Melting Studs

My blogger and FB friend Shail Mohan, besides blogging on her dog Luci, is also a published poet and a sensitive photographer with a very perceptive eye.

 She lives in the southernmost state of Kerala, where many houses still utilise local artists in their homebuilding, and you find amazing styles and lush greenery. Shail has an ocean of everything to click, and she almost catches every fish. Or should I say, every stud in the elephant's nose....  err, trunk ?

Monsoon raindrops are her  speciality and you can see them here. 

Her latest posting about nose studs....   something done today as a fetish, or a blindly followed requirement. It was actually done in the old days ,scientifically to activate a nerve in a nostril, that lessened the pain for women, in their days dedicated to being future mothers....

Ancient noses
attended
by Vaidya Sushrut,
and a fine piercing
at a nostril node
to lessen the pain
for those female bipeds
mobilizing in life
to perpetuate generations.

A nose in
metal and stone,
pierced and studded
in support,
of the myriads of
elephants,
tigers,
deer,
and horses,
unable to breed new generations,
sacrificed at the altar
of a human greed
so terrible,
that
the stud sheds itself
in tears……

Going around in circles.....

My blogger friend, and enthusiastic photographer Shail Mohan has an amazing set of photographs, that capture her environment . She lives in a state, Kerala, which is the first to welcome the south-west monsoons in India.

Lush green gardens, typical plantain trees gracing a traditional garden, and the play of a raindrop, mostly on growing greens, but also sometimes on something man-made, as below.

(So typical in old cottage type or 1-2 floor houses, a water adjusting wheel valve (I just made up that name, don't know its engineering name :-) ), most kids in Mumbai will never have seen it, as it begins to leak, when the washer wears away.....)


(photograph by Shail Mohan)
Sometimes,
seasonal showers,
a cool ecstasy,
making them travel
drunk and sinusoidal
on the edge,
before
unwillingly
elongated,
dripping down.

And sometimes,
on a day
of hot desolation,
and
going around
worn out mental barriers,
your tears ,
leaking through,
across the ups and downs
of life....