Outro
Bauji, with his long arms
mother as bough, avocet & other things
Something Like Hope
We can forget about documenting strange marvels
like the otherworldliness of the mouths of spoonbills
or the foreignness of starfish sticking to tar balls.
This earth is a metal discus let loose and spinning
for too long. It does not matter what happens now.
We are all unquacking ducks paddling like children
learning to swim. Blue buttons and anemones plot
against us. The feather duster worms have decided
to sprout from our ears and pits. Rain thwacks
our head like an old headmistress. We did this.
Before the day of Bauji’s Shraadh, I see him in my dreams
eating bhindi ki sabzi with the same devouring strength
with which he corrected everyone’s grammar in letters
sent by friends, relatives and officers – underlining the errors
with red ink. He refused to participate in the ecstasy of god-stricken
bhakts dancing in temples with total abandon. He preferred
bowing his head once and moving on. I didn’t watch him do this
but I am told so. When he finally moved in with us to Bombay,
he did not like it and threatened to leave even though he was
hard of hearing and saw people where there were none.
I think his long arms could not pace about freely in our 2BHK
and he missed the roads of Chandigarh, his home after his real
home was taken away by an imaginary line drawn by a white man.
They say if you see the departed in your dreams it means that
they are around and that they are looking out for you. Whenever
I cut the bodies of okra stems like a country, I think of you too.
mother as bough, avocet & other things
mother now that you are sleeping next to me in this train
i want to tell you so many times – mother you are the moon.
mother how like a bird my poems keep circling back to you,
mother i am your pet leafbird, mother you are the bough of my life.
mother why do lonely lighthouses remind me of you, their rigid
frame standing still in turbulent waters. mother i never mean to
thunder down on you with my borrowed anger – mother you are
a shrine. mother how proud i have been, how terribly selfish. but
mother you are an avocet, a boat by the river, mother you are rain.
mother do you understand my silences, i am saying that i don’t
understand myself too. mother, are you listening. mother i think
i am trying to say i am sorry –
When during university everyone was making friends and discussing some
Jacques Derrida essay nobody understood, I used to sit in the library garden
on a stone bench and look at the mussaenda flowers drooping down, hefty
with velveteen beauty. Back home, everyone was an avian whose wings bristled
against my neck and flapped ominous birdsongs in my ear. I was convinced that
I was alone in my misery and deservedly so. Until one day, when I opened
my tiffin-box, and from somewhere in the distance, a black cloud of furry mane
joined me as I fed my share of khaakhra to him, and as a token of loyalty, he did
me the grave kindness of chaperoning me all the way to the rickshaw-stand.
I had adored dogs though mostly in theory. But that day I touched his rubber snout,
like brushing the hand of god. I had been anointed and accepted – which felt
something like hope, something like love.
Kunjana Parashar lives in Mumbai. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, SWWIM Every Day, MORIA, Columba, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @wolfwasp.
