Cerebration

Nagamandala: Umar Nizarudeen

Umar Nizarudeen works with the University of Calicut in Kerala. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In an eclectic career spanning over a decade, he has taught in various colleges of Delhi University, University of Kerala and has worked as staff reporter for the New Indian Express, and as Proof Reader for Mckinsey & Co. Muse India, Vayavya, Culture Cafe journal of the British Library are some of the journals amongst many others where his poems have appeared. A few poems by him were also broadcast by the Yuvavani program of the All India Radio.

At first, a whiff of childish glee

Was that an apparition,

From the Amar Chitra Katha?

Her Toupee and costume,

Navel salacious, ribald

This danseuse from medieval Chola,

At a convention of post-modernists

Toasting Bharata and Artaud

Rousing Bhavas, Rasa-Dhwani

Exalted emotions, archaic realms

Primordial in this morgue, the coldness

Shattered by carnivalesque

Marx, Derrida, Gandhi and Ranciere

Performance theory? she pirouettes

The interred snake, nagamandala

And fallen dame, saree of epic fails

Shimmering spangled, gorgeous.

In the end all that could be found was

The Indigo episteme of her

Tilak-dipped feet.

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