Finding Tata in Kuppalli

Corresponding article published in Spacebar Magazine Issue 4 Memory. Read here.

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We are in Kuppalli,
Kuvempu’s birthplace,
Oscillating between rain and September sunshine.
Heat reverberating off the black rocks,
Where the great poet’s last live fumes flew.

He is alive in the house,
Red-oxide floored and three storied.
Long empty, long filled by souls
He’s consumed so delicately
Through ink and sounds.
He’s alive in words on pages,
In every corner, and in every green,
A thousand kilometres in all direction
From the centre where we stand.
And a thousand more from there.

 There in a room, I see a photograph
Of my grandfather.

Mysuru,
29 steps to Tata’s house upstairs.
White walled and mosaic tiled,
Sunlit by the afternoon laze,
I lie on the bed beside him and wait
For the Akashvani to come on
On his purple transistor radio.

The room is simple, accommodating
Him and me and space, like
Air holds light in each of its
Moments, movements,
Till it becomes memory.

His desk, six elbows long.
Six neatly piled miscellany on it —
Letters and postcards, proofs, to be read.
It’s easy to know he’s a reader, a writer —
Six black pens in the stand by the telephone
That rings six times every hour.

Creak of the bed,
Three o clock has somehow
Poured into five; Tata is up,
Coffee dripping through the filter,
The air now holds it’s dark breath
Across the breadth of the house.
I still lie on the bed and play —
Making hand shadows against the
Sun starting to set.

I am ten then and Tata is settling
Into his evening hours.
I am twenty-one now,
And he’s long gone, like his guru.
Kuppali is three hundred kilometres away
From home, and I find him here,
Hanging silently, with his friends,
All smiles in a frame —
A reminder of what should be memory.

Tata has left behind words
On pages too, Kuvempu and him born
With same soft language in their underbellies.
But I now write in a language neither of them
Called home. Finding mine in a foreign tongue,
I sit and I adorn it with what’s left
Of them and theirs.