Songs Out Of Rhythm

“It seems the devil controls the business of my life”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A hospital Bed
An old hospital bed , a man complaining on the sick bed
“ I get dreams of unlit lamps, dried rivers ,lightless mornings, clouded sky,withered
Petals….no one follows me into this temple where bells never clanged,I search for
Hands …but all I can see is walls ,walls laden with images of old feuds,old loves,old laurels,old rains,babies born dead, big wide walls which never talked ,walls imprinted with memories of solitary strolls….these walls scare me….i search for hands to hold….” The man never sobs.He lives his walled existence lost in his own delirium…

Railway Station
Men waiting for trains to come, men rushing out of unfinished journeys to start a new one , men sitting on the rusted benches waiting for trains that would never come, youth with maddening songs in their ears, far from the crowd, beggars with bliss of the day, drunkards with myriad thoughts , pilgrims running away ,undisturbed grey pigeons caught on the old station roofs , pitch black crows hopping to peck remnants of old journeys. The gargantuan train that barge in to disturb the stoic ness of this colorless painting.

An Old post Office
Picture postcards sent by fathers long dead in wars, government sealed letters to join jobs offered in distant lands for people who were already migrants in unknown lands, scented letters sent to old loves , sons long lost in the crowd searching their mothers , advertisement postcards of magic potions offering immortality ,magazines with images of old earthquakes that destroyed 1000 homes , letters proclaiming treasures that were won by long forgotten feuds in courts , letters from schools complaining about a naughty child who was already a mother of two …the undelivered letters forming a garden in that dark paradise of the termites in the old post office..

The Village Reading Room
Old commies reminiscing the days of AKG , the old songs of KPAC, memories of the blood shed in punapra vayalar. They refuse to read the day’s newspapers to live in those memories of yesterday , they pretend not to know of what is happening today in the party to which they gave their heart and soul…they live in that old age home of revolutionary memories .. Long live this revolution against the present.

My Old Mathematics NoteBook
Padmanabhan’s sir’s big red marks against the wrong additions and subtractions that I did as a kid in my old Mathematics Notebook, the untidy handwriting of an uninterested
Kid ,of big digits that would never add up to her imagination , the red face of my dad seeing my notebook … I don have a notebook of glaring red marks these days but I still get all my additions wrong , things never add up the way I want it to…life still is an incomplete mathematics notebook….