Neighbourhood

On the narrow steps leading to our gate,
the pakoriwallah from Bihar is often found
kissing an anonymous woman at night.

Amazing act. My parents switch off the sitting-room
lights whenever this happens. The car beams show
them up – one unbroken secret silhouette.

The steps invite other actions. The local fakir some-
times lies there, coloured like a ditch, and passers-by
might climb to have a better look at the orange trees.

But this is different. The soft-spoken pakoriwallah
smelling of his pakoris, his half hour island of
defiant passion on the steps of somebody’s house,

while around him everyday: the brash freeloaders,
the kick in the groin, the familiar words of abuse
spoken in an unfamiliar language.

In My Mother’s Clothes

I feel the cool sweat from under my arms
soak her blouse timidly – shy, damp flowers
of my sweat on her blouse.

I wear her thirst blue and forest green
and burnt orange as if they belonged to me:
my mother’s colours on my skin
in a dusty city.

I walk in her clothes
laughing inside, relieved
of the burden of being what one wears
since in my mother’s clothes
I am neither myself nor my mother,

but more like that spindly
creature of six who slips onto
her fingers her mother’s gold rings,
pulls on a huge cardigan that smells of sunlight and milk,
and conducts herself, drowsy with love, through rooms
with their curtains drawn against the honeyed light of June.

Rain

You will hear it waking to the roar of a ceiling fan,
in the rustling of dry palm leaves, in pebbles
pouring from a lorry onto the dusty street.
You will hear it in the last aeroplane of the night
(whose sound you will mistake for thunder),
in the alphabets of the birds, in indignant pressure cookers.
You will look for it in the evening, searching for one cloud
among tremendous shadows, and at night when it might come
from a great distance and touch the city with a new light.

You won’t find it in the few grey leaves of March
or behind the thin red crescent burning itself out
on a fevered patch of sky. Your hair will
grow electric with the dry heat of the day,
your dreams shot through with the silver lightning
of monsoon nights, the blue-green nights celebrated
by crickets, the mountain nights where fate
is linked to umbrellas.

But Venus’ eye is clear here.
You will look for it in refrigerators at night,
slice water-melons with its taste on your tongue –
unfeeling, red-hearted fruit – and buy cucumbers in despair.
You will almost forget the sadness of mist, but remember
how quickly mirrors darkened and streets turned grim,
and wait for the same blanket to be fastened over the sky
and change the quality of this harsh, unvarying light.

Always the ‘where’ of where you are is a place in the head
established through skin, and you recognise the address
not in numbers or names but through familiar patterns
of bird-song, traffic, shadows, lanes.

And when you go away only envelopes speak of
the city where everyone thinks you now stay.
For the expectation of the senses remains the same,
for years remains the same: bewildered by dry winds
in April, aching for rain.

(These poems appeared in “Street on the Hill”, published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi: 2006.)