COLOURS

I think of my eyes dreaming you
As I think of seeing your dreams
In imagined sleep of yours and mine
I dream of a reality
Which seems closer to truth

RETURN III

Parting looks
Freeze into
Still life paintings

Courage to escape
Made me look away
At the last moment
From the tear which welled in your eyes
From my yet-no-god futility

RETURN II

Walk back is longer
Hands are pressed under the arms
They had nothing in them

RETURN I

The train moves
Leaves the station
My glances bend on the floor
Pick the broken glass
Return to estranged destinies

MEMORY

My fingers draw a face In the air
My lips whisper a name
My hands throw another pebble in water

A shiver sudden and calm away

SENSE

From a distance
I can touch the sense
Of longings
In the touch of your fingers
My sense can touch your sense
From a distance
My nerve ends replay
The sense of your touch

SILENCE

All my dark meanings
Will grope In your silence
You would fill my crossword
You would give me a word
Before the meanings slip away

TOUCH

Each realisation
Draws a wrinkle on the skin
Of experience
A smile keeps
Visiting the wrinkle
Nevertheless

WORDS

Your silence
Punctuates my word
Fills it with meanings
My word colors
Your silence

ENTRANCED

In a trance you look into me
Take me to another trance
From trance of me and you
To trance of us

It takes me deep
And gives a high

Deep like soul
High like joy

I can’t frame it in my mind
So much happens in this moment
Of tidal spontaneity
That nothing can be completely grasped
Moment, touch, feel, meanings and
You

My senses grope into
Memory and return under expressed
As failed warriors

Words can’t feel the senses
Senses can’t get hold of the complete picture

My expressions can’t unburden
The intensity of this
Growing into me
As fern on some medieval wall


So much happens in this moment

This moment
In this idea of you

© nidheesh tyagi

I KNOW THE END OF THE STORY

i know the end of the story. do you?
that you looked for the right word
and i for the right meaning
(now you would say what is right cant be decided!!??)
(now you would say something intellectual blur)
(now you would polish the glint in your armour)

in the end there was nothing to understand

i had nothing to do with the armour
or its sheen or the regimental brasso-ed polish
no intent of see my reflection in the eyes of worldly wise
you could never mirror me

i came to claim the depths of your being
the darks
the silences
the spaces

i came to disarm and branch out to my freedom
to my endless possibilities
to the salvation of being
but moments were far less ordinary than intents

in the end
words will fail you
meanings me

i know the end of story..

Happiness, incidentally

Nidheesh Tyagi

For a long time there was no job. He tried hard sending his resume, showcasing his academic qualifications, reiterating his objective in every photocopied double-spaced computer typed application of how he wants to do his best given an opportunity, how keen and positive he feels to take up challenges and rise to the occasions. Everyday he prayed to his god to get him a job, checked mails, fasted two days in week, wrote his old parents back home that things were bright and looking up. Its only a matter of time, he kept mentioning to his wife, he was married to in a Bundelkhand village while he was still doing his Masters in anthropology from Barkataulla University, Bhopal. She was living in her parent’s home, counting his promise of bringing her to Bhopal as soon as he lands into a job.

While he was doing this, the employment bureau had long stopped facilitating a job for anyone, except who were working in that office. These were the times that spelt end of the Public sector, Nehruvian economy, Government monoliths, trade unions, employment exchange. He was lucky. Lucky to get a job from employment bureau. In these times.

He was the new night shift in charge of the mortuary in Bhopal Gas Relief Hospital made by the compensation given by the multinational Union Carbide for gassing the city of erstwhile Nawabs. The old Incharge was sacked after he was found drinking in the mortuary and misbehaving with a nurse in inebriated state. The salary wasn’t much but he had a job in hand. And that was all he prayed for. Moreover it was a semi-government job, almost permanent.

So he had a reason to be happy, finally. Wrote to parents about getting a job without clarifying the exact nature of his job. Wrote to his wife to join him in his one room- kitchen- shared toilet ramshackle living arrangement in an old Bhopal neighborhood. She took a month to come but she smiled seeing him at the station. She was proud, her eyes told him. After such a long time.

Sometimes he felt sad. About the gas disaster. The long line of burqa clad women in the morning OPD and the coughing old men, when he leaves his work for the day early morning. When a little girl in a tiny fragile bony frame was brought to mortuary the other day, he almost could not stop his tears and looked away. Then there was this pregnant woman who was brought in after she succumbed on a stretcher on way to operation theatre.

He had a chair to sit and one table to write and maintain his register, a side stool to keep a water jug and a glass, a 250 volt bulb in the room and a ceiling fan, which creaked more than fanned. The ceiling was high but the room was small and poorly ventilated. It was very hot in that close almost cubicle office in that concrete building.

