With Geeta Chhabra's Books, An Indian Ode To Emirates and No Journey Ends

Geeta Chhabra is a well known poet living in Dubai. I have with me here two of her coffee table books An Indian Ode To Emirates and No Journey Ends. Both are poetry books published in gloss and includes poems corresponding to the beautiful Dubai landscape.

Geeta is the mystic; her words shape an azure dawn.


Amitabh

Swedish Medical Volunteers Accident and Emergency

At the Health Resource Centre, East London with Accident and Emergency, EMS personnel and Swedish medical volunteers. Towards an Integrated Accident and Emergency System for the province of Eastern Cape

Prose Poems from Stranger than a Sun 22 February 2013

On this day as I grow older it seems I have betrayed my sky my skin many a times. It’s the same sky, years back we thought had raised itself to such a fluid happiness. Invariably I look for rust on such corrugated skies; collateral suns grieve today the fall of innocence on a Delhi street, a harsh rejoinder to believing that truth is not always sacrosanct. Envious of coloured threads partaking many a horizon, everyday shadows subtly search for corners hiding a shrub or even a tree. Like our many loves replete with the unseen, skins craved in turgid rivers. I hear your voice, your undulant whispers, in shame of unreserved partings. In love we screamed curtailing the benevolence, in love we cried assumptions of the unheard, in love we dared once rolling the streets of old Delhi. With age came sun burnt pores, the mind stops against a reasoned wall, hopes flee a rising dusk. On that day a sudden sky could no longer catch an everyday sun. I could no longer retrieve your words in a long shared memory. In a treasonous river somebody quietly executed Afzal Guru, In a burning shack somebody tries unclothing Kobad Ghandy. Francisco de Goya lives again.

Accident and Emergency Department, Cecilia Makiwane Hospital, Mdantsane

This baby is interested in my mustache

Chandni Chowk Rain

Remember that rain from a lawless sky when rivers broke unevenness of many warnings. The Chandni was draped in a sinewy blue grey platform on which we stood and saw the rain running beneath us. We believed then, we still ruled. Between us remained only a tiny sliver of your Baluch inheritance, sand that refused to grow in time. I remember touching a rivulet cupping it in my hand as it flowed down your hair. Look there, those people, you said, they are going back home again. Home is the nowhereland within each of us. The rain here lives within barricades and lightening resembles gunshots in hills. The Chandni with its shutters down was just another land where people once again forgot to live. Hunched in a living memory of the long walk, it shivers sometimes in its mortal thoughts. Lets now have chai rain today; you smiled, after all not many can mix so smoothly the tea with rain. Looking; a one eyed pirate in a pelting rain, sipping tea from a cracked saucer, the rain on my retina suddenly clicked a picture of you on an unveiled moment.

Poem and Drawing by Amitabh Mitra

Dariba Kalan, Old Delhi, Excerpts from Stranger than a Sun

And as I faintly remember you coming out of Fatehpuri Masjid, it was an evening of prayers and colours crashing against a rebel sky. A sky believing in anointing an old belief stretching all the way to the Hindu Kush where it turns bleak. At the Khyber pass or further at Chitral the same sky seems to disappear. They tell me a sky here died long back riddled with bullets from AK 47 shot by her own people. Somewhere in a Dera Bugti hill side, Nawab Akbar Bugti too died in a hail of bullets dreaming of peace and coexistence. You told me many stories of the Lahori Gate which doesn’t exist anymore and your generations that believed in India since then. Like many other evening even refusing to comprehend, I always waited, feeling the aroma of your itr as you came nearer. It was this clever stroke of losing ourselves in a crowd of loud thinkers, without talking till we reached Khari Baoli, laughing all the way till the spice filled air evoked cough, laughter and cough again. The cashew seller, Arif Chacha, participated in this grand plan every week, munching cashews we just looked at each other and only sometimes you would touch my ears as chacha jaan arranged to become busy. The sky reddened as if it will explode any moment crushed by an evening closing in to our breath. I had told you many things, rambled off to inconsequential endings like the havelis, its filigreed windows abruptly ending in long shadows, longer secrets. When we did finally part every Friday evening, Arif Chacha always insisted in forgetting to take any money, you forgot to put your veil down and I as usual forgot the way back home.

Drawing and Poem by Amitabh Mitra

Migrant Poetry of Raphael d’Abdon

migrant blues


crossing a land grooved
by the presence of dauntless signs

sighs of solitude hovering
over the aching night

there are answers hidden
in these moonlit memories

at the centre of the margins
a quiet view
of places left
and paths imagined



sunnyside nightwalk

a rusty lamp throws a weary towel over the street corner
i sit on a bench and share some words with alain,
my brother from burundi
he’s a street vendor
he’s got two public phones
sells candies
matches
chips
and even single rizlas
in case of emergency

he’s trying to make a living and raise his two kids
between the cops’ raids
and the xenoidiotic threats of some local afrophobiacs
(king shaka would be ashamed of these modern age fighters
and don quixote would pity them)

apart from this
alain’s doing fine
his babies are sleeping now
they’re dreaming of tomorrow’s crèche
where they’ll be playing all day
with the policemen’s kids

i salute alain as
three skinny cats jump out from a deserted building
look at me with disdainful indifference
it must be my long beard and my tattered shirt
or maybe
they’ve more urgent things to think about
like finding a way to catch that bloody bird

they’ve skipped too many meals this week
ribs don’t lie
and the night cutting wind reminisce
of how fragile they are

i kick dreams away as a
washed out pack of nik naks swirls down the sidewalk
and arrogantly lands
over my rugged takkies
littering is fascism
and i just can’t stand ignorance
niknaks
and dirt

drunk screams from the flats across the road
from under a leafless tree the glittering shadow of a knife
blinking in the shrieking winter fog

“business as usual” smiles the flashy nedbank billboard
over the razor-wired fence

the umpteenth sickening sound of police sirens
rips the moistened sky in two
it stiffens the mallow along my squeaking spine
while needles
sting the midpoint
of my frozen anus

it reminds me that it’s time to go home
and i agree (even if i don’t have one).
i walk around the corner
find a seat at sipho’s tavern
pull up my overcoat
pull down my beret
and order another beer

it’s the penultimate one
for today



Dr Raphael d’Abdon is an Italian scholar, writer, editor and translator. His essays, articles, poems and short stories have been published in volumes and journals. In 2008 he moved to Pretoria, where he lives with his wife and his daughter. He is a vegetarian and his hero is Prince.