The Bookstore at The Street's End

There is a bookstore at the street's end
that sells the dreams we once dreamed.
I didn't know of it till I walked into it;
and the balding salesman eager, flashed his

wisdom-stained teeth, "Sir! I know
what you want!" His eyes yellow
(No, he wasn't jaundiced, or crackbrained)
acquiring a musty glow, unfeigned

that comes from a lifetime of browsing
through reams of unsought pages. "Nothing!
I'm just curious but what'd you think I want?"
"A book of dreams; dreams that yet taunt

your growing wrinkles, grey hair," he shrugged.
"Really!" I looked askance. Stretching six-feet across
the display gallery, he picked, "Your Dreams - Rich or Macabre."
But astonishingly, the words bedimmed, and in my hands

bore another's name, another claim.
I peered hard, 'Who is the poet? Oh! It is but me!'
"Hey! What may I pay to buy this book?" I asked.
"Nothing! Write and gift us this very book!" said he.

(c) Dan Husain
May 02, 2007

We Steal Your Senses: The Initiation

With words we construct
a sarai ten feet by eight,
a river of magic,
fire, blood with
a bridge of smoke,
a building of three tiers
stacked over it
with fairies in it
throwing pearls
at the piranha
floating
in the river of magic –
With words we create
all this and more
on the proscenium
of an auditorium.

But beware!
These are not tales
of horses and mare,
of fairies and angels,
of Lord-smudged gospels.
Here desires heathen
would deepen with
every twist of the tale
that you choose to veil
your senses with –
Your senses Ha!
Like some former lover
are no more
a part of your tale.
Like a bedouin’s loot
in this bazaar of lies and truth
they’re up for sale.

So we wait at the gates
of the kingdom of Afrasiyaab,
the sorcerer supreme,
the king of devils and djinns
before whom sixty-thousand
warlords
each with an army
of a hundred thousand
or more
genuflect, kiss his girth,
wash it with their blood.
He, The Arrogant One
whose kingdom
runs from The Upper West Quarter
to The Lower East Trough
even he,
even he bows
to Zammurad Shah Bakhtari,
also Laqa, the ultimate in sorcery
but only a wily old bastard
with fungus in his teeth
and beads in his beard
who sits on a throne
smelling of his own faeces.

Together they fight
Amir Hamzah –
The Lord of Conjunction,
Sahib-qiran,
before whom the moon
and the sun both bow,
whose valour instills fear
in many who’d kill, tear
with their swords and their spears
and not once show remorse
even they, when they’d hear
his name their pride would run
like a disease from a medicine.

But the point where
we choose to enter –
our senses surrendered –
the point where we
let ourselves be
in this magical world,
this magical world
where the difference
between the real
and the imagined
is perhaps a trick
between the awake you
and your sleeping self,
the point where we enter
is the one where Amar Ayyar,
confidant, friend, chief trickster
Amir’s lieutenant, masquerader
has murdered Mahtaab Jadoo
and has in a jungle taken refuge…

© Dan Husain
March 27, 2007

A New Year's Party

That there is room for other conversations too
is a thought, a double-edged sword
for me,
and for you.

My friend on the next bar stool
is mesmerized with your heaving breasts,
your slender frame sitting straight,
laughing, sipping wine, while the world waits
to genuflect before the moment
when the woman in you will glow.

“Yes! Yes! I know what the world has come to!
Hunger, intolerance, head-butts, Zizou!”

Please! Please take note of what I’ve become too
but I don’t know how you do that
I forget my misery; laugh at your jokes.
You caress my cheek, playfully pat.

“No seriously! I mean there are more bombs than childbirths.
Ask a man gone casual walking in Baghdad, Madrid.”

Somewhere the ghazal singer croons Faiz…

“Aur bhi gham hai zamane mein mohabat ke siwa…”

Ah no! I remember “dukh” in the original work.
“Dukh” is stark, naked, intensely painful than
“Gham”; a ghazal singer's mellifluous, melancholic version.

