In my city

In my city, I have forgotten what it is like to
Call it mine...

The ancient fortress skirted over the skyline, glimmer
Mirrors in the moonlight. They leak some of their radiance down to the
Urban mad child in her lap and I, one of her patients...
Soak in the stories I heard in school. The rhymes of mighty queens
Who wandered through Rajasthan’s desert to find the sparkling gems..
The sages, the mystics, who never spoke to me...
Lay curled in their secluded erotica. The epics
Written on the Peepal leaves, woven with confusions...
These legends, the folk tales. The masqueraded beggars.
The dance of poverty stricken hijras

At the stroke of twelve, the alcoholic murder of an innocent mother.
The gothic silence of the city at night, the crickets from house gardens
And the roar of televisions in the tiny apartments.
The jarring tractors, the tumult of school life.
You will love this city, whispers an old woman. But what does she know about
My love’s vision? My barometer of loving.


A man? Who despises my touch and dons a fake mask.
A friend? Whose life is now seemingly a suicidal drama...
A dead poet? With whom I fumble
In nightly hours, lined in a perfect synchrony.
There is nothing that I have learned about any city in these nineteen years.
There is nothing I have felt that resembled love or its smoke...
I don’t know Jaipur. The city I am supposed to call mine.
I regret.
I won’t even know Bangalore. The city I crave to call mine.
I regret.

So my excuse is the post modern confusion and the sensational overload...
(Some more intellectual bull crap)
And that is all what I hold on to now.

This city is a witch of dream neurosis.
This city
Is a scheming middle class mother, straight out of the soap operas...
She spends her days in luxurious loafing and with dreams of
Settling in the US. It has turned into sweet vicious cage of
Countless foreign education institutions and “Learn English”
Offices. All I hear is chanting of money machine. Humming
Of laptops busy in stock sharing, its users masturbating
Afternoons with Katrina Kaif and bad clones of Angelina Jolie...
Couples

Decaying with their energies, they discuss money even in the bed.
They make children with planning...
They use expensive, specially engineered condoms
Because they have forgotten what it is really like to fuck..
This city has imbibed its mad children’s flavor. It swallows the gin
Of its ruins, its old heritage. The stumbling wraiths of Hawa Mahal, the
Magical birds guarding the windows of broken palaces..
But there is nobody to savor the dance of loss. We all have
Relinquished the battle long time back. We are terribly comfortable
With losses..and that is what I have learned too.
We have become accustomed to drab lectures of non violence
And then delighting the street brawls. Confiscation of a prostitute’s earning, her rape
In police stations....After the same constables have drooled over her cunt
And licked it like melting icicles. So which part of the city
Am I supposed to call mine? And start learning it?
The more I learn, the more I forget. The more they talk,
The more meaningless they become.

City
Is a glorified corpse of a thousand dreams and I am just one of them.
One of the dreams which are sold at the lemonade cart by
A fifteen year old boy who wants to be like Brad Pitt.
A city..lost in its own translation.