City market sprawls
Under covered roofs --
Blocks and blocks
With no outside, and yet
Not really inside either.
Miles of food:
Raw, cooked, and
-- Sometimes -- living,
Squirming in buckets
Or trying to flip to freedom.
In the witching hour,
With blue tarps up
And food stowed
And only streetlamps lit,
A drunk stumbles through,
Crushing an overripe
Peach underfoot.
Taken on April 27, 2019 at KR Market, Bangalore (Bengaluru)
Taken in September of 2013 in Bangalore at K.R. Market
Garland coils in saffron and yellow.
Burlap bags of loose blooms in many hues.
Free petals strewn across the floor.
Vendors sit like stamen, still amid the chaos.
Customers waft around like pollen on the wind.
And workers flit about like industrious bees.
It’s a post-apocalyptic scene.
Until you see the flower floor.
Concrete walls, bare but for paan stains.
Looking like a fresh massacre.
A murderous rampage
written in shotgun spatters.
A pack sits, rhythmically rocking,
hands mindlessly at work.
But with their backs to you,
you can’t see they’re stringing garlands.
Looks like the junky fidgets
of a Zombie horde at rest.
The impulse to tip-toe past, rationally quieted.
Then you peer over the rail to the flower floor.
The flower floor is brightness.
The visual gravity of oranges and yellows
exerts such an aesthetic pull on the eyes
that one can’t see any sign
of dystopian dreariness.
[National Poetry Month: Poem #12]
Tiger Riding for Beginners 