Sudeep Sen

Couched on crimson cushions, pink bleeds gold and red spills into one’s heart. Broad leather keeps time, calibrating different hours in different zones unaware of the grammar that makes sense. Only random woofs and snores of two distant dogs on a very cold night clears fog that is unresolved. New plants wait for new heat — to grow, to mature. An old cane recliner contains poetry for peace — woven text keeping comfort in place. But it is the impatience of want that keeps equations unsolved. Heavy, translucent, vaporous, split red by mother tongues — winter’s breath is pink.

1 A bright red boat Yellow capsicums Blue fishing nets Ochre fort walls 2 Sahar’s silk blouse gold and sheer Her dark black kohl-lined lashes 3 A street child’s brown fists holding the rainbow in his small grasp 4 My lost memory white and frozen now melts colour ready to refract

Ten years on, I came searching for war signs of the past expecting remnants — magazine debris, unexploded shells, shrapnel that mark bomb wounds. I came looking for ghosts — people past, skeletons charred, abandoned brick-wood-cement that once housed them. I could only find whispers — whispers among the clamour of a small town outpost in full throttle — everyday chores sketching outward signs of normality and life. In that bustle I spot war-lines of a decade ago, though the storylines are kept buried, wrapped in old newsprint. There is order amid uneasiness — the muezzin’s cry, the monk’s chant — baritones merging in their separateness. At the bus station black coughs of exhaust smoke-screens everything. The roads meet and after the crossroad ritual diverge, skating along the undotted lines of control. A porous garland with cracked beads adorns Tiger Hill. Beyond the mountains are dark memories, and beyond them no one knows, and beyond them no one wants to know. Even the flight of birds that wing over their crests don’t know which feathers to down. Chameleon-like they fly, tracing perfect parabolas. I look up and calculate their exact arc and find instead,                                     a flawed theorem.

Under the soft translucent linen, the ridges around your nipples harden at the thought of my tongue. You — lying inverted like the letter ‘c’ — arch yourself deliberately wanting the warm press of my lips, it’s wet to coat the skin that is bristling, burning, breaking into sweats of desire — sweet juices of imagination. But in fact, I haven’t even touched you. At least, not yet.

drawing a breath between each sentence, trailing closely every word. — James Hoch, ‘Draft’ in Miscreants 1. some things, I knew, were beyond choosing: didu — grandmother — wilting under cancer’s terminal care. mama — my uncle’s — mysterious disappearance — ventilator vibrating, severed silently, in the hospital’s unkempt dark. an old friend’s biting silence — unexplained — promised loyalties melting for profit abandoning long familial presences of trust. devi’s jealous heart      misreading emails hacked carefully under cover, her fingernails ripping unformed poems, bloodied, scarred — my diary pages weeping wordlessly — my children aborted, my poetry breathless forever. 2. these are acts that enact themselves, regardless — helpless, as I am, torn asunder permanently, drugged, numbed. strange love, this is — a salving: what medics and nurses do. i live buddha-like, unblinking, a painted vacant smile — one that stores pain and painlessness — someone else’s nirvana thrust upon me. some things I once believed in are beyond my choosing — choosing is a choice unavailable to me.

An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas containing stark white sheets, perfect in their presentation of absence. Only a bold logo on top revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else. I examined the sheets, peered through their grains — heavy cotton-laid striations — concealing text,in white ink, postmarked India. Even the watermark’s translucence made the script’s invisibility transparent. Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets of sophisticated pulp, paper containing scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned, untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate and circulate to keep alive its breathings. Corpuscles of a very different kind — hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.

for Leela Samson Spaces in the electric air divide themselves in circular rhythms, as the slender grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic, one that once reverberated continually in a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter of eye-lashes, the pupils create an unusual focus, a sight only ciliary muscles blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal could possibly enact. The raw brightness of kanjeevaram silk, of your breath, and the nobility of antique silver adorns you and your dance, reminding us of the treasure chest that is only half-exposed, disclosed just enough, barely — for art in its purest form never reveals all. Even after the arc-lights have long faded, the audience, now invisible, have stayed over. Here, I can still see your pirouettes, frozen as time-lapse exposures, feel the murmuring shadow of an accompanist’s intricate raag in this theatre of darkness, a darkness where oblique memories of my quiet Kalakshetra days filter, matching your very own of another time, where darkness itself is sleeping light, light that merges, reshapes, and ignites, dancing delicately in the half-light. But it is this sacred darkness that endures, melting light with desire, desire that simmers and sparks the radiance of your quiet femininity, as the female dancer now illuminates everything visible: clear, poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.

for Jane Draycott As winter secrets melt with the purple sun, what is revealed is electric — notes tune unknown scales, syntax alters tongues, terracotta melts white, banyan ribbons into armatures as branch-roots twist, meeting soil in a circle. Circuits glazed under cloth carry alphabets for a calligrapher’s nib italicised in invisible ink, letters never posted, cartographer’s map, uncharted — as phrases fold so do veils.