bombay breeze: an ode to a city and its imagination

Aranya

dear reader,

perhaps this is an apology. but it is a kind of apology that one is wont to give to a sensitive friend, to whom one writes after a very long time. i have, for some time, considered these commentaries as letters that have sought to indulge your patience, with brief, unformed, sometimes even uninformed, ideas around poetic practice. perhaps one could see this space the way Marquez saw the many film scripts and ideas he had written before 100 Years of Solitude. when an interviewer asked him what happened to those ideas, he said they all went into the novel :) shows. but marquez possessed the magic to whittle down time into pleasurable prose. our ambitions are less lofty, more fragile.

so the text below, is not a commentary on a poem, but a poem, parading as commentary. it is a letter, to a city, and to an idea.

'“or else you’ll go mad” a blurred still of ‘Ganpati festival’ in Mumbai from Payal Kapadia’ s All we imagine as light

Aranya

---

O lone traveler
itinerant poet
engineer of dreams postman

who hails from a place
where language has not died

O quivering string that drips with the quietude of service

what it means to surrender
your eyes have taught

This world

a body bristling with holes
a jaali through which the light streams
is yours to hew

let the city sing in your eyes
and let me hear the scream
that disdains joy for darker epiphanies

in this wasteland
where opinion is harvested
on the sharp edge of the meme
you continue to hold the song
like a sieve

as if music could realign place
as if the apprehension of sound
could teach silence

teach me
to be quiet

O homeless friend
who was cursed into the expanse
whose eyes flickered when the dream took wing
when your nose stiffened to the smog
when belief reminded you to stir
before it is too late
and told you there was something else
in this forest, other than the city

O deewana seeker of darkness
come to bombay I beseech you

come smell the fumes of neon dreams
that break at the crest of midnight

go to the door of the sky
that place we call the sea
go to the edge of the wave that stretches
from Oberoi hotel to NCPA
sit there on the empty stage at Little Theatre
and watch as ghosts rainbow into life

sit with your 3am nescoffee and ask the girl

who’s hawking roses why she won’t sell you one
to throw into the sea

Listen to the breathing silence of the night
when the only sounds are the swish of doomscroll
and the muffled hum of fingers crackling with mischief

in dark rooms without windows
fear becomes anger
even the time is whispered like a secret
no city knows this truth the way bombay does
catastrophe is expected here
until it happens after that
it is always sudden But come to bombay dear friend.

Come, because I have to tell you a secret that I can only tell you
in bombay dear friend because anywhere else
it would spontaneously combust

you and i we are the pole star to this moving night
of other worldly images the city is a place we can never reach
except in our imagination look how the streets are wrung from the backbone
of desire look how lovers find room in each others’ flesh how night finds sleep and moon-drunk days grow old
under the haze of a 200 sq. foot matchbox home

in bombay we learn to fold ourselves into a shape that is acceptable to others

Come learn with me the meaning of space

this night my musafir is caught in its own laughter
and with our elbows tasting rust we could feel the spray

that began in calloused fingers of spice traders calling rates
from across the seven seas we could rehearse the sacred pathways

into the brain that the opium agents devised we could replay
the memory that sits still in the burnished stone at khotachiwadi

for you i have brought my broken instrument
some tunes still strain against the plastic skin
when it flicks the lazy strings

but I know dear friend that they will come alive
in your hands

that when you sing the music will not be out of place
the song will be a beautiful mistake
that people can sense in their bodies
because like everything beautiful
in this moving city
it is broken

sing softly dear friend
lest they come to hound you
lest they come with their bulldozers
and their stones and their claws
of god and nation and knowledge
sing softly dear friend lest the mob
burst through the walls
and force you to burn your poems

---

hope you, and your loved, are finding meaning and the space to create. do write to poetly@pm.me if you have any questions, queries, or comments. i will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time. happy sunday!

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