New | Poetry | Lina Krishnan

Painting by Emile Bernard (Wikimedia Commons)

My MIL’s Address Book

Archana heads the list. 

Her number doesn’t though

It finds a place, under S - her nickname

Her Doctors - Murlidhar and Gauri

Are mentioned under their respective capitals

Being decades older than them

She feels she owes them no appellative

I look in vain for my name among the Ls

I find it elsewhere, below her son’s name

And then, there’s Bhag Diwan

Her late husband’s late sister

Less than a year ago, she was at the other end of the phone

Now a barbed wire crosses out her name in the book

Replaced tidily, by the name of the son 

Who lives at that address now

Portraits

On the Metro’s Purple Line

Tired even on a Sunday 

Faces from an Eisenstein deck

Van Gogh’s farm workers

Now driven from the Land

One in particular, a figure all in white dust

Two days worth of paint in a day

Dead tired, half dazed. 

I look. And look away, too late

He has seen, that I have seen

Safedi walla, house painter in white

Like Michelangelo in marble dust

Brothers under the skin

Or rather, above it. 

Showstopper

The lone shiuli wonders

Why it’s been singled out

Not in the little basket 

With the rest of its kin

Not cognisant at all

With the perils of the spotlight

Of how loneliness colours that terrain

Even if the photograph

That is being taken

Is only for a friend

Homesick for the shiuli season

And much else, unsaid

Anda Bhurji

JNU on a rainy evening
We look about us
When last, did we students from DU

See a forest glisten?

Against a conversable twilight
We unfurl shyly
In a sizzling pan, random kindness
Meets surprised enjoyment

Not so, do you expect
A Menshevik tutorial
After hours, to go

Bandicoot Tunnels

The garden is a warren

Each morning shows newer dugouts

Strategic bunkers for rodent war

Or is it just a nightly commute?

Put in a beer bottle or two

I’m advised. Glass keeps them out

Oh a teetotaler rat, I think

My mind off-kilter as usual

It’s a neat, punctuated row

Along the garden wall

I navigate, in mind's eye

The hundred-plus tunnels

On the Kalka Shimla line

That too, is narrow gauge

Bio: Lina Krishnan has worked two decades in communications. She has phases of immersion in art, then poetry. She also writes notes on cinema. She lives in Auroville, India.