Comrade, do you occasionally get a newspaper?
Don’t believe the piecemeal news.
Last year the one who drowned in the village pond…
It was not mother.
A brick got disengaged from the blue terrace and fell down.
At the very first raid, mother
trying to swim through Gorky’s novel
ran away from the police.
at the banks of the novel
and sometimes fades like her own blessings.
And recently, the poet
who was in news for joining the party safely
it was not I, it was a Dek tree on the outside wall
which bad spirits, wearing police uniforms
had learnt to climb up and down.
Long before that news went to print,
when night was sliding into words
and the dark- like cobra, sat coiled on names…
I stole whatever remained of the party’s compassion
and slid down…stole away
into the human clamour
When my own feet were listening to me
like love poems
I went and put the waning compassion
carefully among crow’s eggs
To Sadhu Singh and Jirvi*, I have complained
many times about these news.
Who say that the paralysis of news
does not let them walk on their own feet
they ask for crutches of our death
“if we believed their truth
we would have cried over you many times over.”
Every time I read the news of a sudden raid
I tell mother-
Its not you, but another warrior with your name
Mother knows nothing of grammatical nuances
Shivering in the chilling innocence of old age
She mistakes a naming word for a caste name
and a caste name for a collective noun
For her whenever a bullet is fired on a name
Some caste or some emotion is murdered
Comrade, mother is anyways crazy
Both of us and news cannot change her
For coming home late, she will
With any household object
Or with the whole house, beat you and later
Stuff her dry breast in your mouth