The Quiet

I have never really thought at length about why I have got used to wandering (not by motorcycle, but the relatively slower way -- on cycle and thereafter afoot) so much, over the last 3 plus years, since when I brought out my first book.

It largely had to do with the need to sit and work on what I had already put together as a first draft; but I can clearly see that it also had to do with a need to relate to the open spaces and the wildernesses around me -- to see art, individualism, identity and even life, in the dirt tracks, the cracked earth, the sunburnt rock (there are a lot of abandoned quarries around my place) and the waters I would go visit, Shameerpet Lake, the puddles of ochre / red rain water and the spirogyra-laced pokhuri like waters collected in the quarries.

Moving On dealt with a lot of those "relatings" in poems that are artless (and to a certain extent boyishly awestruck) in perspective, uninhibited in treatment and "inked" with a minimalism (especially in my pithy choice of words) that can probably be expected from someone to whom words are are kith and kin.

By the time I brought out my second book, I was an addicted walker -- thanks to my close encounters with butterflies and an increasing felicity to relate to birds. By this time, the poetry was almost incidental -- I had started to learn how to deal with my immediacy and also started to learn how to let the poem brew in me. In fact, apart from the poems dealing with butterflies in my second book, most of the others have a contemplatively detached and "quiet" air as if the poems are voiced by the elements, by time, or by a stoic whom nothing can touch.

I still don't know if I am ready (or capable) to look at my third book in a contemplative or objective mien; in many ways it was the toughest of the three, but again there is that sense of quiet in many of the poems in them, even when I am being irreverent in my take on a particular bird; there is an utter lack of anything to do with the aural element of birdwatching in any of the poems. Its another thing that whenever I am ghooming and I come across Francolins (called Teetar in Hindi) and stalk them to get close to them and photograph them properly and they first go to ground and then take off in an "explosive whirrrrrrr" it completely deafens me, almost as if I have a proper pair of ears.

Its also another thing that I can hear and feel the lake breeze and the rain squalls and tree songs (I need to be able to see the tree for this to happen) and I seem to be hearing it even better with the passing years.

And there are times when I am up in the penthouse (which is where I incidentally "wrote" most of the poems of my second and third book) when I am stunned by the clarity of what I can hear -- mostly the silence, sometimes my thoughts and on rare occasions, the bars of some Old Hindi song that I hum to myself.

It is at times like this that I feel the most content, that I feel foolish for having again and again tried to go out of this quiet -- into the clamorously questioning eyes of women -- to search for love.

Surely it would have been better if I had been less of a "moth-being-attracted-to-the-candle-flame" and more of a nature poet?