A Journal of Poetry

I wake up in the night feeling the same seismic shift When my mother had died Seventeen years ago, at eight fifty-five to be precise Or perhaps even before- when her tongue sucked the diagnosis like sorbitrate Cancer: a foaming ancient lute which calcifies the core into an instant fossil The opposite of life is not death It’s the silence that’s ever so alive in the surrounding mirrored tiles when you first listen saying it to yourself: Cancer The stammering, the rage, the careening alienating the mind, the marrow, the innards into a concavity of absence Chandan agarbatti, tuberoses on a vase, coalesce with the monochrome frame of my grandmother in the room who had suffered the same diagnosis- kept from her in parenthesis A squishy nautilus shell, she had once coiled another heartbeat within wherein I lay silent in my co-habitation, merely a protoplasm inside my mother then Forming a mandala of shared peals, ticks, grief and perhaps diagnosis. Now with every step ahead, I leave something behind As the insomniac nights arrive trampling with its hooves To exhume my brimming legacy

The young scion mounts the dais with joined hands, waves at the single-colour monopoly. His bandhgala and starched ajkan, have stiffened him into a prized position. A painter he was meant to be. He taps a meek, “Hello” into the microphone – feeding, HELLO, hello, hell-o – and cultivated claps clog the space in between. Sunrise blushes At the amber dyed cotton Extravagance of Dhobighat Abated breaths are rattling his poster promises. As his throat chokes with his inherited speech. Threaded marigolds weigh down his spine- moments from his fabled victory. He looks around at the sea of eyes, not a teardrop he can own. bubbling pot of dye weaves lamenting its purity unbled, unbleached, unredeemed

A corner bakery, streetdogs at its door, sleeping There’s a blackforest on a red-white chequered tablecloth. The little boy plucks the cherry, flicks across- its sweet pungence. His ayah pretends not to look, it’s a routine. In his head he’s deciding: “In-pin-safety-pin, bun-maska or plain muffin?” Tomorrow is secured then, also the day after and the next. So what if he gets to meet his Mumma only at bedtime? She has promised him an after-school cake every day. In exchange. Sugardust fills the blanks Floats and fogs The years One colour for each day, one flavour. Stacks a rainbow in seven. Like the raspberry-red lipstick, she’s leaving on his wet cheeks for goodnight tonight. Every night. An empty rush of sugar. Piled chairs, stale mawa cake, pink puffing paint on the walls But the show must go on.