Cold Night

Have you ever been burnt by a moonlit night?
Have you ever tasted the bitterest of honey?
Have you ever drunk nectar and felt poisoned?
Come here in the homes among the bamboo groves
Come, feel my palm and see how cold the night is.
Have you ever seen beside every bed a pot of poison?
Have you ever seen hanging on every branch?
Ropes of the executioner
Come here in the streets of henjunaha
Come, feel my skin and see how haunting the night is.

Broken

I am home and they are still here
These streets still scarred
These hills still in reverie
Which one is more sore?
The broken strings of your guitar
Or the broken notes of their Pena

This is hour for wounds and maiming
There will be a time for mending and healing
There will be hours for mantra and magic
Of course I wait for the Maibi
Who feels the meagre pulse on my wrist
And tells the fortune of this land
She tells over my body
The fever of this land
My pulse, the broken throb of our antique drum
My bosom, the angst of a missed progeny
M y forehead, the warmth of the fresh pyre

The malady of this land is mine

This home gave us everything
A corner to live and die
A corner to croon and sigh
Though it could never give a tiny corner
To rest at long last
Broken bones of our hearts

Fading landscape

Something fades on this dying landscape
Is it a glow worm or bonfire?
Perhaps a soul or just the tip of a cigar
Each night someone burns to live
Each day someone always departs

Once more a day has come
Not Monday or Tuesday just a day
Unadorned: unaware
Leaving queries unanswered
Once more gone is the day
Like the half un-drunk glass of red tea on a tray

My soul was the sole witness
Of their incarnation into wild
No norms: No canon
Just the measureless chase of prey
Just the swaying leonine mane
Just the lick of nature on our face
And we the worm from eagle’s beak to chick’s mouth
Though the owl of Minerva no longer flies over this land
White dove turns red
This land harbour no regret
Wildly fresh..as ever..
I chose to be here forever...

Emagi Enpham (My mother’s site of casting fish net)

Today evening at around six thirty I felt a surge of desire in me to go to my mom’s place of casting fish net where she was already gone for more than two hours this evening. I took a torch and walked out of my room without telling my father. It was a dark September evening and I was dropped there by a leikai (local) aunt. As I walked through the meadow lifting my phanek a bit I felt the grasses flirting on my thighs. A big frog jumped away from my way into the pond left of the lane in a splash. The unknown humming insects welcome me. I called my mom from a distance. She never expected her daughter who was out of the village for eight years would turn up there in the dark evening. She was happily surprised.

The mosquitoes were in a swamp. I asked my mom how she managed to hold on with the mosquitoes. She says they do not bite her. On the bank of the small canal, a small rug sack was laid and on it my mom’s arms lay so serenely… a small torch with indigo and yellow color, a small plastic bucket in which once paints were once filled, a Manipuri novel, a shawl and a few small towels. I asked my mom if there are no snakes around. She told me she knew a mantra to shoo away snakes. That was the first time I came to know that my mom too knows mantra (as all women knows secretly some mantra or the other).

I sat down beside my mom. Just beyond the canal, the expanse of a vast green field stretched and bounded by the Tiddim road and further beyond the green-black mountains silhouette against the starry sky. In the dense bushes strange noises of the night rise and fall. After how many years I was savouring the sight of glowworms glittering here and there. Few yards away in the graveyard I felt our ancestors snoring in death such peaceful sleep perhaps we envy at times. Death in that way is really beautiful.

I knew somewhere ten thousand Kilometers away in that City which made me, it must be growling, howling, whispering, beckoning, teasing and sweating from its daily wrestling. I far away from that still feel the odour of that city…I just have to close my eyes and smell deep. Scents also carry memories. Songs also carry memories. From Nambol to Imphal and in other routes of Manipur the scent prevails …familiar ones. The Nga Yonbi scent (the scent of smoked fish seller) is everywhere. Sometimes the scent of Soijin and Soibum (fermented bamboo soot) also erupts from hither and thither. From somewhere in the corner of the street the scent of fried ngari (fermented fish) erupts in rupture. This scent is an acquired scent. It would be offensive to an alien nose, I am sure our Meitei nose is perfectly evolved to trace and feel at home with this scent. This is the scent of Manipur. Thousands of Kilometer we have gone and thousand more we will go away again and again perhaps never to come back. Yet we carry with us the memories and the pang associated with these scents and songs. Once in our lifetimes we long to come back here at our home, long to recall the lost memories, the fading vision and the various graves that had grown in our absence like my grandmother’s.

