkam’s voice is both convincing and assertive. But, she uses too many words and is often repetitive.
Nevertheless, Vanderkam has a lot to say and her book is not meant to be read in a hurry. For example, a chapter which deals with achieving a breakthrough requires you to visualise the next level in your career and figure out the people who will take you there. She clearly demands time and introspection. Fortunately, Vanderkam doesn’t look at readers as corporate prototypes but understands that her readers may include super-moms juggling house, kids and demanding jobs, couples facing mid-life ennui, and the young and ambitious. As she takes a fresh look at time, Vanderkam makes life look less burdensome, and the “want-to-do” list easy and achievable.
I had been pushing my French lessons for the-day-when-I-would-have-time. But now it’s back on my weekly calendar. Every French word I learn turns my day into a “good Tuesday”.

Where the Serpent Lives BY Ruth Padel I Beauty, beasts & betrayal I

A serpent lives in the heart of the jungle and the abyss of the mind; that is also where author Ruth Padel rears her story. The novel Where the Serpent Lives (Little Brown Books, Rs 595) by the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin progresses by creating reflections of the human emotions in nature. It is a tricky formula that works for Padel in some places but leaves her exposed in most others.

Where the Serpent Lives opens in the nest of a King Cobra as field zoologist Richard observes a snake secure its eggs. From this rainforest in Karnataka, the story makes a fine leap to a house on Primrose Hill, London, where Rosamund, who could once make heads turn like sunflowers, is trying to deal with the jungle in her mind. She is in a state of emotional paralysis, caught as she is between a profligate husband, Tyler, and an increasingly reclusive teenaged son, Russel. Even though she knows Tyler would “romance a rhinoceros if there was nothing else on offer”, Rosamund is unable to get herself to do anything about it. Killburn in London is another frequented address in the story. Here an aspiring singer and unwed mother, Anka, leads a tenuous life shuffling between her young daughter and an unreliable boyfriend.
The death of Rosamund’s dog pushes Russel towards an emotional crash and estranges the couple. Rosamund’s long-time friend Irene, who is married to Richard, advises her to visit India. Richard, though true to his wife, has
been in love with Rosamund and struggles to rid himself of the obsession. The story reaches its climax when bombs go off at London tube stations while Rosamund is still in India — she must find love, make peace with her father
and reclaim her son.
Padel has an undeniable eye for detail, particularly colours, but she fails to trim her story. She mediates beautifully between man and animals but gets distracted and doesn’t pursue her ideas till the end. For instance, she describes local foxes keeping a watch on Rosamund’s family, but pulls at this thread only in jerks and abandons it too soon. In the human realm too, Padel is constantly distracted as she uses precious words to trace the complex story of each of her characters. She makes an effort to season the connection between Rosamund and Anka with suspense, but with early clues like same endearments repeated to the two women by a man, renders herself predictable and weak.
Since a significant part of the action takes place in India, the author tries to draw on Indian symbols and folklore relating to snakes. But she seems to have picked the first pantheist chord that came her way: Shiva and the folk tale Nagamadala, made immortal by Girish Karnad. Padel is at her imaginative best when she sees glimpses of the wild in humans and their emotions: the morals of a black mamba, “Tyler’s jaw, wide like a bull frog’s, gobbling Daisy’s lips”... She is also terrific at writing love scenes, but they get repetitive and boring.
Padel explores the far recesses of the human mind with a creative yet scientific flourish. Characters have a parallel animal alter ego indicative of their state of mind. Rosamund associates herself with a Rusty Spotted Cat “which slips through the undergrowth, trying not to be seen by larger predators”. Her son Russel, on the other hand, is Kaa, an Indian Rock Python. Tyler is associated with a tiger though that fails to account for the strong streak of deceit in him. Betrayal is a constant subject in Padel’s novel — it reappears in Rosamund’s relationship with her father and Anka’s with her mother.
Most of the characters in the book are tied to nature by profession or by instinct and time and again they are set off to explore the jungles where the narrative adopts a Discovery channel-like tone, describing the habits and habitat of snakes, badgers and owls. Padel is known for her nature poetry and the mastery with which she creates the sounds and music of the rainforest cannot be denied. But the melody turns into a cacophony as her characters clamour to “detoxify” their lives of betrayal.
Padel engages nature to give her ordinary story a unique colour. In that, she succeeds. She fails, however, to use that colour to her advantage. Nature remains a mere appendage to the story and rarely enjoys the writer’s full commitment as she flits from one subject to the other. Perhaps, in line with the theme of the novel, Padel herself betrays nature she so dearly loves.