“Ha! Here speaks the poet
whose only tool to a woman’s heart
is semantics!”

Everyone titters, I feel naked.
You giggle, wink, blow a kiss.

“Don’t you think it was chilling to watch Saddam today?
As if he’s walked into a bar asking for a table!”

I feel a shiver up my spine.
Raise my glass, toast the wine.

“Long live America!”

We all laugh.
“I love your sense of humor.”
But I wait for the inevitable.

I wait for the moment
when your own thoughts
conspire, chain your heart.
I wait for the moment
when my poetry's logic
play tricks, seal your lips.
How long,
how long can you duck, efface
before my joy trips on your face?

That there is room for other conversations too
is a thought, a double-edged sword
for me,
and for you.

Ah! She sings my favourite Momin ghazal now…

“Ulte wo-h shikwe karte hain aur kis ada ke saath,
betaaqati ke taanein hain uzr-e-jafa ke saath.

Maanga karenge abse dua hijr-e-yaar ki
Aakhir to dushmani hai asar ko dua ke saath.”

© Dan Husain
December 31, 2006

Tonight is An Unusual Night...

Tonight is an unusual night.
I have no memory of you,
I crave no more for you.

I do not feel grand,
no untied strands
to string them in a poem for you.

But once I was bitter.
I wrote poems about darkness,
drew blood
from my sunken hollowed cheeks,
saw my apparition in the mirror
a body of a poet, a soul of a whore.
But I do not feel that anymore.

I do not see any metaphor
hinge on your pendent, armlet, tiara,
on your resplendent anklet, mascara,
on your kohl, eyeliner, rouge,
on sundry embellishments of your beauty.
Oh! What a fool, what a stooge
I’ve been to believe
in a stupidity that must,
must always poetry
be a muse’s slave?

That must I,
I must stave in
every thought, every misgiving
on which I constructed
a world for you
in my half-drunken
poetic renderings.

I think I will, I say I did.

But now when I have killed
every essence, every single conception
of what I am, of what I be
I brood – is it love
that I do not wish for love
anymore?

© Dan Husain
November 6, 2006

festivity

tilak smeared foreheads
with white skull caps
is not an everyday sight
but this is what happens
when our eid-spirited selves
run into diwali's bright lights

Death...

What a shame to let go of a month without a poem, so I cheat again and treat you with an old one. Oops, hope you won't mind this. Not really one of my favorites. :-)

Death
Like betrayal
Lingers at the corners of love
Ready to stab
Just when you expect it least.

Death
Like woman’s smile –
Bewitching, mesmerizing –
Ready to bind
Just when you think you’re done with it.

Death –
Perhaps when I embrace betrayal
Or free self from the trappings of love –
I will turn around
And embrace you too.

Death till then
Is only an epistemological hell
Three stanzas beneath my verses.

© Dan Husain
April 16, 2005

Coffee in Times of War...

Just the other day a friend asked
Have you ever tried war poetry?
War, I said, I haven’t seen one.
I was only born in seventy-one.
I’ve often seen pictures –
Oh why pictures! Even a painting
in a restaurant once –
of a Sikh General
making the Pakistanis
sign the surrender.
And then I grew up
reading lessons, history
about World War One and World War Two,
Plassey, Panipat, Waterloo,
War & Peace, The Day of Armistice,
the ancient tales of the Mahabharata,
the Muharram majlises, Karbala.

But then who needs textbooks?
Television brings live - Beirut.
And if this isn’t enough there are movies –
A Bridge Too Far, Platoon, Killing Fields.

But no, I have never seen a war.
I don’t know what it means
to sit through blackouts, power outages,
to hold my breath and wait
for a bomb to detonate.
I don't know what it means
to have splinters of plastic and tin
pierce through my clothes, skin.
I don't know what it means
to lose an eye, to lose a limb.
I haven’t seen my child without her head.
I don’t know what it means
when a mother grieves for her dead.
The closest I have seen a man’s guts
split wide open was from a scene
in a movie called Saving Private Ryan.

