The Temple That Solomon Built

The bark knotted and hugged itself in the olive grove,
stout branches were axed and carted to the site.

The temple dwarfed every structure in vicinity,
workers teemed like ants through day and night;

tents to house workers like mushrooms sprung,
officers maintained files of schedule for work;

masons, craftsmen believed a halo followed them, 
that they had to hold in place with humility.

The sculptor held the chisel, felt for contours
on the rough surface, ran his fingers on the wood,

and marked the face of cherubim that lay within.
What no one has seen it was for him to give shape:

how much to slant the eyes, arch the back, stretch
the wings from wall to wall, carve feathers row after row

from memory of birds from his home in Phoenicia
where cormorants pondered over the Mediterranean sea.

Ekphrastic poem : ‘Ekphrasis’ is a writing that comments upon another art form, ekphrastic poetry is a poem inspired by visual art. It is the description of a real or imagined work of visual art. My poem is closer to the latter description.

Solomon took seven years to build the temple to house the Lord. In the inner sanctuary of the temple, he had two cherubims carved out of olive wood. The Old Testament describes so vividly Solomon’s labour of love that the temple structure, the carvings and the gold gilded walls form a visual in our minds. My poem is inspired by this visual.

Day 17 NaPoWriMo – write an ekphrastic poem

Sacrifice

Skin of her baby was smooth, she rubbed almond oil
felt warmth on her fingers. She took her breast
that swelled with milk to his lips, pressed them open gently.

The child got heavier each day, never opened eyes;
the milk overflowed and stained her robe. She held
the child close and rocked in grief, ball of pain in her chest

from the nine months that she bore in her womb watching
the life that was filling in, limbs emerging only to be laid to rest
in an unnamed grave. Forgotten, claiming no lineage and family.

Day 10 – Poem A Day Challenge

“For today’s prompt, write a shady poem. I’ll leave the interpretation of this prompt up to you. It could be a poem that includes shadows and/or shading. It could be about a shady part of town or a shady person. Or well, something else.”

I interpret ‘shade/shady’ as ‘out of light’, ‘in darkness’. The poem is on  the love child of David and Bathsheba, who was cursed to die the seventh day of his birth, for the sins of adultery of his parents. David’s journey of atonement and healing is narrated in the text, the grief of the mother is left for us to imagine and create.

Read the story of David and Bathsheba here and here.

A Story

The wall heaves as he sleeps, presses into his dream where the sky is a blue that he never sees in his city. The dark corners whisper with voices he is familiar, he runs through the corridor where her face appears: his mother on whom he emptied a bucket of fish.

The breeze blows the hair that falls on her neck, he holds her in his dream, pressed close to prevent the room from caving in. He sees her getting crushed as he curls on the bed, refuses to take my hand that I extend to him.

He says the postman is smiling, carries a letter that can kill him. He turns away from me, toward the wall.

Day 6 – Poem A Day, NaPoWriMo

Prompt from Rachel McKibbens : Write a poem that re-tells a family anecdote. If you don’t have one, think of one you’ve heard from someone else. A story that has never left you. Let the last line be what you learned from this anecdote; a power you now have, or a black hole you avoid.  

Lemon Blossoms

The neem tree at the corner of the garden lays out a florescent carpet, the smell of the flower reaches me in my room every time the April breeze tosses them. My room is painted an electric blue, from my table beside the window I cannot see the sky, the arches of coconut fronds keeps me floating in a green cave of light. 

I pull the box from under the table, a coarsely carved wooden box with dust settled in the grooves. I open it and look at the letters neatly folded and tied with a cheap satin ribbon that goes back to twenty years, frayed and faded at the edges.  I undo the knot and open the letters,  I expect my throat to knot with the memory of the walk on the warm beach and the quiet streets as I held his hands. But the seat in the garden of my house warm in the afternoon heat carrying the scent of lemon leaves comes in my mind’s eye, and in the frame are my parents the trusting people who walked with me and have shored away all my memorabilia, each one important, letting me make my pick after they are gone, which one I want to stay with.

I can picture them in my room in the coolness of the bluey afternoon sifting through my books, my papers, photographs; sorting them and keeping them in sari boxes and wooden boxes. They would have handled it carefully, the shattered pieces of glasses of my life that I painfully gathered and put away in the corners of my room to be forgotten and abandoned. They want me to take them, hold them and put them away after making peace, and that is why I am back home.   

Story A Day – Go Home Again

Step Out

I followed the path, cows and sheep on the pasture. I entered the village
and was welcomed by friendly dogs and hens. The woman sweeping her porch
stopped and stared at me and the old man reposing in the shade of the
banyan tree smiled at me. I nodded at them, didn’t stop to talk; the road
opened to paddy fields. I walked on the clumps of soil readied for the next
cycle of cultivation, glad I was finally on the move looking at the trees and
fields and not at the blue floss of clouds on my computer screen.