Outlaw by Roy Moxham I Life & times of a bandit queen I

It wasn’t the best or the worst of times, but it must have been the strangest when a British archive restorer chose to write to a bandit languishing in an Indian jail. The letter, written in June 1991, fetched an instant response. Phoolan Devi, who had just stood and lost in elections, wrote back to Roy Moxham asking him for financial help.
Nine years after her assassination, Moxham attempts to resurrect the association which spanned several letters and visits to India. However, his book Outlaw is as much about Moxham himself and his India adventure as it is about the bandit who became a lawmaker.
Much has been said and written about Phoolan Devi for the vengeance she sought against injustice. Born into the bramble of caste and gender, Phoolan had a fairly unfair share of reversals. But neither stoicism nor silence suited her style. Armed with a double-barrel gun and an acerbic tongue, she chose to fight back. Years later, she gave up the gun before the pictures of goddess Durga and Mahatma Gandhi, but retained her tongue. This is the point where most accounts about her draw to a conclusion, but Outlaw takes off from here.
Moxham describes her as small and thin when he met her for the first time in February 1994 after her release from prison; nothing like the fighting-fit woman in fatigues who had surrendered in 1983. He meets the inevitable question of the nature of his relationship with Phoolan headlong. He confesses of being tempted to propose a marriage of convenience to Phoolan when she confided of being under pressure to remarry. He clarifies at the cost of appearing rude to the memory of his dead friend, “… had she been more beautiful, I might perhaps have had second thoughts about our future relationship.”
The Phoolan Devi Moxham befriends is not the gun-wielding outlaw one would imagine. She comes across as a cheerful, plain-speaking woman who spent little on show even during her halcyon days. The book works much like a photo album. The pictures the writer presents are interesting, be it Phoolan bargaining with a vegetable vendor, blessing a shy Dimple, the daughter-in-law of Mulayam Singh Yadav, or Moxham talking to Ravi Shastri. The language is simple and bare, the flip side being that it doesn’t cover up where the writer descends into banality.
During most of his India visits, Moxham stayed with Phoolan or her immediate family. He describes her house as frugally furnished, without any servants and full of near and distant relatives at all times. On his first visit, Phoolan’s brother tricks Moxham into sending him a camera. This is the first in a series of incidents where those around Phoolan come out as coveting her legacy. After her death the relatives bickered in public while the case against those accused of her assassination lingered. Moxham uses the milieu around Phoolan to understand and explore India. Not all his shots are close-ups of Phoolan. More frequently he zooms out and indulges himself with brow-beaten briefs on the great Indian railways crush, the differences between North and South Indian cultures or the political picture. He is, however, more engaging when he observes in the vein of a sahib in India: Roses stay wrapped in cellophane, beds shared by those of the same sex, blasting fan like sleeping under a draught or the girl not going to her own engagement. Phoolan Devi’s political career had kept her in the news years after she gave up arms. Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, much to Phoolan’s dismay, carried her story to an international audience. In an appended note, Moxham says he could not get himself to see the film till 2009.
He documents his own fruitless fight against its release in London while in India Arundhati Roy fought fiercely against the film. The book also suggests the possibility of Phoolan’s husband being covertly paid to get her consent to the film.
A circus of feuding relatives, funeral and politics followed Phoolan’s assassination in 2001. Moxham says it robbed Phoolan of the dignity she deserved in death. Outlaw attempts to redeem what was so lost. It reconstructs Phoolan as a brave woman who lives the burden of a traumatic past and an endangered future. Yet it shows, ironically, how susceptible the once bandit queen was to harm. Moxham neither indicts nor condones, but he is a crucial witness to the legend of Phoolan Devi, the woman who not only survived but also prevailed.

