Ashajyoti

I loiter across its dusty rooms
That hunch and creak, as if in old age—
I mean certainly,
In old age.

My kin have fled to places strange;
To the warm cities of Delhi and Bangalore,
And to tenements in the next street,
To scrape their skies and dig their graves

At a safe distance from these walls
Which shall come crashing down in due time.
A few things that my mother claims, lay scattered across these dusty rooms—
Across the city, in fact.

An old bride made of poster paint;
A sweet wooden violin, the size of her fist;
And her sister’s breath, that had ceased to be
Only a few minutes ago.

Then of course, there is the warm light of the evening sun
That no longer heralds the clinking cups of tea;
Or curfews meant to keep bullet wounds at bay,
But nonetheless lies splattered on the floor like honey.

They count days, and buy time—these things;
From a place where her father; And her fathers’ father
Had grown weary of the weight of a nation split apart, and had sat down to rest
Oh, to never rise again!

And so my mother,
She hunches and creaks,
As if in old age,
Or in the sweet, sweet taste of her childhood

To gather them and flee—
Far from these wretched walls,
Which shall come crashing down again
In due time.

What does it matter to me,
Or to you
If water drips from the kitchen tap,
Or overflows onto the terrace;

Swallowing each crack
Of that flattened slab of concrete
That you call your sullen crown—
As if you were light, and it itself, a blurry shadow.

Don’t you know that we no longer live amidst the sighing pines,
Where the roofs of our homes were slanted,
And where the sound of rain would slide off quietly
If we were to only shrug our own shoulders?

As evening sets in, and I wet my throat with tea,
Somewhere along the warm horizon lingers
The sound of a hammer
Slamming onto concrete at quick, equal intervals.

The man who bears the hammer has no time—or intention—to catch his livid breath.
My ears strain to seek and find him,
And find the place
Where he has birthed this sound.

Beyond this warm horizon, and the many auburn light-years that separate us,
Lie fields that brim with Kashful;
Lies my amputated tongue,
That suddenly quivers again
At the taste of fresh blood.

Scattered in the fields are Nazrul's children,
And I wonder if it is their groans I hear.
It is hard to tell now, for the hammer, and the man,
Have both gotten louder in their ire in the time that I've taken to write this.
And when I listen closely, I hear the dull thuds of a pillar falling.

I run off to my lover early in the morning;
Dodging cross border missiles,
And my rather cross father—
And all that they have set ablaze with no mercy.

The bike ride costs a fortune, and leaves me with a sore behind;
A small price to pay, I suppose, in times of war.
My lover laughs, and then buys my meal;
And we hold each other, until evening has set on our skins like gelatin.

I think that there are moments in which I cry,
And in the end, we cannot keep our oath about quitting cigarettes this year.
I run off to get us a few, and over them we tell stories of our childhoods.
I think then I cry again—this time, a little more fluently.

Finally, my mother calls, and I board a green city-bus, and then another,
Until at last, I have grabbed a hold of a tempo in Paltan Bazar,
Which ferries me home, and to my father—
Past the rubble of a flyover under eternal construction,
And the counters of Banik Chat House, which have emptied by now.

At Bharot Shebashrom, someone gets off,
And struggles to find their change just long enough for us to hear
The amplified voice of man sermonizing a crown on Tagore.
He speaks of him as an antidote to Gandhi.
Tells us that we don’t understand him in the way that he does.

The woman next to me,
Who seems like the women in our fold
Who are taught Tagore as a rite of passage
Into a life of domestication completely bereft of him,
Listens closely.