I went questing for truth in the world like a knight, with set jaw and drawn sword. Ready to scale mountains and slay dragons in their dens. As if truth were a phlegmatic princess, captive, inert and awaiting deliverance. I found it not. I went haggling for truth in the marketplace like a shrill housewife, beady-eyed and tight of fist. Trading insults and scorn. As if truth were a loaf of bread or a ruby-red pomegranate to bargain for. I found it not. I went begging for truth like a vagabond, with bare feet, tangled hair and a piteous expression. As if truth were a susceptible kinsman with philanthropic tendencies. I found it not. So weary with questing, and barter and plea, emptied by failure I called off the search. Leaned my forehead against the window, and looked out on a moonless night, too tired for thought. I watched as the stars came out, like so many lights on so many distant porches. I stood as quiet witness. And I do not know why somehow this — was enough.

Today as I chop small red tomatoes in our light-filled kitchen, I look at the green trees waving in the window and think about death. How we travel closer to each other every year, every moment really. The way people in a long relationship move imperceptibly towards each other across time and space, until their beings are so braided together it is difficult to discern where one leaves off and the other begins. At the end of this humble task I will be fifteen chopped mini-heirloom tomatoes closer to my last breath, because life is in a committed relationship with death I think to myself. And it is as if I am discovering this truth for the very first time. The thought fills me with wonder and surprise. Makes me lift my head and look out the window past the green of the trees. To whisper softly,  Hello partner.

The poetry of a lightyear lies in its dreamlike definition: a unit of length equal to the distance that light travels in one year in empty space. Just under 6 trillion miles (or 10 trillion kilometers if you prefer). A unit of measurement, in other words, that belongs to the gods. Who, it might be noted, every so often catch us religiously tracking our frequent flyer miles, and try not to smile.

The poetry of happiness depends on an element of surprise. It is lithe and built like a jungle cat. Adept in the art of camouflage, capable of consummate stillness and able to traverse large distances with great velocity. In ill-advised moments you find yourself stalking it through the jungle of the day with your too-loud feet and bad-timing (your species was not built for stalking). Later, in an unguarded moment, happiness will pounce on you. Roll you to the floor with soft paws and sit on your stomach gleefully. Joy will swallow you whole. Because you are prey to happiness. And always have been. Not the other way around. It. Has. Never. Been. The other way around.

The poetry of flaunting originated with the night sky who refused to put away its diamonds for safekeeping. Not to be outdone, the sun secured a golden chariot and perfected the art of the grand entrance. This brazen show of wealth did not trouble the oyster but irked the athletic ocean (who harbored a competitive streak, and had long been prone to restlessness). Thus began a ceaseless foam-crested display of strength and stamina. The mountains shrugged their glittering shoulders and declined to comment on the state of affairs. Never one for admirable restraint the peacock fanned its jewelled feathers and invented the strut. Then humans entered the fray. Needless to say, it all went downhill from there.

The poetry of a certain South Indian childhood means that you have bathed in at least three waterfalls and been blest by more than one elephant. You know with a knowing that predates language: the scents of jasmine, of camphor, coconut oil, and filter coffee. Know them the way you know the particular sound of your mother’s bangles. The way you know the sound of the latch on your front gate, and the sound of wet laundry slapping stone. You belonged to an off-key choir of schoolchildren who chanted morning lessons in unrecognizable English and ear-splitting unison. Your to-go meals were eaten aboard trains and came wrapped in banana leaf and newsprint, neatly secured with twine. All your uncles rode motorcycles.

You are an encyclopedia of wonderfully specific wisdom. You know what a hill station is, and are familiar with the many shades of cow dung. Also the urgency of pressure cooker whistles and the buoyant trill of bicycle bells. You know exactly how stubbornly red earth will cling to white canvas footwear. And how deliciously lime pickle will stain a snowy bed of curd rice in the bottom most compartment of a steel tiffin carrier. You spent a monkish amount of time sitting cross-legged on the floor.You memorized a poem about daffodils long before you ever saw one. You were raised by a village. Leaning out the window of a schoolbus you didn’t yet know was a luxury, you watched little girls march bravely to school. Small brown faces dusty with talcum powder. Beguiling bite-sized ghosts in their too-big pinafores and two tight braids doubled-up and tied with bright ribbon bows. In a lamplit shrine you waited for the shred of holy leaves the priest pressed into your palm that later tingled your tongue.You placed a coin in a withered, grateful palm on a busy street, and wished with sudden fierceness that you lived in a fairer world. You encountered an anonymous rickshaw driver or tea stall owner who did you a kind turn when you were most in need of one and then promptly disappeared.