King Asoka: A Love Story by Harish Singhal I The blood, intrigue that made an emperor I

History may be about the dead, but it is never dead. A young fact grows into a youthful story over time. It gradually matures into a belief, then turns into a doubt-ridden narrative to end as a fiction. A writer intervenes and recreates history during any of these stages. The facts about the Maurya empire are over 2,100 years old as Harish Singhal works on them to churn out his debut novel, King Asoka: A Love Story.
A great deal has been said and written about the Mauryas, much of it sheer theory based on fragments of evidence spared by time. In social memory Mauryan emperor Ashoka was one of the greatest Indian kings of all time who journeyed from being Chanda, or the terrible, to Dhamma, the righteous. While much information about Ashoka’s rule is drawn from the pillars erected by him and from Buddhist texts, few reliable facts are known about his personal life. So what happened during the Kalinga war that transformed the king’s heart? The most accepted answer, and one supported by the inscriptions on Ashokan pillars, points to the massive bloodshed during the war. However, storytellers over the ages have tried to add to the motive. In this novel, Singhal allows history its due place yet weaves a fine mesh of fiction around it.
The novel opens with a dramatic episode of the eleven-year-old Ashoka’s brush with death in Kalinga. With that we step into a marvellous recreation of ancient India. There is no dearth of action here with palace intrigues, princes scrambling for the throne and queens fighting for their sons while King Bindusar struggles to keep together the vast empire he inherited from his father, Chandragupta Maurya. This is also an India still under the influence of Greek and Persian conquests. In fact, with the western border of the Mauryan empire reaching Kandahar, Greek-Persian empires are now India’s neighbours. The signs of Alexander’s visit are alive in the queens bartered at war.
Ashoka is an unfavoured prince to begin with. His mother Suba is a simple woman, uncomfortable with the role she must play to project her son as a prospective successor of the king. In the fierce palace environment she herself falls prey to an ambitious Livia, a Greek queen of the now dead Chandragupta Maurya, who takes Ashoka under her aegis. Ashoka is a thinking youth, an upright prince whose relationship with women always lands him in trouble. Ashoka beats the crown price at a horse race, thus presenting his claim to the crown, but that is not enough. Crown Prince Sasima flees Taxila at the first sign of revolt. Ashoka, who is sent in his place, decapitates the rebel and presents the head to his father. However, Sasima’s mother, the Queen, manipulates the King to forgive her son. As the King inches towards death Ashoka must fight for his crown. The struggle culminates in carnage at the palace with the queens drawing the daggers. Ashoka becomes the King and though he has a wife and two children, Mahendra and Sanghmitra, he has not yet found the woman who will share his throne. He finds that woman in Anga, grand-daughter of a former Taxila governor, and marries her after a long pursuit. The Kalinga war looms after a period of marital bliss.
The cause of the battle has not yet been clearly established by historians. Singhal picks an interesting lead as he leads us to a battle to the death for the statue of Jina, the Jain god. The predictable bloodshed follows but a unique turn in Ashoka’s life leads him to adopt Buddhism.
Singhal sticks to realistic descriptions and relies on imagination. The result is admirable. He has a powerful story to tell and it works well till he decides to explain what is much known. That Ganga was worshipped or the horse was a sign of majesty aren’t facts that need re-telling, particularly when there is a remarkable story at hand. His characters are well-etched and consistent, but as war approaches he tries to throw a few commoners into the arena to evoke the pathos of war. The story is unable to digest these last-minute creations and the effect is lost.
The narrative loses steam after the war but the writer is in no mood to sign off. He details what is inscribed on the pillars and ends only after Ashoka’s death, not realising that for the reader the novel ended 20 pages back.
Bollywood’s big-budget 2001 movie Asoka also traced a similar story of the king. Despite a power-packed performance by Shah Rukh Khan, Ashoka emerges as a ruthless murderer who gives a kill-all order to his soldiers when he thinks his beloved is dead. In Singhal’s story, however, Ashoka is set for greatness: he is brave but not ruthless, a much more complex character. Contrary to the biopic he doesn’t kill for love, instead he renounces violence for it. Both stories have their own version of how Chandagupta Maurya’s sword passed on to Ashoka and of the love angle. Singhal’s rendition of the intimate is bold and exquisite while the the song-and-dance element in the film falls flat.
From the Greek princesses to the tribals of Kalinga, the sheer expanse of the novel is exhilarating. Singhal churns together fact and fiction to produce a magical story of love. When Ashoka attacks Taxila to claim his throne, Livia tells her story as she waits for the first sign of his victory: the story of the Greek princess who was brought to India as a war bride of Chandrgupta Maurya. In the words of author genius, anyone can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

A Break in the Circle by Sharmila Kantha I Devoid of humour, full of mistakes I

In the heart of “small town” India is an unexplored world of stories. Sharmila Kantha at best reminds us of that treasure in the backyard. It’s a pity however that she stands in the midst of a ready field that she is unable to harvest.