I don’t know what it means
to run from desk to desk
in a dank office corridor
asking for compensation
for a son dead in a war.

I don’t know…

My words trailed in the wispy heat
of Delhi’s August afternoon street.

I am afraid I am not qualified
to consider myself a war poet.

My friend cursed himself
for bringing this topic up,
dunked his biscuit in his coffee,
as I waved to the waiter,
May we have more of these, please!

© Dan Husain
August 23, 2006

Mumbai, Mayhem & T.S. Eliot

Last night I read Eliot.
These are strange times to read him
and more to discuss him with a friend at Marriott
as we sip wine and eat lamb-steak,
expostulate (that’s a big word) against double-speak,
heresy, hypocrisy, a bureaucrat’s bid to block blogs,
America’s complacency, Israel’s capacity to bamboozle, shock.
My friend chuckles, he’s recently been to Tel Aviv,
is well acquainted with Israel’s potential for mischief.
And then, my friend burps, sighs,
“Aren’t we lucky to be alive?”
But then trains were never our aspirations in rush hour drives.
We’re probably waiting for the Metro
for us to shift to public transport,
aspire then for a workplace
between Versova and Ghatkopar.

(…the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table…)*

The conversation shifts to extra-marital affairs, orthopedic surgery –
Professor Matuknath Chaudhary’s love discourses for his paramour Julie.
(I think Matuknath has balls
to turn his life into a brawl
and stand for what he believes
while the news channels gloat at this sleaze.)
But it is politically correct to take pot-shots
at him and I further it with parental duty, guilt.
I talk about my mother’s rheumatism, her knee…
Why is it that women suffer more from arthritis?
Has there been a medical research on this?
My friend shrugs, I don’t know though my mother also suffers from it.

(We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!)**

The bill is paid. We step out in the early morning rush.

(Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”)***

I am grateful to my friend, and
he says thank you for that rib-tickling performance.
This is the best we can offer to each other –
Moments like bric-a-brac, friendship as a tag –
A mathematician and a stand-up comedian.

I stand smugly satisfied at this sight.
The rain assumes the muggy Mumbai night…

(Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.)****

© Dan Husain
July 19, 2006

Notes:
*From T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
**From T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”
***From T.S. Eliot’s “Rhapsody on A Windy Night.”
****From T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes.”

Dances With Hope

Like a glistening street
on an autmn day
hopes play mischief
with my dreams,
make them sway
and I let the moment ferment
its own sweet little tale
as it gels with the afternoon sky -
ephemeral, azure, refreshingly pale.
They make me drown
in eidetic images
of a life unlived,
your beautiful face,
a balmy smile,
and a dream unfulfilled.
And I may take a day off
or perhaps a lifetime
to string these pearls
in an eternal rhyme.

© Dan Husain
7th January 2001

PS: I thought the whole month will go without a post. Didn't have anything new so I pulled out this old poem. I wonder I'd write like this anymore. I don't fully approve this. :-)

Tripped...

There is a thought on my tongue.
Wonder what it would’ve done
had it cloaked itself in words
but I remain clammed up
and let my silence burn
her stately veneer’s hem.

But many moments later
this moment will unfurl upon her.
Poised on the Metro escalator,
with the sweat breaking over her brow,
she would not know what hit her
or on her tongue tastes bitter.

© Dan Husain
May 27, 2006

Death of A Poem

In a few hours from now
they’d pull down the shutters
and leave a stark street
to a poet’s imagination
as he’d grope in the dark alleys,
burnt on cigarettes
and cheap whiskey,
wondering
where in this pool of scrap
he’d find the foetus
of his once deserted poem.