In the name of god, God is killed. In the name of love, Hatred is wished for; in the name of holiness the most profane is sought. In our name they have forsaken us. This is the predicament of our lives.. this place is no exception in harbouring these eternal predicament. We are people of this world no different from others. We throb with a part of this universal predicament
But I See the Nongjabi in the west as the sun set so lazily and I felt perhaps we live for this moment. I saw the nervous stars and get myself excited for life. And I realize I live for that. And tonight my heart dancing with the glowworms felt the joy of living. And it is beautiful to be just alive without much questioning without much retrospection. Yet the beauty of this innocence is so evanescent that I did not know I felt it too.

Meanwhile my mom is getting more and more irritated with me as I keep on flashing the blue torch into the net piercing through the murky water and shooing away the tiny fish.
She is like ‘Ebemma, What are you up to? You are chasing away all the fish… go back home.’ And I was just enjoying irritating her and irritating tiny fish out there. The un- courteous mosquitoes have penetrated my phanek and bit me through my skin in spite of my waving and shooing. And I was sure I have drunk the water of seven seas and become polluted and now my mantra I remember no more to shoo away any wild from invading me. I lost my atavistic mantra at the cost of gaining another mantra of another paradigm. And the cost is too high to tell you.

And now I must go else my mom will chase me away. I came back in the dark lane with shrubs and canals on both sides. I knew I could never be back from what I felt and lost those days in the city that made me and killed me at the same time..this is a timeless predicament.

Written on 25th September 2009

Monstrous Absence

The city in his monstrous absence
Hallowed with winter rays
His scent in some abandoned corner
Ran like a kitten into the chambers
Of my lungs as
I inhale deep

The city in his monstrous absence
Lulled to a dreamy spell
As fog hung heavy on its lids
Each winding road
Trails the edge of his endless shadow
And I trip on that edge
Every step I take

The city in his monstrous absence
With all its saintliness stood so ascetic
Made me holy once more as
I was washed this winter
With the dew that erupts
From the spots where the tears dry

The Other Revolutionary

She took up Irabot’s sickle
To chop off the overgrown beard
On her mother’s chin
She too is a revolutionary

The wicked wind licks lecherously
Her thighs along which the phanek slithers
Yielding to the wanton wind
The phanek prostrate on the wayside cried
‘hey lady! you have dropped me’
She knowingly did not look back
She too is a revolutionary

The evening prayer to Sanamahi was offered
Forgetting her crimson lunar cycle
Only to remember when her man tucked her phanek
From her waist in that drunken night
As the faint scent of haeme whiffs along
She too is a revolutionary

She rode away in the air
Screamed with the muffled mouth
Forgot when ought to remember
Swam in the cloud
She too thinks a thought
She too is a revolutionary

That night in that bloody war
A seed of revolution was sown
In her ravaged womb
Against law against time; against all dimensions of life
A revolution grows in her belly
She is a revolutionary through the ages

Rainbow

Violet leibaklei pierces the earth
Many a summer ago when she once walked on this vale
Its faint scent opens its eyes whenever I close mine
Her dim soul glows whenever I look at a lazy distance
On the way back I saw her soul slowly descending and rising
With the waves of the archaic wind
In the autumn air I saw it nestled in the cradle of a weightless leaf

Indigo sky mocked at me
As I once tried to play with the clouds
At last I played with pebbles and marbles
As if there will never be a game after
It was the morning that went and never came
Although I waited for the final game
On the way back I saw it between the human bulls
In the muddy battlefield I saw them rolling like buffaloes in the mud

Blue ribbons with which I bound my hair
Fell and trampled in the dust and foot
That day when I first came out of my home
Seeking a strange freedom in that seized street
On the way back I saw freedom curled asleep like a street dog
In the garden I saw it playing hide and seek in the folds of the foliage

Green moors of this valley beckoned me
Whenever I am exiled from this land
Like calling me for the last truce
‘As you killed my son give me your daughter’
And I shrugged and said so as you say
On the way back I saw her son making love to my daughter
From dreamy mountain I saw their love melting down in ravines

Yellow November fields opened itself for her visitors
Who were never ever inheritors
Wild herbs; shrubs; half sun baked cow-dung and snails
Their sole heritage from this soil red with their kin’s blood
On way back I saw the visitors performing their daily rites
In the field I saw their dreams opening pearl-less oysters


Orange suns deliciously drooped on my courtyard
I plucked them one by one
One for me; one for the unknown; and one for the unnamed
I put them in the jar of my anguish
On the way back I saw suns getting burnt
In the jar I saw them melting into warm rays

Red cheeks of that summer beauty
Blushed by the unruly highland wind and Orion’s luring gaze
At last they fled with her beauty
And the lovelorn searched for the stolen
On the way back I saw her beauty kneeling at the tomb of the slain
In the grave I saw it walking every evening like a lost ghost