Based in Patna, the story of A Break in the Circle focuses on the life of a middle-class family. Anuradha is a housewife whose days revolve around her children, husband and parents. House maid, visiting relatives, weddings and TV serials are the other elements that claim her. The news of a visit by a professor who had left the town years ago sends ripples across her placid life. She is strangely worried about the “requirements” of one who has lived in America for 20 years, and establishes an online contact with him. The professor’s past, a topic of common discussion in the town, is spiced with stories of an affair with a student, Manvi Prasad. Close on the heels of the professor’s visit, Kallu Chacha comes visiting with his family. His groom-hunting mission disrupts Anuradha’s plans to shop and prepare for the professor’s visit, as does the arrival of a troubled couple from Delhi. The couple is in Patna to find a solution to their problems and it falls on Anuradha and her husband to help them out too. In the midst of this, Anuradha must also dissuade a cousin from pursuing a modeling career in Delhi as it will bring bad name to the family. The different strains of the story begin to climax as the date of the professors arrival draws close. So while Kallu Chacha must find a suitable son-in-law, the Delhi couple a solution to its childlessness and the maid must marry off her daughter. A dramatic end takes shape as Anuradha and her husband are going to pick the professor from the airport. Veil falls off the face of an arrogant Manvi Prasad and the truth behind the professor’s past is revealed.
Wife of an Indian diplomat, Kantha has her roots in Patna. Clearly here she bites off much more than she can chew in 195 pages of A Break in the Circle. Her earlier works include a novel, Just the Facts, and two picture books for children. Even as the author struggles to place the characters in their social settings, time remains blurred. While the story attempts to be contemporary, the characters lack the ambition of today’s middle-class, particularly in small towns. They resemble more the frugal and inhibited class of 70s and 80s. The author hops from one character to the other attempting to grab it all in one sweep. As the story ends Anuradha see all of her life’s episode winding up like one of her TV serials. For the reader, on the other hand the climax is a shrill screech, just the way they do it in the soaps: “Nahiiiii”! To make matters worse, the text is rant with errors which the editors should have seen and fixed. There is excessive use of qualifiers: “Then she poured out drinking water from the large earthenware pot with a long stainless-steel ladle into oversized stainless-steel glasses and set them in front of the men sitting at the pockmarked table”; and rather banal insights: “Sadly there is no incentive in our system for such people to stay if there are better opportunities”.
Television appears as a node around which the family gathers. The story itself is deeply inspired by the spate of small town soaps. However, Kantha is unable to spark similar humour or debate. The story of the average family life is never simple to tell and Kantha under-evaluates her subject. She gives in to the first temptation to tell-it-all. While the writer commits the most probable mistakes it is even more surprising that the reputed publisher chose to put its stamp on the book in its present form.