Unsung talents dwell in you. Such as the ability to drink water from a tumbler without your lips ever touching the rim. You were raised in a home crowded with miscellaneous context. Bougainvillea. Black bobby pins. Bore wells. Beaded lunch baskets. Brooms that require you to bend while sweeping. Bandini dupattas. A scythe to split coconuts. Steel buckets. Storerooms. The spit and crackle of mustard seeds in hot oil. Power cuts. Petticoats. Gas cylinders. Guava trees. Geckos. Head baths. Handkerchiefs. Kerosene lamps. Kannmai. Kolam. Cotton wicks. Custard apples. Curry leaves. Ceiling fans. A cyclone of cousins. A fond flock of aunts. Tear-off calendars. Turmeric stains. Whitewashed walls. Red chillies dried on hopping hot terraces. Key bunches tucked into sari waists. Safety pins stored on mangalsutras, and sticker pottus  on mirrored surfaces. Stories of mango-stealing monkeys. Hibiscus bushes. Heirloom silk saris stacked in the mystical recesses of your grandmother’s olive green Godrej scented with a strange, heady mixture of sandalwood, incense and moth balls.

You traveled a fantastical landscape cluttered with color and chaos rendered familiar by dailyness. Loudspeakers. Lopsided buses. Buffalos. Bullock carts. Banyan trees. Boiled peanuts sold off carts in paper cones. Paddy fields. Dried river beds. Dragonflies. Temple bells. Bus conductors sporting pink nail-polish on a single untrimmed thumbnail used to tear off tickets. Bananas, green, yellow and red hanging in thick clusters like the fingers of a giant. Stray dogs. Colossal crows. Cricket matches.The peculiar and literal sales pitch of street hawkers whose hoarse, hypnotic chants floated above the din of narrow streets and into open windows. The crumbling and friendly (if somewhat Draculaesque) smiles of the city’s paan-chewers, Diamonds that flowered and flashed in an old woman’s nose ring. A vegetable vendor’s impossible earlobes freighted with dull chunks of gold and stretched like chappati dough down to her shoulders. Women jostling with curved rim water pots at taps that ran dry (their wells of rough-mannered affection did not).Weddings where hundreds came and nobody rsvpd. Where the serpentine notes of the Nadiswaram coiled through the air only to be overtaken by the adrenaline rush of the thavil in gettimellam mode. Where food was ladled out of large shiny pails by sturdy men and you were plied with freshly fried appalam the size of frisbees, mountains of steaming white rice, and shockingly orange jelabis sticky with sugar syrup.

One day you watched a man climb to the top of a coconut palm pulling himself up with his bare hands. On another, you touched a garland thick as a tree trunk woven from tuberoses and marigolds. You woke a baby fast asleep in a cradle fashioned from nothing more than an old cotton sari, soft with use and slung low from a ceiling hook. Once upon a time you were bitten by an army of tiny red ants.You wondered about the white stripe that dances the length of a squirrel’s back. You rode triples with your sister on your father’s trusty scooter. You opened a pale blue aerogramme. You chewed a neem leaf (the memory still has the power to pucker your face). You cracked open a tamarind pod and sucked the sweet and sour flesh off its hard black seeds. You were stalked on a hot summer night by an impressively single-minded cloud of mosquitoes. You caught sight of a spiky green chameleon in the garden. From a small roadside stall that sold soap and sugar, peppermints and pencil boxes, you purchased at the princely sum of fifty paise, for a geography class, the outline of a world map printed on grimy grey paper. Nameless continents and countries stitched together. One vast and various world of implacable mountains, whistling deserts, talkative oceans, and fertile jungles. Not unlike the nation of a certain South Indian childhood. Each day a planet and a profusion. Of unremarked yet not unremarkable experience.

***

The poetry of a certain South Indian childhood (Part II)

The poetry of surprise speaks in the vivid springtime language of bulbs. A daffodil-sudden assault. We believe in the sure ground of the familiar, forgetting it is rigged with trapdoors that drop us slickly into the fertile depths of wonder. The head is confused but the heart knows enough to skip a beat and the breath to catch, when the wild beauty of hummingbirds darts into the frame of a dusk window, when red umbrellas flip inside out in the rain. When renegade moments break loose from the predictable march of calendar time to color our lives unexpected and real.

The poetry of stillness sits cross-legged with closed eyes, cradles opposites. Outside a scholarly breeze leafs through a dictionary of
trees (looking up the meaning of life). Sound of muffled footsteps in the hall. Somewhere a door opens&shuts. Amidst untold comings&goings the thought of death flits across mind’s sky; harmless as bright-winged blackbird. With no warning the scent of seventeen lilies floods the room.

The poetry of freedom ripples; a thing-in-motion (like laughter) an unrepentant elegance, yes a wise extravagance that will find lilies even in times (especially in times) — when there is no bread.

The poetry of forgotten promises belongs to night. Someone sews lights on the hillside like sequins. So many glittering eyes accuse you of squandering time. An old pledge stands forlorn on the outskirts of memory. Like abandoned tower. The stars have refused to come out and take your side and a silvercoin moon has been tossed in the sky to decide what happens next. (You will be given another chance…don’t blow it.)