Office Commuter (1) Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Emptied of rain, the convalescent sky
Grows luminous again, all is cleansed.
Bicycles emerge from passageways
And weld in long formations;
Hedges are in sheen, suburban lawns
Shine like card tables;
The washed day ripples like a sari.
Boys thump in puddles,
I smell that drenched animal, the earth.


On the veranda, letting in the day,
I sit on a wicker stool and read
Of bombs in a sorry land, havoc, flood;
There is no danger level in my mind,
No broken bounds. I have been made whole.
I turn the page and scan the cricket news.


What can I do? No answer yet.
I dare not doubt my own adequacy,
Still less my relevance. Muffle then
All subversive hesitancy,
Do what you must, and live


As others, wiser, do,
Within a sufficient world
Built of splinters too,
But loyal to the purpose and command
Of the dazed mind, cemented
With ordinary concern
For family and friends,
Waterproof against the seeping question.


I know of ways to cheat
The doubter in myself,
Devious hypocrisies
Of the indifferent will:
To soar upon a glider
And gaze at tenements;
Tragedies in scale
Are not so terrible;
To plunder history
For false analogies:
Babylon, Nineveh;
Seen in perspective
All is invisible!


To squeeze out ironies
Like adolescent pimples,
To diagnose the sickness
And surgically probe
The festering tumour
And leave it there to mend
Or fester if it will.


To wait for evidence.
We do not know enough
About the brain or glands
Or Andromeda
To come to conclusions.
Facts held up in tweezers
Vanish in scrutiny.
Who know but that a shot
Of anti-adrenalin in the arm
May turn a tyranny
Into Utopia? Or 'Sarvodaya'.
Or that a computer
May find a means to end
All agriculture?
We do not know enough.


The flies visit my face and hands,
The sky is ill again, opaline, then grey.
A pin-stripe rain begins, too weak to tax
My faulty windscreen wipers. Changing gears,
I take the corner gently.
A dank heart goes to work.

- - - -
(I wrote it in my thirties as an official based in New Delhi)