Cheema stares at his canvas
painted on a grey background
sober it looks .
His characters come to life.
that of
his father walks up and down
muttering,
the other
his mother cajoles him
as he waits in the corner
with bloodshot eyes.
An artist at heart
took to engineering
at the behest of his family.
The JJ school of art Mumbai
the classes he loved to attend
disappear.
The huge halls of
Indian Institute Of Technology
come alive.
The portraits, sketches and the idiosyncrasies
of characters recorded in his mind gradually
convert into Oracle and Java.
The colours fade. The encoded information
surface.
Cheema’s sojourn in U.S
pay him in dollars
the exchange factor
(a dollar= sixty-seven Indian Rupees)
help his family
to come out of the woods.
The dream of becoming an M.F Husein
remains unfulfilled.
The artist dies unceremoniously.
Meenas Poems 