Y2k YAGYASENI

One discovery leads to another, it’s all in the digging, I know now
Chancing upon a scrap of parchment almost twenty one years old
In the much diminished treasure chest of my grandma’s wardrobe
I discover a name that was most honourably bestowed upon me
With the highest hopes of the reflection of a similar virtuous femininity
In my journey through life and in a touch of sophistry,
I now ascribe that a tingle in my naive heart that I felt back then
The burning need to discover facets of that unfamiliar face
To this name that I never knew I had, but, always wanted
I didn’t believe my destiny was written, at least not in the usual way
But maybe what generated this unlikely pull of belonging
And beckoned my spirit northward to an unnecessary detour
As I firmly believed, was my great grandmother’s pronouncement
Long forgotten and thus never acted upon ever by anyone

I felt the tinkle of kinship then, but was reluctant to recognize,
I thrust it headfirst into the abyssal depths, afraid
I’d have to leave farther behind, my beloved city
Whose roads I had traversed countless times
As if remembering the lines of a favourite poem
To savour in phantasmagoric memory
My fledgling mother diligently recorded
My little footprints over all these years
As I’ve trotted around her many cobbled lanes,
In the pages of our album, albeit in my mind

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For our hearts always beating as one since
I took ginger steps into the wide yawning unknown
I kept my heart doubly barred, afraid that the lock I'd hung
The very first day I came here would somehow fall off
And my own fingers would find their way into the crevices
Chancing upon something I didn’t know, even existed
That could potentially weaken my emotional embankments

The end of an era prognosticate by the sages, as she emerged from the flames
The end of the girl I was until then, anticipated the busybody aunties,
As I boarded the plane, the same fire burning in my eyes and spirit,
The same haughty obstinacy coursing through my blood as hers
I came here having learnt that blind men’s sons are blind indeed
But tempering that knowledge with tact and cleverness
That I should keep my mouth shut to stay out of trouble.

I flit hither-thither, a shrinking body clothed in new dresses,
Meagre pearls and diamonds dotting my ears
A picture of absolute reserve and modesty,
My heart thudding lest that it would be a dangerous rendezvous
Where I could be devoured in a complete erasure
I flirted with a city that I was so afraid to call my own
Ignorantly then, I set out on my little quests born out of ennui
Walking down the columns of foiled sandstone arches
Gazing out of the minarets and the courtyards,
Just as she would have from her palatial balconies

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Surrounded by her train of flattering attendants
Making my way to rooftops of abandoned havelis
Bustling lanes, sprawling merchants’ avenues
To watch the occasional visiting parrots,
The perennial pigeons coo and soar to the muezzin’s calls
As people throng below to offer humble prayer
It was indeed the famed Indraprastha with its bejewelled pillars
With enchanting halls of Maya that I was really looking for
Seeking the Palace of Illusions only to find hundreds of resting places,
For both, countless people as well as endless dreams
The Yamuna, a much besmirched goddess, still runs her course
Trying to look beyond the glossy blackness to picture
The sterling beauty that she would have been
Flowing through the verdant plains like a stream of lifeblood,
As she wept in yearning, playfully bubbling by her feet, their twinkling anklets,
Prancing after a whole menagerie – ladies at momentary play

I’ve restlessly wandered searching the history that wasn’t this urban jungle
Once upon a time, navigating through stories of ravage, sifting through the rubble
For beauteous little monuments that emerged from travails or strife
In this smog shrouded metropolis, amidst squalor, ruin and abandon
Where nautch girls once had their indulgent revelries, in squatter colonies and stagnant stepwells
Where tongues of flame had transformed a forest into a capital of celestial beauty
Dipping tired toes in the waters of ornate fountains
And running around manicured gardens, chasing butterflies,
Down Russell’s pristine colonnades in Lutyens Delhi I felt that daydreaming child

Buried for a decade under a pile of debris within, come up for air
And together we shuffled between the forgotten Puranic and the engraved Quranic verses
In differing visions of Paradise, wondering at the kaleidoscope the city really was
For we had only heard tall tales and long taradiddles so far

The crystalline halls that bore witness to her proud majesty
The pillars that wept, bereft of a queen as she ran for help
Are now but shards of painted grey ware, obscure in sepulture
And I walk down the streets, past cows, lotus and bedecked eunuchs,
Instinctively inhibiting my self, fright freezing my insides
Just like the scurrying squirrels I tried befriending
Wanting to quieten the racing in my chest
Every time male shadows loom up on mine
Praying my good fortune doesn’t run out for I may be her namesake,
But I’m only just a girl- insignificant and small,
My existence exposed to effacement
I don't really dare to make myself visible and walk tall,
Really keen to escape a similar fate

Where life was an endless trial through fire for her, who was its daughter
I had my lessons in the numbing cold, sometimes warming blue fingers with the kindness of stranger’s fires.
And having basked in the joy of discovery, when I fly back to my native shores
I take stock of the millennia that separate her and I and the five cities that stand between us,
Proudly raised by generations of imperiously imperial conquerors

Only to be razed rather inevitably, inexplicably, to the dust

For Gold does fade to grey but life still goes on
And beauty takes raspy, lingering breaths even in the broken
I’ve never felt closer to her before,
It is then, that I realise it isn’t unforgivable promiscuity
If I do come to love another in the same way as her,
For by the end of the day, my heart could grow to accommodate this city
I could initially only offer my deepest and sincere disdain
As I oscillated between the temples and the tombs
Like the pearl that broke free from my grandmother’s necklace,
Bouncing and bobbing till I came to find the comfort of familiarity in the unknown,
I learnt that I’m not only a child of the city of temples
But also an image of her, who I’ve known since my earliest years
As she screamed pleas down the halls, dragged by her serpentine mane,
Disrobed yet dignified till she was avenged
Mirroring this city with its indefatigable spirit- perpetually plundered and destroyed,
Only to rise each time, more fiercely beautiful than ever
And as I long to let down my hair by the resilient river
To finally feel the breeze blow away the hurt from my soul, I realise in hindsight,
Smoothing out the creases on that crumpled scroll, my fractured psyche came together
When three identities and histories coalesce like the phantasmic tributaries of one silted river
Just like how I was still all the three girls that I thought I had outgrown and lost
Along with my material belongings begrudgingly relinquished in cardboard boxes
Just like I was the fragment of the woman I met in many pages,
Sometimes as a peerless queen, sometimes a ravaged pauper,
Sometimes cutting herself up in five as she pined away for one,
Sometimes devoted to just him but always sacrificing parts of herself,

At times wishing for endless rebirth, yet remaining a haunting presence even as she breathed her last, in others

But with tears streaming, untamed hair trailing unbound, bleeding and blazing-forever a proud warrior.

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