Write A Drabble for Story A Day

Holi Hai!

This story is a response to the prompt from Magpie Tales.

Mangala Ratwa walked along the dusty road leading to Tejgadh from his village Gantia beyond the Chilia Ghat. The hills ran on both the sides, the forested land was covered thick with teak, eucalyptus and neem trees. There was crispness in the air, the morning sky was washed peach carrying still the shades of dawn. Mangala pulled his coarse shawl over his head and walked as his breath snaked patterns in the air.

Mangala left his village well before dawn, he carried in a cloth bag teplas and achar that his mother packed for the journey. It would be late morning by the time he reached Tejgadh, he was hopeful that beyond the hills he would get a lift in a jeep.

This was not the first time he was going alone to Tejgadh, he had travelled alone all the way to Baroda when his grandfather went to the Government hospital with a severe stomach pain and did not return home the same day. Mangala’s mother hesitated to send her eleven year old son alone to the city to enquire about the old man. She was helpless, Mangala’s father was away working in a construction site in Baruch and she had to stay back to take care of the fields, cattle and the poultry.

During the winter months when the stream and water holes ran dry and intense farming activities could not be pursued, many men in the village went to cities like Baroda, Baruch, Ahmedabad in search of work, they worked for daily wages on construction sites or in factories. They left the village in the month of October and returned just before Holi, to prepare the land for the next agricultural cycle that began in June soon after the monsoons.

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Mangala took a ride in a jeep from his village to Tejgadh, his father’s friend Nagin Ratwa in Tejgadh put him in a bus to Baroda that was 170 kms away. He was told how to reach the hospital from city bus station and meet the District Medical Officer to enquire about his grandfather. He found his grandfather admitted in General Ward for treatment of ulcer, the boy stayed with the old man in the hospital buying him food, medicines and taking walks in the busy streets outside the hospital. On recovery, the old man travelled back with his grandson to Tejgadh where they stayed for the evening in Nagin’s house before leaving for Gantia the next morning.

Nagin Ratwa had a small shop under the famous limda tree at the cross road that lead to the town of Chhota Udepur. Nagin’s shop stocked just about everything that the villagers needed. He kept his shop open till the last bus from Baroda passed the village at about ten o’clock in the night. That evening Mangala sat with Nagin in the shop watching the village wrap itself in silence and darkness. When a bus stopped a few passengers rushed to buy bananas and ripe guavas. A customer or two from the village visited to buy tea leaves and cooking oil.

It was then that Mangala observed the weights that Nagin used. They were stacked in a corner of the coarse wooden counter. One of them looked different. He reached for it to feel how heavy it was. The weight carried a musty smell of dark corners of the shop, it felt greasy, the measure was engraved on the sides in a coarse fashion.  It seemed like Nagin seldom used the weight. The other octagonal discs of weight were smooth and shone with use. 

Mangala had seen weights used on pan balances and the ones suspended in steel yard balance, when he accompanied his mother to the weekly Haat at Panvad to barter or sell the products that they produced in their farm, like eggs,  corns, potatoes. There was a small shop in his village, the shopkeeper did not use such weights, instead he used polished stones picked from the bed of river Orsang. His mother complained that the shopkeeper cheated the villagers; she haggled with him and demanded for more sugar, jaggery and oil. She refused at times to buy provisions at the village shop and would take the long and tiresome journey to Panvad to buy a bottle of cooking oil.  

The next morning when Mangala and his grandfather left for Gantia he carried home with him the weight that Nagin Ratwa used rarely. Nagin asked Mangala to travel to Tejgadh once a fortnight, buy commodities like sugar, jaggery, tea leaves, cooking oil, and wheat flour in bulk that his mother could sell in the village for a fair price.   

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It was the fifth trip Mangala was making to Tejgadh since his mother started a small shop in the village in an enclosure outside their cattle shed. Mangala looked out of the jeep as they drove past fallow fields. The fog that hung heavily on the grass lifted, he felt sudden warmth in the air as though indicating what lay ahead for him. His heart became light, he smiled at the boy sitting next to him and said, “Holi Hai, it is the festival of Holi.”

It was Holi the next day, his father and the other men from his village would return home. Mangala mentally ran through all the extra things that his mother had asked him to buy at the market for Holi. As he chewed the spicy tepla he thought of how his village transformed during the Holi festival. Men brew liquor from the flowers of the mahuda tree, women dressed in resplendent colours and cooked a communal feast, and everyone sang, played on the drums and danced in the large open ground at the entrance of the village.

