New Roaming Facility for All Users



Yes this is bus no. 66
a red double decker oddly rectangular
whirlwind to elsewhere

You may first examine
its circuitous route,
you may find it somewhere, anywhere
everywhere, on the roads of Bombay
cold, saturnine and suspicious like the Gestapo
ogling at lost roadies and irritated night flies
itching to ingest the unknown cerebral haemorrhages
of night workers, whores, tuition returned teenagers
and hurl them irretrievably into the night sky
through overused unctuous exhaust pipes

You see, it swirls, breathes, and curls
round the nasty jagged edges of streets
Which are splitting wider and wider
around junkies' streaming heads
celebrating a scrap of life under the legacy
of toothless David Sassoon
around half-asleep taxis
dipped in violet dreamscape light
where tired rotund drivers
are capsizing their paragliding fancies
and yes, near some dreamy chawls and unlicensed desi bars;
poor night is growing hard and sticky in the heat

Unrepentant orange town lights bursting
at an ageing windshield are washing us passengers
of all our maladies
we no longer need to dream
we no longer need to cry
there is only a deep celestial neon glow galore
does it remind one of the painted frosted glass
at chapels or even the gold aura of oil skinned lamps
at south Indian temples?
Well, we might as well substitute
we shall soon be purified and cleansed
as if with a divine dip in the gurgling Ganges
quarantined against crazed night visions

No, I said, this is not the age of sadness
this is now the age of spine-cracking laughter
laugh at that mad tramp
whose half-bitten technicolor dreams
will soon drown into half-cooked stew
for black and white newspapers, sociologists and poets
and that vagabond who haunts
your bedside ditch
will die in a vomit pool
just outside your rattling door

And bus no. 66 is rolling, rolling
all over the tarmac floor collecting samples
to sanitise, to free us all
send us safely home
a good night's sleep is promised
and hurried morning snores.