a mail to a friend

dear ashley,

i am leaving tomorrow for mumbai,,
i will say 'hi' to mumbai from your side
i dont know why i'm going there
the city has no connection with me
the city that i have been connected
seems lost in its pollution
the sound of the screaming tyres
the decorated roaside by spitted betel leaves
the beggars at every traffic point
those heart shaped balloons
which have no price
like their lives,
running and playing and fighting
for the moment against the heavy vehicles.
i do miss sometimes.
those morning scenes of those people
taking bath next to tube well near the dairy
make me smile inside me and funny
despite of all those flamboyant gentlemen
i wonder how these cities
are complete without you and me
the roads never ends
the stray dogs fighting over the garbage
like us and them fighting
for deserved foods and rights
the hijarahs caught me for my innocent look
asked me money
touched my balls through my pocket
but they left me for the stinking fish i carried
i salute the stinking fish
sometimes they came and called me 'bahadur'
it's the city that have been connected to me
and i love it and still feel it
but i will still say hi to your mumbai
to embrace me

with kisses
ronid

ashley replied to me

Please don't call it Mumbai.
That is the name given to it by Hindu fascists
and we reject them, don't we?

I miss my city.
ashley


2 comments:

sadsadas said...

kahan pe ho??abhi bhi Mumbai mein hey kya?

Anand said...

On a similar vein - a poem by AK Ramanujan

To A Friend Far Away
(The collected poems of A.K. Ramanujan)

Between official letters, I doodle the wet
wild tendrils of a familiar alphabet.

I leaf through telephone books, watch the sand
run as I read small print inked on your hand :

breathing the sulphur of city fumes,
I sense your far away breathing rhythms -

quicken as you turn round and round
looking for a child in the market crowd :

hear oceans lash between now and now,
groping in the mist for what I know,

do, or be, when affections find find a bird
tiny, button eyed, city-bewildered,

green-yellow, hopping in the yard : I take it
home in a kerchief to a chekered blanket

maybe only to find it dead
by morning in the twist and fold.

of my confusions, my absent presence,
faraway rivers amok in my continents.