Holi, the festival of colours saw the end of dry winter, beginning of spring when the tender warmth of the sun enabled the men and women to work for long hours in their fields preparing the soil for the next cycle of sowing, tending and reaping.

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 (This story takes place among the Ratwa Bhils, a tribal community of people living in the Baroda district of Gujarat. When I was associated with Bhasha, an NGO that works on various initiatives with the Adivasi communities of India, I travelled extensively in this region and  interacted with the Ratwa Bhils.

In this story, among other things, I celebrate the independence and courage that Ratwi women display as they manage their lives, family and village activities when the men are away in the city for half the year, toiling hard for a living . The women form cooperatives, Self Help Groups, take loans and start small enterprises.

I salute children like Mangala Ratwa who assume roles of adults while still young. They help in the farm at sunrise, go to school mid morning, run on errands, take cattle for grazing, collect dried sticks for firewood,  play under the limda tree, and remain cheerful always.)

Romancing Burnt Sienna

This is a response to the second prompt from Magpie Tales started by Willow.

She stood at the window and looked at the sea. Beads of sweat cooled at her neck, a light breeze stirred her hair gently. Mosquitoes hummed drowsily and she became aware of the darkness settling in the corners of the room, the purple sky was descending into a well of darkness, the horizon disappeared after a last glimmer.

She moved to the large polished table, lit the bee wax candles on the wrought iron candelabra. The candles threw a pale pearly light in the dark room. She fidgeted the matchbox; her eyes descended on the box – burnt sienna, the colour of her marriage sari brocaded in the rich silk of south India. She ran her manicured finger over the box, opened it.  She smelt the matches; they carried the smell of a different world, a different culture, quite like her husband who carries a different time in him.

The burnt sienna triggered a memory of an evening when he took her to Arikamedu, a nondescript suburb south of Pondicherry.  It was once a busy port town that docked Roman ships. He took her in a boat from a fishing village, they went deep into the sea and the land curved behind them. She saw a mangrove at a distance and saw that they were moving beyond the lip of the land towards an inlet of a river, thick with moss and algae. The boat sliced the water that was like a sheet of green glass, just the way the Romans did in the first century, he said.  They pulled up on a thin bar of sand and beyond there was no habitation, only dense thickets.

He lead her through the brambles, polythene covers clung to the thorn thickets and blew gaily in the breeze from the sea. She saw empty bottles of beer and cigarette butts, revelers from the city she thought with disgust.

He wasn’t aware of his surroundings, he had moved to a different time and seemed a different person. He had been during those early months of courtship a mysterious lover who went on his archaeological digs, that evening she saw him descend into the world that he dug and excavated.

He took her to a trench where layers of digs had been completed, he led her down the trench. It was once a bead making unit, beads of various hues in various stages of making had been found there. Glass came from different parts of south India and it was blown into tubes, pinched into drops to make exquisite jewellery that went to different parts of the Roman Empire.

They stood on even land and he held out a shard of pottery for her. It contained beads, a dark mass in the failing light. As she held the pot he lit a match that threw light on the cluster of translucent glass beads the colour of burnt sienna. She held a bead in her fingers, veins of light flowed through the small piece of glass. She stood there transposed to the world that these drops of colour and light travelled, all the people they adorned.

She opened her chest of drawers and took the box where she had kept the bead. She placed the bead on the match box, the bead left a stain of glow on the match box. Does Bratislava have a Roman connection like Arikamedu?

The Flower That Is Textured Like Milk

He looked at the fair skin near the neck, the collar bone that scooped out a deep hollow, the long neck that sloped softly into the pearly sari. She seemed like a child, a play mate from his village hiding and waiting to be revealed. His eyes softened and rested on her a whole minute wishing her not to look at him, for he knew that if their eyes met the temptress would drag him to the mud.

A Crushed Flower

He looked at the things in the drawer of his table, the things that she forgot during her visits to his room – a wooden bangle, a large ear stud, a vaseline tube, an eyeliner bottle. He packed these trivias and dropped  them in the garbage can outside the house. He did not realise that he still carried the bus ticket that she used as a book mark in his book on Kural, and a browned jasmine flower pressed accidentally between the pages.

Flourescent Blooms

She was dressed in a dark blue sari, the turquoise stone on her ears caught the fluorescent light and threw a pale glow on her cheeks. She had painted her lips a deep pink, her hair was drawn in a formidable bun, a red rose was tucked on a side of the bun. She had pulled her sari tight over her chest and the curves of her breast heaved as she breathed deep. There were lines near her mouth, and her eyes were puffed. She was evidently in a turmoil.