MEASURES

That night like glad children we made a castle out of stories,

Etched places in the carousel of dreams and ate idlis

Three black dots in strobes of four, our car rode on and off

Highways drenched with winter fog; little did we

Know that we had caught a spot of time, which, like a bald stone

Rippled circles into the future, awaiting the conjoining smog

Of meanings

Back home, like an arriving army of distant murmurs,

Tangential notes populated my room, as if

Asking to be put into their rightful places, to be

Strung back to the perch they had been unhinged from—

And then, as if

Lighthouse to a receding storm

Was that abysmal forgetting of melodies,

And, with them, the hard-earned gatherings of memory,

Of early mornings spent fitting my shuddha gandhara

In the outer fringes of heaven—a dark space holding

Restless, belligerent sounds; forgetting incisions

Made in time, when it stopped flowing like water; and lastly,

The felling of the human dam I had built

Against the onslaught of tired destiny—

All these leapt back tattered and the tape recorder fell apart.

The night ended like the masterful cry of an infant

As it wails on to new terrain, asking to be fed, again and again,

Making, at last, a language for the demands of men.

Such were the failures of that night.