But I’ve known many a poet
who in the stench of their thoughts
have lost the serendipitous joy
of constructing unsuspecting metaphors
that would cense the bosom
of their once shared love with their muses.
They stumble back now
to this scrap
of what the world was, what it could be
rummaging for their once aborted themes.

© Dan Husain
April 14, 2006

These Days...

I

These days
I find everything staged:
the words of comfort you plant,
the concern that I fake,
the platitudes that we toss,
twirl, throw into each other’s face.
How brittle is our truth
that we wrap it with pretexts
believing love holds good
only in certain contexts.

II

The other day
at Carter Road,
when the Sun was
a speck of orange in your eye
and the world
a soot covered portrait,
I felt I had a poem for you
but then, these days, I don’t write poems.
I look for words instead,
words that would miff the silence
you puncture our conversations with.

III

In the quietness of the night
when you twirl next to me
I hear shrill screams
of our unsaid thoughts.

I then strain, strain
to hear your silence...

© Dan Husain
March 25, 2006

The Line...

Between the here and there,
between courage and fear,
between love and longing,
between knowing & belonging,
between fisticuffs and handshakes,
between letting go and heartbreaks,
between knowledge and wisdom,
between thoughts and action,
between inertia and initiative,
between certain and tentative,
between criticism and mudslinging,
between ignorance and awakening,
between you and me,
between they and we
there is only a thin line
dwindling somewhere in your mind;

step across it!

© Dan Husain
March 2, 2005

For Freedom, We Fight

“For Freedom, We Fight” -
fluorescent words
glimmering under car lights
on a wall
against which we once leaned,
our lips entwined
in a life-giving kiss.
Oh! I so much wanted freedom then
to break free from the shackles
that fettered our unsanctioned love.

But now my moist eyes
only see fluorescent words
glimmering under car lights
on a wall,
that’s just a wall
in this ugly city;
defaced, an eye-sore,
mouthing metaphors –
mere slogans from history –
and then it dwindles out of sight
with a vague phrase prancing in my head.

“From Freedom, We Fight”.

© Dan Husain
August 30, 2005

Peace & Its Discontents*

Here! Right here!
Let’s draw a line
and reach an understanding
albeit hesitant
that we will not
step across it.

But then who is to decide
what is righteous?
The loose ends, the cul-de-sacs
in the labyrinth in our heads
often spill on to the other side;
barbed spaces
where our tolerance resides.
And then the discontent,
fermenting underneath with gnomic intent,
like Azaan at the crack of dawn
will pierce through this uneasy peace,
shattering it
long after stillness has settled
in our clattering teeth.

© Dan Husain
February 11, 2006

* A tribute to Edward Said. It is the title of one of the books he wrote on the Israeli-Palestinian Peace accord. This is for the passing away of a truly great scholar.

A Long Evening Walk...

Under a cold-blooded sky
pigmented with your thoughts
I walk from stillness to motion

but with each step the truth peels off
as colors do from mildewed buildings,
as the skin does from freshly healed wounds

and I wonder,
in a mist-gathering hug,
was the world more colored at standstill?

© Dan Husain
January 28, 2006

Fuel

Two hundred years from
The first aerial bombing
We would have burnt
All the earth’s gasoline
And yet our thirst
Be unquenchable.
We may then slake it with blood
Flavored with our own hate-fables.

© Dan Husain
January 21, 2006

Crossroads

There is this little boy
Who stands everyday
At the same intersection
Selling the usual ware.

He smiles at me, winks,
Taunts, even pleads
But I just ignore.

But then I wonder
It can’t be hope alone,
Someone must be buying too
For him to stand there
Day after day
And weather indifference.

© Dan Husain
January 11, 2006

The Fan

In your head
There is violence,
Malice, jealousy,
Unquiet silence.

And you think
The same for me.
It strains your
Casual repartee.

How you wish a knife
Twisted into my guts.
Spit on my face, see it
Sullied with your insults.

But when we meet,
“Oh! I love your poetry!”
“Ah! Just wordplay!”
I quip with feigned modesty.