Diasporic Indian writers move over nostalgia, loss

Maya has only three days left to live. She has important decisions at hand: dividing her sarees and her coveted jewelery among daughters and daughter-in-law, cleaning the house, placing order for her coffin, ensuring she is looking good at the time of her death and the like. As she goes about in a mechanical way preparing for her death she learns to live again.
Maya is the central character in British writer Divya Mathur’s story Antim Teen Din (Last Three Days). While the story breathes of Indian culture, the character is European in its bearing.
Nostalgia and loss no longer define the experience of the green card holder. The Indian diaspora has stepped into a far more complex jumble of existence. This was also the dominant opinion at the recently concluded three-day seminar in Toronto, organised to bring together the Hindi diasporic writers of Canada and Britain.
Organised by Katha UK and Hindi Writers’ Guild, the Toronto event discussed approaches to story writing and the modern idiom. Speaking at the event, noted writer and general secretary of Katha U.K. Tejinder Sharma, stressed on the need for the writers of the diaspora to emerge from the morass of nostalgia and assimilate the local concerns.
In an email interview, Sharma explained that the workshop discussed aspects of writing in view of the writer of a changing social setup. "Today’s writer does not just reveal what happened after. He justifies whatever happened, why did it happen? He works hard to show the story rather than narrate it," Sharma says.Till the turn of the century no writer of Indian origin had any Hindi work of fiction published in UK. Over the decade the growth has been tremendous with the Hindi diasporic writings boasting of writers like Tejinder Sharma (UK), Deepti Achla Kumar (Canada), Archana Pennuily (Denmark), and Krishna Bihari (UAE).
But it is a tough road for the writers of this literature. While most of the writers and readers are first-generation immigrants, the second and third generation immigrants merely have a working knowledge of the language. So the writer looks towards the reader and critics back home in India and the Indian diaspora abroad for readership.
"Procuring Hindi books abroad is not easy. Mostly the writer gives free copies to his friends and readers. There are hardly any outlets for Hindi Books. In London we have one store run by India’s Star Books," says Sharma. The first edition of most of the Hindi books is only 350 copies. These books are dumped in the government purchases or the writers are forced to buy their own books.
In UK, the Indian high commission started a scheme about four years ago to provide assistance to the upcoming Hindi writers in UK. Organisations like Geetanjali Bahubhashi Samaj, Asian Community Arts and Katha UK sponsor collections of poetry and short stories from time to time.
"Otherwise, the exploitation of the author by the publisher is complete and absolute.
Barring a few established names, every writer has to pay money to the publisher for getting his/her book published. Royalty is a distant dream for immigrant writers," Sharma adds.
Aren’t the writers put off by the bleak situation? Isn’t the lure to move into English too hard to resist? Sharma doesn’t think so. Some of the stories of Usha Priyamvada, Susham Bedi, Shail Agrawal, Ila Prasad, Archana Pennuily, Krishna Bihari, Divya Mathur, Gautam Sachdev, Usha Verma, Zakia Zubairi can compete with the best written in India. Tejinder Sharma’s story Qabra ka Munafa has been cited among the 20 best short stories in Hindi in the past 25 years.
With over 80 per cent of Indians who cannot speak English and the continuous stream of immigrants, Hindi diasporic literature is only beginning to find it voice. Sample The Colour of my Passport by Tejinder Sharma:

Meri chamdi ka rang aaj bhi wahi hai
Mere seene mein wahi dil dhadakta hai
Jann gan man ki awaz, aaj bhi
Kar deti hai muje sawdhan!
Aur mein, aram se, ek bar phir
Bith jata hun, sochna jaise tal jata hai
Ki passport ka rang kaise badal jata hai

(My skin has the same colour
The same heart still beats in my body
The sound of the National Anthem
Still alerts me to attention
And I pause for a while
At ease, and I postpone the quest to find an answer
Why does passport change colour?)

To My Daughter

“How the stars made?

nd how grass grows

so tall? Tell me papa

Cause u ave lived

nd u know all.”

“It’s a funny world Navvya

For years we live

Knowing nothing at all

Neither today

Nor years hence

I can tell you, how

grass shoots up straight

Story of how stars

were made and trivia

around us sprayed…

But I do not know

The truth and

live years in

the loop of

honourable dark.

Do not learn

from me doll.

Weave your own truth

And maybe at the end

You will have lived.”

सपने का जन्म

वो अन्दर था 

जब हम पत्थर

बजा रहे थे

त्रिश्नाएं वो  

बटोर रहा था

जब घास हम 

सुलगा रहे थे 

विछेद रहा था

असंभव, वो  

जोड़ रहा था

अद्भुत

कई साल तक

हम आग 

सुलगते रहे

वो रहा

अन्दर गुम

फिर एकदिन

उसकी रचना,

थी तैयार

सपना उसदिन

हमने देखा

जो कुछ भी

हाथ में था

गिर गया

जो बरसों से

नहीं जली थी

उसदिन

वो आग

भभक उठी 

January 32

‘Why this date?'

‘You won’t understand’

says your smile

‘That’s my day, or

will be…,’ you add

with stylish silence.

With him the jazz

doesn’t help,

‘Whaayyy?’ he’s earnest.

‘We all do it,

Mine is a date.’

‘But its never coming!’

‘It always is,

wooling winters

with anticipation

then summers silently

sweltering in disappointment.’

He throws up his hands.

He won’t last long.

‘But you see,’

you tell him,

‘Jan 33 will last forever.’

‘What is forever?

…,’ you miss the rest

then something

you let slip

is not heard either.