for amit

It’s raining outside
And from where we sit
feet entangled
our ears strain to reach
the music beating down
all earthly noises
till all u can listen to is
the sibilance of water
And somewhere between the
drops, imagine falling stars
which will cover the grass
tomorrow
with brittle frost
that will crack like glass
crystals under our naked feet
and we will remember
one night in mahabaleshwar
Sitting on warm hearth
when we stretched out hands
into the open night
another rain, silver crusted
had melted like snow
on our fire-blushed skin
Night long it had fallen
In the dark
wetting woods
filling earth with scents from heaven
At other times, we thought
water fragrances would rise from
deep within
and mingle like forest mist,
the breath of trees whose
roots had reached the
molten core of that rich earth
Rain dreams lie there,
You said
like ancient phantoms
which unearthed every wet season
to haunt the eyes
of all like us
who lay awake night long
maddened by the musk
that runs wild in the woods
hearing rain, dreaming stars
feeling fire, smelling earth

Essences..

I know what that guy in ‘angels in america’ means when he says that the sense of smell is the most under-rated of all..he says that in a different context, ;) but it did hit a chord in me..it’s been a private obsession with me right from childhood..trying to find the right metaphors for a particular smell..every summer when I visited my grandparents, my nostrils kept hunting for traces of familiar scent-prints, till the identification was complete..it lay in that dark clean storehouse, which then seemed to me, full of adult kitchen secrets, its wall-hugging racks lined with big aluminum utensils storing grains n the expensive scent of rare basmati..n then my sigh would settle on the unmistakable perfume emanating from the wooden crate where alphansos nestled in hay, ripening in the warmth, tantalizing taste-buds long before the fulfillment was due..one emerged from the place smelling of mangoes, haunted..the house was sold a few months and I know what I’d miss the most..the smell brewing in that little corner, filling the room with a sense of summer and all the good things it ‘had in store’ for us..