Some nights he would sneak into the mortuary. It had a working 3 tonne air conditioner of American origin assembled in Malaysia. And the chill really made him feel good. In that cool breezy feel of the air-conditioned mortuary, all his sweating of hot Indian summer night will vanish. He felt fresh. Free from stink and sweat. He thought he would never need any other job. He felt lucky to have this job. He smiled. Outside the heat wave was still roaming in the streets, the earth still perched, the concrete roofs and floors still emanating heat.

Outside the hospital, there were these power cuts in the town. Afternoons were dry, hot, sweating, which he had to spend at his home. In the small room, after they eat their lunch together, he lies next to his wife using a handheld plastic fan on the cot. They talk about the air conditioner. The cool breezy feel. They don’t talk of mortuary. Not of the child or that pregnant woman. Someday he would show her around, he tells her. In that power cut. The state radio was playing movie songs of the last decade in the background.

© nidheeshtyagi 2004

APARAJIT'S WORK ON SILENCE

Aparajit's work on SENSE

RUNWAY OF REALITY

You came on clouds that day
From celestial miles
From a virtual space of imagination
Landing on a runway of reality

Wings find their feet
Feet fly
Moments turn magical
In early hours of dawn
Destiny gatecrashes
From impossible statistics
To secret garden of desire
Beside the fountains of joy
Fog descends into vegetation
Turns into dews

Heart pumps blood
Hands touch
Body pulsates against body
Soul responds soul’s call
In moment of answered prayers
Grass turns into green
Trees into jungle
Clouds into river

There are no cell phones, ring tones, TV news, people with prying eyes, no agenda, no plans, schedules, no newspapers, no food, no distraction whatsoever. Some poems and flowing, floating us. I would disarm myself from any excess baggage and open up to soak the incredulous feel of my humanity resonating in yours. I would not come to you with my past, identity card, material dimensions, future, preoccupations. I would in the moment seek the life in that moment. I will present myself to this moment, as my human surrenders to the divine will. I will make myself available to the magical moment you brought with yourself as Prasad from Gods themselves. Together me and you were in our alter-world, away from the wife and mother, father and husband. All we could have been then was to be the essential and the elemental humans- not even individuals- we are. Nothing could get lowered, nothing could be berated, nothing abused. Nothing was, believe me. The more I soak you, your shades, your meanings, your nuances, your ambience, the more I am sure of it. If we try to justify, rationalize, define, categorize and equate the moment of our truth, with our other moments of realities then pain and punishment are very obvious inferences of it. Could I have stopped you from coming to me? Could I have stopped myself if you came to me? I don’t think I disrespected your freedom – spelt or otherwise. All we could do in this moment of confluence was to be mesmerized, to open to give and receive the eternal beings in the two of us.

All too unbelievable
All too short
All too precious
All too spontaneous
All too dreamy, which we won’t want to wake up from

In this miracle moment
Fantasy seeks reality
Reality seeks fantasy
And cheats itself

When reality meets
Fantasy
Only the expectation
Is Unreal

© nidheeshtyagi

WHEN TRUTH BECOMES REAL

Infinite imaginations
Ignite and sparkle in mind
When I think you

Mind plots combos
Images flash through
Laced with luck
Lines, numbers and alphabets
Interplay with nostalgia, memory and fiction
I have read late night 14 years back

Pictures shape up
Films roll on mindscape

A face in the train locked into gaze
A hand that longs the touch but has to go
A prayer whispered in silence
Another moment of togetherness which isn’t there
The long lonelier walk back from King’s Cross waiting
With a sense of finality now

I can’t miss the beauty of this pain called parting

I resist you in mind
Resist slipping into the trap
I don’t want it to finish here
Something must be left undone

I grasp you
Cling to you
As the last and the final
Figment of life
For the moment
When truth becomes real
And slip away

© nidheeshtyagi

DISSOLVE

Civilizations perish
Cultures becomes alien
Words sound archaic
Acts look trivial

To belong at such moments
Is to explode
Beyond the glass wall of time and universe
And walk over it

To you

To be a tribal is
Not a choice
But a destiny
So real
Essential
Elemental

That there is no getting away

As the river dissolves into the forest
Climbs into that last leaf
Of greenness and glee

Destiny bends
Bows to the call
Of life…
Of unsaid prayers

Bows to a sprouting seed of truth

© nidheeshtyagi

RENDEZVOUS

When its over
The party
The crowd gone
Dance floor empty and music off
Peeled off make up and worn out niceties
Dresses changed
Efforts exhausted


In this unassuming moment
Let me come near you
And not touch you
But the shadow and silences

