RamGanapathy.com

Author: Ram

  • You walk

    8’o clock, and you walk into the bee-hive of Brisbane CBD. Your ten minute stroll to office is a full length feature film. A kaleidoscope.

    You sidestep a broken tile, almost bump into the coffee cup of the man in front. School kids cross you like a herd of sheep, jostling, screaming, joyful. A lone smoker puffing away at the corner of the Marriott, watching an animated couple arguing in Spanish. You pass him fast, your lungs still suck in a hint of blue nicotine.

    The signal turns red, twenty more seconds. You close your eyes to bring in the smell of fresh coffee from the cafe called Morning Ritual. You open your eyes to the climbers and creepers up the stone-walled 19th century church, up to the many colours of Brisbane sky, coloured by its river, textured by its people. People you don’t know, you don’t know yet. New colleagues, new customers, new neighbours, new fellow-pedestrians.

    New cafe baristas too. You made a new friend earlier today. Karpin, the cafe owner, the sole barista who opens his shop each day at 6am, even on a Sunday. He told you he never took a break, never took a single day off in all ten years. Did you believe him? The man looked calm, and his flat-white stirred you up. You liked talking to him, talk about your grandfather, how he ran a restaurant, back in the day, not so successfully. You didn’t tell that part.

    You soak it all in. The signal is still red. What’s wrong? Ah, did time stop for you to breathe-in this glorious new city?

    You see the old lady with wild hair, storming across the pavement, deranged, rambling, in pain, almost blocking you. You sense she is hurt, lost, lonely, and never in a million years going to be a threat, yet you try ignoring her, avoid her trajectory, leaping towards the signal, and hope it turns green, oh God!, rush and jump into the pedestrian crossing, all the while astonished by your flight, your fright, and your sudden descent from that self-congratulatory, priestly state of altruism into a hollow pit of apathy, worse, disgust.

    You walk.

  • Amma will move again

    Amma will move
    Amma will move again
    She moved when asked
    She moved without asking.
     
    She moved across cities, jobs, and houses
    She moved well when she had it in her
    She climbed up the parapet
    To clean, to dust, to remove
    She ran to catch the bus to office
    To earn, to support, to care
     
    She lent her limbs to grind spices
    She bent her hips to sweep corners
    She swirled those wet clothes under the sun
    She spun around like a top
     
    She held her son
    She rocked her daughter,
    She kept eyes open, 
    as they fell to slumber.
     
    She walked when needed
    She ran when needed
    She gasped for breadth
    Her legs were tired
    Her eyes were dry
    Her hips were weak
    Her hands were trembling
     
    She moved when she was young
    She moved when she was a teen
    She moved with her father
    She moved with her brothers and sisters
    She moved with her husband
    She moved with her son and
    She moved with her daughter
     
    She moved from Ramanathapuram where she was born
    She moved to Pudukkottai, and then to Coimbatore. 
    She moved briefly to Hyderabad
    She then moved with all to Bangalore.
    She moved across three houses within Bangalore.
    She moved across two floors of the same house in Bangalore.
     
    She was moved again to Coimbatore
    She has been moving for the last seventy years
    She cannot move anymore.
    She cannot be moved anymore.
     
    Amma cannot move.
    But,
    Amma will move.
    Amma will move again.

  • Alter Ego

    The alter ego wrestles out, 
    out of the quagmire,
    it sings out loud
    in simple verbs.

    Across the crawling dullness,
    against the passive nothings,
    above the soulless whispers.

    It sings from the heart,
    it sings to the heart,
    deafening all them joyless cousins.

    It sings in blue,
    the colour of day
    It sings a colour,
    I had not seen.

    It sings a shape 
    my hands conceal
    It sings a truth
    my verses obscure.

  • Silent Burn

    When I err and trigger
    her to hurt in anger,
    the "Sorry!"s burn in her silent terror,
    my stories flop down her upper lip tremor.

    Those calm eyes hide a fidgety beat within,
    a stray hair drops to her cheek's murmur.

    I plead once more,
    I plead an hour more.
    Off I go sleep in dread,
    my heavens in hell, thorns beyond.

    There! She sings, 
    a fainty old dance,
    a smile benign,
    lets me crawl up grand.

  • Fright, Flight, Fall

    You see this lady with wild hair, walking all across the pavement ahead of you, deranged, rambling in pain, almost blocking you. You sense she is hurt, lost, lonely, and never in a million lives going to be a threat, yet you try ignoring her, avoid her trajectory, leaping towards the signal, and hope it turns green oh God, rush and jump into the pedestrian crossing, all the while astonished by your flight, your fright, and the sudden descent from self-congratulatory, priestly state of altruism into the hollow pit of apathy, worse, disgust.

