South Asian Summer - Four Poems by Anushri Muthusamy

Village next to the river of remembrance

 

Grief and nostalgia pull up a monobloc chair and sit in front of a TV, contemplating the choice of cereal in the bowl. Old photographs are framed upon the walls, bearing intangible witness.

Nostalgia, she sips wine and lets her wild hair free, wears her favourite jewellery and perfume. She made everything look perfect, or at least convinced the people to remember it that way.

The confused village always seemed to drool over her, almost like she ran a cult. She thought it was okay to lie to people if it gave them the illusion of joy. Are we all fans of a falsifier? She is a retired designer. She hand-painted and fixed fonts for pickle brands. There’s always this urge to meet her. No one knows if she’s stupid or accurate, but it didn’t matter, as long as she made them feel they could be saved if they lived in the past.

Meanwhile, Grief was a 9-year-old boy. He hides in places people least expect. They do not wish to see him, but always carry a picture of him in their left pocket. His concealed mischief is always a mystery; he collects pebbles and feeds pond fish. He wasn't an activist, but somehow remembered things that were forgotten. No one really knew what he thought or wanted. He stood in the corner, silent as his coat, and let people be people, in their dismissed glory of things.

Of course, both of them are weird, wary, manipulative and breathing.

But how we forget: nostalgia and grief reside in the same house, eat the same food, meet the same people, watch the same sun set and rise. Oh, how grief shies away, hiding behind nostalgia's skirt.

South Asian Summer

Tropical summers in South Asia are modest, conservative, hard-working, and, for most of the hours, frustrated.

We ride bikes and our children hold us tight from behind, holding their drooling popsicle.

We sell, buy, bargain and burn at the farmers market, with just sweat and exploited wages to take home.

We pour concrete and hold cardless identities, then at night, we listen to the radio in our mother tongue and sleep under cheap polyester sheets. Confused about the impending anger, without knowing where, why or what, but with just midnight heat for company.

How we crave shadows and rest, to escape the sun we pray. We watch our kids run, hold mud and also carry commerce loads with dry hopes of reaping fun.

We are not allowed to invite or reveal vexation and leave for vacation's breeze, because it's not summer in the Westland of dreams.

Evening grass

Evening grass is a motionless train to the past, to revisit your 8-year-old self. Marching through the museum of moving things, you sniff the scent of the evening grass with the setting sun like it's your mother's cotton dupatta, supple and safe.

Evening grass is an archivist remembering the cycle lessons with your dad. It didn't forget your false stories that you and she made up when you guys were 12.  Evening grass is a reminder for you to head home, to love, needing to be needed somewhere, to worry about, to cut lemons or polish your shoes for the next day.

Evening grass is a flimsy thing of the past, contouring with a costume of the present. What a cosmic joke

Forest is a woman's suitcase

Feathers of all that is found and forgotten

Sometimes led by a man and often finding itself hiding from the same

Unwashed fabrics and their suffocated memory

Relaxed trees holding dreams with their deformed roots

Leaked perfumes of resting birds, spill here and there

How she yearns to accommodate and host her company, friends with fruits and wine.

Oh, how she desires to be left alone, watching wildfire run its brief course harshly.

Saving secrets under a sack of dried leaves and lies, while she's careful when trying not to break the hand mirror that she uses for manipulation.

She laughs loud and wakes up jungle's wilderness, without hesitance or apology.

Lost in hibernation, she craves fruits before rotting.

Forest is a woman's suitcase, a vault for voyage, vulgarness, volume and virtue.

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About the Poet:

Anushri Muthusamy is a Public Policy practitioner. She writes poems on themes of memories and emotive textures of mundanity.