… crisscrossing …

… my feet dragged my heat-drugged body

crunching on the molten gravel late evening.

As the desert heat hummed and singed

my face and arms glistened with sweat

my wet shirt clung to my slimy body

while my mind raced to my AC cool room.

A lean cat crisscrossed my path

steady, focused footsteps, ignoring me

crisscrossing its beaten trail

to seek water or shade perhaps.

Its feline mouth – a half open grin

breathing out its internal heat.

A flash of helpless pity 

crisscrossed our minds ...

Selfies

Taking a selfie is not everybody’s cup of tea.

They are the domain of today’s teens.

So those in their thirties, forties and fifties

don’t take those monstrous selfies, I plead.

When you do so, you render yourself weird to the core

magnifying malignantly a part of your visage and chest.

How far you hold the phone and the angle matters.

A wrong hold in an odd angle and you are floored.

Shoot close and straight - you get nostrils blaring with gust,

hairs sticking out like antennae of wasps or roaches.

A little lower makes a mugshot of a thick necked thug,

a bulging shoulder that stretches out in haste

while the other appears a mid-sized appendage.

A little higher and you get a big headed moron,

your forehead a parched land stretching infinitely.

Your face looks as grave as an owl’s and if you smile

it falls flat like a jarring musical note prolonged.

And no, never try those contortions of face

you will end up a three dimensional eerie ET

thrusting its damned head into everyone’s sight.

So leave those selfies to the teens and those in the twenties

who have perfectly perfected the art of taking selfies

pouting their lips and standing at gravity defying angles

creasing their eyebrows like a rugged mountain range

hallowing their cheeks or tangling their arms with ease

creating those impossible naturally contrived smiles

and myriad emotions not deciphered in dictionaries.

Madras Buses – Yesteryears Travel Reverie

From bed to bus stand, I hum through a flurry of chores like a drone.

I gobble up food like a pelican, get garbed, grab the bag with lunch packed,

a hurried bye to dad and mum, walking and running through the maze

of palm trees to catch 29D at 6.30 from Madhavaram Milk Colony.

I hop into the dark and light green omni-dragon reluctantly,

hoping to reach in time to catch the popular and all-important 29C.

If late, we sprint to latch ourselves like leeches on to the moving bus.

Stretched on a time-rack between stops for ‘tickets’ ‘tickets’ ‘tickets’,

we wait in hope to hear the shrill double whistle or the ‘raiee’ ‘raiee’.

At Perambur, at last, we are belched out and stream into 29C.

The insatiable toad swells head to torso with students at every stop

not an inch to maneuver, we are jammed hams salted and heat-dried.

Male students hang on chivalrously making space for groovy girls

hormones on fire, many a match made on those buses perhaps.

Every student of Loyola, WCC and Stella in town make their presence felt.

The dragon scrambles on, crawls at times, makes a dash or stops abruptly

crushing us like a tightening vice as we lurch forward like projectiles.

The driver steers as though on high seas, his hands and legs in a trance like dance.   

Money, bus passes and tokens are passed by dwarfed hands and constrained necks.

The struggle to reach the door starts well before we reach Sterling Road.

Like telepathic worms we wriggle our way through layers of human flesh.

My shirt button entangles in a girl’s hair (preordained?!) as I tried to slide past.

We spend a good minute untangling with embarrassed contrite smiles.

If you don’t make it to the proximity of the doors in time, the crowd,

which gets down to let you out, will box you in, moksha denied.

Then you are neither in nor out, stuck at an inclined angle

like Hercules supporting the roof of the bus from collapse

and in resigned karmaic silence, you wait for the next stop.

Getting down at Sterling Road we venture into the final lap – catching 49D or 41D.

A journey short and honey sweet, a gush of relief as we spy the college gate.

Were those Ulyssian journeys worth it? – For millions of us who couldn’t afford

a bike, a car or private transport, those city buses were our lifeblood,

our lifeline to a college education and a future in those early 90s.