One country is too small for you

You go from hope to disillusionment
You go from pride to disgust
There is something terribly wrong with the world
Just yesterday the world had been set for you
How were you to know
They would come for you?
We are accidents of history,
especially you, with your slight eyes
Your freedom-loving bones
It's been almost seven decades
And they still haven't got the hold of you
they don't know why you dance and sing
they don't know the words of your lips
they don't know why you die
year after year, asking to be free
Sometimes even love fails to stem
the tide of this feeling, so late in life
which has been been aroused in you
By now you know they will never see you an an equal,
Yet they ask you to fight for this nation
Whose nation? you want to ask,
You will always forever be the other
Marginalised, neglected but chained.
This heaping of indignity, it makes you feel small
It makes you so ready to apologise for
what you haven't done.
For you are a wanderer on this earth
And one country is too small for you.

There was a freak rain in the morning
the day I left home as though Manipur
was mourning my departure, I romanticise
the Wakching rain, I miss the way my world
erupts in laughter in the morning
The steps of Mama going faint
As she goes downstairs, Papa's songs
filtering into my room
I am growing old and impossibly younger
My bones are heavy with history
There is always so much writing to do
which never gets written.

The earth quakes in Manipur

We are but specks on this earth
Cowering from fear that the earth would give
 away and swallow us up
We live in the shadow of despair
That you have given us such beauty
Only to take it back
We only wish you to spare us
Your unpredictability, your arbitrariness
Tell us how we have sinned
We will try to make amends
We stand humbled before you
Please don't disrupt our insignificant lives
Leave us to our devices, our human loves
Let our mortal lives take its course

You were Dodo when I was Pepe

You were Dodo when I was Pepe
And you used to pull my hair
And I used to stamp on your foot
And we used to lie around in your mother's garden
You, me and Deb
We had strange nicknames growing up
Whoever gave them to us?
But they stuck nonetheless
So much so that I never found out
Bung's real name and then he moved away
Our real names were like the fancy purple frilly frock
I rarely wore unless on birthdays or parties
And we grew up
God knows why, God knows how
And boys would go past my house and shout "I love you"
We outgrew our petnames,
You grew into Chingkham
I began to answer to Pianu
We moved away, went to college
And many years later at Deb's wedding
I saw you with your little girl who answered to Pepe.

These days I listen to Farida Khanum on repeat

These days I listen to Farida Khanum on repeat
We sit together in the afternoon
Eating cashews and almonds
Mum bursting with news, Papa reminescing
Goldy wakes up at one, even though
we spent the whole morning trying to wake him up
We dressed him up in Papa's trenchcoat,
My sunglasses and a hat.
He looked like a regular CIA spy.
These winter days are so miserly with the light
It is evening too soon, and I have barely woken up
Alice Munro enchants me,
I am beginning to think I should
start with short stories first,
Canadians seem to be my current favourites
From Margaret Atwood to Michael Ondaatje
And ofcourse Justin Trudeau,
who makes me weep with joy at the things you do,
I can't get over the swag with which
you are changing the world.
I get my daily dose of poetry from Akhil,
resident poet of Dilli
Took a little bit of my heart that time you read out
your poem in JNU,
You write so beautifully
I wish we were friends
And through you I heard of  Farida Khanum
who sings divine, even more so with age in her voice
"Aaj Janne Ki Zid Na Karo",
I blanket myself with the immensity of those words

In the seven months till she saw him again

In the seven months till she saw him again,

 Meira had  turned 16, felt desperate to see him again,

 concocted stories in her head about his life,

 tried to innocently ask her mother about him

 to which she wasn’t very helpful apart from

 the obvious fact that he was in her MA class and a bright boy,

 tried to forget him because he had never come back 

to return more books of her mother's, figured out that

 he probably saw her as his proffessor’s daughter and nothing more,

 had her first kiss with a boy in her school who she felt

 was much prettier than her, then told him very guiltily 

that the kiss didn’t mean they were going out as he might

have assumed, devoured dozens of books, decided that life

 was meaningless and inherently unfair, castigated the books

 she read for making her see, think and feel more than 

was necessary for survival, sobbed a few nights into her

 pillow as she felt an acute pain in her heart at all the beauty 

and all the stupidity, punched a boy in school for calling 

her ‘chinki’, had been summoned to the principal’s office

 for her aggressive behaviour which had surprised everyone

 because she had been such a wonderful student, 

had always done well in school and hadn’t exhibited 

any antisocial behaviour till now, tried to bring up the fact 

that the boy had provoked her by using a derogatory term, 

her mother had been summoned, Naina was indignant that 

her daughter had to suffer because of a stupid ignorant boy,

 had fought on her daughter’s behalf but decided to brush up

 the matter because she didn’t want her daughter to be awarded

 a disciplinary action, Meira had cried her heart out

 on the way back, Naina had felt helpless and heartbroken

 that despite all that she had done to bring her up in what

 she had considered fair, never letting her daughter feel 

any less of a person because she was a girl, she had completely 

overlooked the fact that she looked different from her, 

different from the people who inhabited this part of the country,

 who called her awful names, and thought she was any less 

beautiful because of that. For the first time in her life, 

Naina wondered if she had done the right thing

 by leaving Manipur and bringing Meira here. 

And you looked for me all the way to Kanglatombi

I am beginning to realize how small Imphal is
How I can probably go from one end to the other
for a nice long walk and not even get very tired
When I was younger I thought you lived so far away in Singjamei
Back when we were younger
and when I was in love with you
In that crazy way only fiveteen year olds love
You know that pure unadulterated amplified kind?
And laughed about crossing Konungmang a few minutes before you did
Or when you saw me at Sekmai and I didn't.
At twenty two I am revisiting that time five years ago
When you promised me we would spent more time together
when we get to Delhi
By then I had so many other people in my life
And you marked my life with your stubborn absence
Borne of hurt and hate
Now we have settled into some kind of friendship
Not as close as we once were
But still holding on to each other
Dull ache of a love
Our names reveberating from Kongba to Nambol
The places we sought each other
Caught glimpses of
Wrote fervent letters to
The kind of love that went unfulfilled
and then dulled into something akin to friendship
Sometimes I can feel the connection return
when we talk but you were never the kind to confess
All those years I spent trying to unravel you
and you never said a word.
We parted ways at Chingmeirong
And you looked for me all the way to Kanglatombi.