Postcards from Amritsar: Durgiana
The entry is the usual narrow lane crammed with shops selling kadas, rudraksha necklaces, brass artifacts, flowers, garlands, sweets. Jumbles of colour. Women haggling over fake gold rings. Boys clanging dekchi lids. Frothy lassi being poured into glasses. The lane opens out suddenly into a temple compound, a clear white space. Neat counters where you can keep shoes or get prasad. An automatically replenishing puddle for people to wash their feet. And a small shrine of Durga. Through a gate is the main temple. It’s built in the middle of a lake.

Punjab road trip
There were fields,  lots of them; fields yellow with mustard flowers very reminiscent of the movies, fields burning in neat squares of orange flames. Also trees, roadside markets, men sitting on charpoys, men sleeping at bus stops, funny film posters, and a ridiculous number of shops selling ‘English Wine and Beer’. As opposed to ‘desi’ I suppose because, of course, English is synonymous with foreign. (That’s turning out to be quite the theme of my month, by the way.)  I didn’t see any water bodies, which saddened me because I love water bodies. For some time, a woman with two kids came and sat down next to me. With both kids. One in her lap a

A poem
of mine is up at Poetry Friends. Do read.

Around Town
The next TFA event is a reading by Abhishek Majumdar of his new play An Arrangement of Shoes. Abhishek will be in conversation with Swar Thounaojam after the reading. Audience feedback will be very welcome. Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1 Date and time: Friday, 20 November 2009 at 6.30 pm Abhishek Majumdar is a playwright, actor and theatre director currently based in Bangalore. His work includes Harlesden High Street, which won the Hindu MetroPlus Playwright’s Award 2008 and The Land of Ups

Stray (un)poem 1
Swim across this strip of sea. After all, what separates us is brief as an eyelash– only continent, only colour, only language, and a zone marked by the thin, thin fingers of a clock.