Krishna Kumar N V aka Envy (1980)
Today I live in Santacruz West, Mumbai. But the truth is I have my roots elsewhere. Don’t we all?
I come from Neeliyad, four kilometres East of Edappal, in Kerala.
Neeliyad, in the late 70s, was a one-bullock village that ambled through time with no hurry whatsoever. Its claim to fame lay quietly next to it — Vadakkath Tharavad at Anakkara, a couple of kilometres north of Neeliyad; Vadakkath Tharavad is the ancestral home of Mrinalini Sarabhai, who danced like the monsoon breeze, and Captain Lakshmi, who marched with the fire of freedom in her eyes with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. But Neeliyad itself was content being anonymous — a verse written in red mud and green paddy.
I did my schooling in Pulgaon, near Nagpur. But a visit to my ‘native place’, Nellekat Variyam, once a year, was de rigeur. From Neeliyad, a rutted road, flanked on either side by paddy fields that swayed like a sea of whispers, led to Nellekat Variyam (from where I get my initials) half a kilometre away. After the rain, the road would gleam with puddles reflecting the sky — clouds floating in muddy mirrors.
Nellekat Temple
We were barefoot wanderers of that little world. We learned to swim in the village pond, ate raw mango slices dusted with chilli and salt, and returned home only when the evening shadows stretched across the fields. During festivals, payasam arrived from the temple on pieces of plantain leaves. Even now, I cannot think of that taste without remembering the people who placed it in my hands.
Sundays we went to watch football matches at Kumaranellur school — the field wet, the cheers loud, the joy unmeasured. Petrichor was not a word then — it was a feeling.
Those days were not just lived — they were breathed. The air was thick with belonging and longing, the nights deep with silence broken only by the crickets’ chorus. Life was measured not in achievements, but in moments of wonder.
Now, in a world ruled by screens and deadlines, my mind wanders back along that muddy road. Perhaps I am seeking again that one-bullock rhythm — where time trotted gently, and joy was a simple thing: a mango, a pond, a sky full of memory.
Maybe Neeliyad never left me.
Maybe it waits, still — at the bend of that muddy road, under the rain-washed sky.
Because no matter how far we travel, our roots remind us that simplicity is not the absence of ambition — it’s the presence of peace.
For the Muse
Yesterday, whole night,
my eyes shut
I kept kissing
your phantasmagoria
in a hundred places.
Yes, yes, you
either love me
or are in denial.
Tell me, tell me,
what is it,
goddammit?
As for me,
to tell you the truth
I’ll have to lie:
I hate you.
I wish, I wish
I could cling to you
like a wet sari
to the body
of a woman
bathing in a river.
I think of you,
I dream about you
all the time.
Epilogue
Some loves arrive in our lives.
Others are waiting for us from when we are born.
Years later, we mistake them for memories.
Yet they continue to inhabit us — in the smell of the rain, in the taste of a mango, in the faint roar from a distant football ground carried by the wind.
This poem may be about a woman.
Or perhaps it is about a village.
I no longer know the difference.