And soak a sleeping face

The shadows of my fingers
Stroke the silence of your tresses

You dream what I imagine
I imagine your dreams

See you here


©nidheeshtyagi

TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES

take off your shoes
take them in your hands
and step barefoot
on the earth
take the universe in your stride
shift the weight forward
as the world passes by
at the hill
spread your arms
say hi
to the you – you were always
to the you – who is catching up
decide
to
smile
----------------------
monsoon answers prayers
touches
earth
arouses it
answered by love
and moaning and bursts of songs and greens of fragrances
a bacteria emanates that fragrance
a frog croaks a happy song
an ant flies her last flight
blind in love
a peacock spreads its wings

life engages life
life sprouts life
in a boat a flow
of mad bliss
draped in raincoats
gods cruise
into their own party
--------------------------
of another times
of another delhi
wrote a poem the other day
an old flame just said sorry
did a story on the dirty dingy ward of
premature born babies
headlined – WARRIORS AT BIRTH
--------------------------
i too
learn words are smart
punctuations to meanings
silences are so loaded with
--------------------------
( so far so good. how is it going? this letter. to you. sorry for all the nonsense. you asked for it.)
(and now the poem i wrote the other day)

24, MAITRI APARTMENTS, MAYUR VIHAR

lovelorn walk on a lonely raining delhi winter night

rain drips over my face
i exhale smoke
i smell the fragrance
and i touch you
touch the feel of u
feel the touch of you
every time i look out from the DTC bus
on regal bus stand
the charms of your smile
the warmth of your breathe
the island in your eyes
flash like billboards
across times (every time)
across crowds
across destinies
i spread my hand
my fingers reach out
to draw your face
in emptiness

long after you are gone
i touch and feel the
the emptiness sitting on the bus stop with the winter fog
and the cigarette vendor and the cold stray dog
i walk with my empty hands in my torn pockets
returning to my sleepless and cold late night
in bus number 035 and drop at mayur vihar
singing a very nasal hemant kumar
(isko hi jeena kehte hain to yun hee jee lenge/ uf na karenge/ lab see lenge/ aansoo pee lenge…)
not just in love
but also to keep forgetting the freezing
feel of a lonely delhi late night.

between cigarettes and you
life crosses yamuna bridge
and dda flats
coughing chowkidars
drunk driver
sleeping dog
cold tandoor
copulating bodies
humming radio
flushing toilets
disappearing dreams
job interview every next morning
letters to home
mentions in diary
stitched smile
three wheeler to smoky no where

chai boils over
as the filament of the heater breaks again
i will draw my last drag of cigarettes
between fingers
after lighting it from here
switch off the lights

melt into the dark silence of being
in rapt attention and with locked eyes

if its winters, love and solitude

the temperature is 5 degree below
than what appears in the morningers.

-----------------------

LIKE THE DEEPEST PRAYER

I will hold you close
Locked in my heart
Chained to my ribs
I will hold you away from my lips
Like the greatest secret
Like the sweetest sin

River will gleam in the jungle leaves

When no one would be watching
Will return to this moment
In silent steps of darkness
To drink the nectar of
Joy from the river of life
To be 435 years old Mohua tree again

In the forbidden valley of emotions
In the impossible terrain of desires
In the fading footways of destiny
In this jungle of happy smells
In this spicy exotica of your kitchen
In this touch of life, love of god, forest rain, crooning silence of woods
In this steal of a glance
In this accident of a touche’
In this solitary moment of shared truth
In this lasting look on the railway platform
In this becoming of our own shadows
In the mirror of your unslept eyes

Will walk up to the hillock
Set up on a melting rock will bow to your temple
And offer my body, place my soul

Your still statue feet move
When my hands hold them

By infusing life into dust.
You Answer my pilgrimage.

Like the deepest prayer
I said the untouched
Like a divine river
You touched the unsaid

©nidheeshtyagi / 22 may, 2004

YOU AND I

I am that gleam in your eyes
Depth of your silence
Texture of your whispering dusk
A twitch motion of a still life painting

I am a medium to celebrate and salute your pain
Your journey
Your endurance
Your womanhood

Breezy moment in a musty cell
Intense bundle of joy, fun & libido
Drop from the oceanic compassion
A stone with coloured layers of humanity

I am your mirror. You can see yourself bare
Unmasked and unleash that gush in you

© nidheeshtyagi

FLIGHTS

Imagined memories become our homelands
Just before the breeze the moment framed in still life
Hands that held before train moved
Glances that showered before tears make you look away
Slomo of perception details
Window and a table and breakfast in water colors
Music in desert hopes
Muffled prayers of silence
Feel of gut over a beating heart
Spontaneous leaps of meditative faith
Across the window of impossibility
Freedoms flies to horizons

© nidheeshtyagi

ENTWINED

you sleep in my dreams
smile in yours
i watch you from up close
your heart beats in my chest
your shoulders breath me

a river flows, gushes
a jungle turns green, breezy

a moment gets dense
and explodes me in you

in my early morning of happy desires
you bloom like a thousand rajanigandha


©nidheeshtyagi