©Dan Husain
January 7, 2006

Mother: The Idea of A Poem

The poem generated much discussion at a writers' forum Caferati. Finally, I thought the debate merits a response from me - the poet: the original mischief-maker. I am posting my response here for your perusal. Thanks & best regards.

The Idea of A Poem

I think I had some inkling that this poem will generate much discussion. And I also knew that the reactions would be varied.

I am not into lengthy post-creation discussions. They bore me to death. I think they’re best confined to classrooms. But often there is a widening gap between the instinctive gut-felt acts of an artist and the informed nitpicking of a critic. And I guess for sake of fostering understanding (I am not sure what ‘understanding’ I refer to here!) it’s best that the artist speaks for his or her act.

The Genesis of ‘Mother’

Yesterday, I had some time at hand before I had to leave for my play’s rehearsal. So, I picked up Amitava Kumar’s book ‘Passport Photos’ and continued reading from where I had left last. The book is an insightful peek into post-colonial literature, the travails of immigrants, and language and the idiom that it acquires for people across social, national, economic, psychological, religious, racial, gender, et al barriers. The book is innovatively structured. Each chapter reads as an entry in a Passport.

I was at the chapter titled ‘Sex’ when I stumbled upon a discussion on the Dalit (I hate this categorization here but I think it is relevant in the context of the point that I wish to make) Marathi Poet Namdeo Dhasal and his collection of poems called Golpitha. Amitava was talking about how Dhasal brings forth a whole host of issues in his poetry – brahmanical hegemony, patriarchal family structures, gender repression, violence, etc. He intends to shock and at the same time throw it in his readers’ faces and disconcert their smug social superiority and indifference.

The poem that particularly hit me is Dhasal’s “What Grade Are You in, What Grade?” In Amitava’s words, “In this poem, almost in a ritual manner Dhasal very powerfully details what the Brahmanic Hindus consider defiling: a menstruating woman, a dead cow, meat, sex.” I quote the translated poem for you.

“Fucked a menstruating woman? Fucked her?
Dragged around the dead cattle? The dead cow?
Rubbed the grindstone? The grindstone?
Known what hayale is? Cow gut?
Saved stale bread? Ate it?
Sucked the marrow? The marrow?
Fried the giblets? The giblets?”

It also serves “to document what had been the duty of the Dalits, the pariah castes condemned to the outskirts of Hindu life, performing the tasks of traditional scavengers.”

While all this was having its effect on me, my thoughts kept hovering around the violence against women in recent times that few of you have mentioned here. Strangely, the poem also reminded me of a line from a dialogue from my current play “Where did this come from? I thought we had guzzled every drop of alcohol in the house!” And also about the Ummayyid Caliph, Yazid, who allegedly raped his mother in an inebriated state and about the movie ‘Gladiator’ where Nero is making advances towards his sister. The violence of these thoughts erupted inside me and everything strung together as a poem.

The Post-creation Blues

There is again a lengthy discussion as to how the original version got transformed into its current form. I do not wish to get into that as this apologia of mine has already run into two pages.

Nevertheless, at times art is a conduit for importing larger issues from inaccessible, often intellectual and elitist, spheres into more knowable territories of mass cultures. I guess I was attempting to weave in a grave issue like gender violation into something as perfunctory as an act of reading newspaper and sipping our morning tea. And shock ourselves in seeing that apathetic face of ourselves where we feel by maintaining a steely veneer or an ostrich like attitude we’d get the better off the situation.

But the last I am looking here is poetic brilliance or an attempt to resort to sensationalism to promote my poetry.

I am only experimenting with ideas, issues, forms and see how wider perspectives, that may serve some purpose, be incorporated into my poetry.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Best regards,

Dan Husain

PS: Oh! One last thing. Poets and Actors don’t have any morals or speak from a moral hierarchy. We can’t burden ourselves with such weighty things. :-)