  • Tapping on the Floor

    Writing post-lunch, I feel the gravy drowning my gut. I am ready to write soundy words from gleeful images in my mind. The laptop is not on my lap. The monitor trembles as I punch keys. No, my fingers dance around the keys like a 80s pop star, hopping between colourful buttons on a bright floor. My fingers dance on the key floor from years and years of typewriting practice. I remember showing off at university, how good I was, how fast I was, how accurate my typing was – only to be admonished by the fellow computer-lab’ians : stop banging the keyboard. Its not a typewriter for godsake.

    It wasn’t a typewriter. I looked at the blue screen of the booby CRT as I punched a key. It blinked a hazy yellow font back at me. It taught me learnt a lesson. Typing on a computer is not to make it repeat what you say. It is to make it think about what you say. How to make the computer think? Well, that was the day I took baby steps towards programming.

  • A Word To Begin

    Who said you can’t focus after a heavy meal. My eyes roll in slow motion, the hip collapses into the sofa, while a mild breeze from the river below hits my cheek with a gentle praise, my fingers grip a dancing pen whose wild strokes fill the void of my story with a voiceless word.

    I begin.

    This is what my writing has come to. I scratch and stutter and stumble and suffer. I find it easier to stay admiring the bubble inside this fancy pen I hold. It resembles a mini fish tank, with pebbles and fluff but no fish. The dancing bubble at the top stares back. As I shake and scribble, the whole galaxy is stirred, many little planets move around.

    I play God.

  • Floating Points

    Numbers tumble, float across,

    Rows of shadows long and noisy

    On the edges of an A3 sheet lay

    licking fingers, scratching heads.

  • Who are these Books

    These books are collected, sorted and organised in racks by the librarian lady. She walks with her trolley, pushing it with one hand while holding books on the other. Does she read the books she handles each day?

    Can anyone ever read all the books that look at us from these shelves? Some are sitting tight, pushed by their neighbours, some stand with a slightly slant angle, unable to bear the weight of their companions. A few brave ones face me with their title page crying, “READ ME!”.

    Some say, “Pick me up”, politely. Some stand with stylish poses, while a particularly thick lady there looks weary, perhaps no one touched her for a long time except the librarian.

    In them are wrapped consciousness of authors, living and dead, shut to silence until anyone opens their chapters. They wait for anyone to flick their pages to switch them on.

    One sentence, one word even, can change a person. When he needs it, when he absolutely deserves it, a book appears in his life.

    It never leaves him.

  • Markings On The Wood

    Madhu was in the class room. The desk had scratches and markings everywhere. He sat, slouching a bit and looked up. The wooden beams crisscrossing the large, ninth standard A section class room had markings, scratchings and writings. They were not Thirukurals. Lewd and rusty things said by fourteen year old boys over the years. How did they get up there ? Did they scratch on it before it got erected?

    Vignesh came back from the playground. He looked and breathed tired. He smelled too.

    “Move aside, da! I have to complete it before the mad man comes”, he said. “Did you finish?”

    “Oh, I know. You would have finished already!”, he kept charging at Madhu without waiting for a reply.

    He then jumped over Madhu’s back and landed on the bench. He put his hand under the table and unearthed folded foils of white sheets. His style. He didn’t like notebooks like the rest of them. He wrote in pieces of paper and clipped them, stapled them, sometimes even knitted them with twine threads. He was messy.

    Madhu checked the blackboard. The blackness brought about by the cleaners in the morning was long gone. It was grey. The white chalks and multiple erasing in the morning class by the physics teacher Vanan. Chalks. Well, chalks were all over the place. Small, rounded missiles they became at the hands of the always-angry teachers.

    Vanan, the large-teeth fellow, carried his cane always and wrote his equations with a screeching sound that swallowed all the silence of the class of hundred and five boys, all stunned by his whirling sound of whiplash.

    He liked to pick up on Vignesh, his favourite. He would ask the trickiest of questions at the most unexpected times – when Vignesh dozed off for a mere millionth of a second.

    “Sir! Sir! Sorry Sir!…”.

    Whip. Whip.

    “What is Newton’s second law of motion?”

    “Sir! Sir! I don’t know, Sir! Please sir!”.

    Whip. Whack.

    “Just coming to school every day, well dressed, filling your stomach, and like a donkey, carrying bag full of books, but not opening them, ever”. Vanan’s caustic remarks were directed at the whole class. It was a prefix to the violent act that followed.

    Taking in a long breath after uttering each phrase, swinging his cane up in the air, pausing a moment for pure theatre, swinging it down while breathing out and lurching towards the poor boy, he lashed at his buttocks at an angle tangent to the convex, tender flesh.

    Vanan laughed like a yoga guru and a warrior, all in one.

    “Sir………r!”

    Vignesh was more moaning than pleading. The last sound of the afternoon physics class.

    It was quiet ever since. The whole class wrote “F=ma” one thousand times as an imposition, in white sheets, notebooks and soiled scraps.

    It was Newton’s law but Vanan’s regime.