Border

This morning at the
window, white crane on green palm
taking flight into

a greater greenness.
A rock-face sky fractured by
possibility.

Tribal thump
of poem-heart. Frantic pulse
of phloem. A bird

unpinioned from starched
metrics. And me, from gridlocked
opinion. Between

us, just this thinnest
skin of disbelief, almost
vanquishable. Al-

most vanquishable.
Almost.

Looking for Jamshed

I remember the time
I buried Jamshed
in the St Xavier’s canteen,
curly hair, spectacles,
nicotine leer and all

I slashed him with a sickle
then dug up the stones.
It took time

I placed him deep in the earth
then planned my alibis
cleared the footprints, cigarette butts,
dusted my hands,
whistled,
walked away.

It’s been twenty years.

At times
the stones give way
the grave leers

and I reappear

deliciously
lawless

But Jamshed’s nowhere to be found.

Decant

If you were coffee
I wouldn’t live my life
in a coffee shop
getting my collective fix
on your beans
Public lust isn’t my thing.

Allow me
some deluxe delusions.

Allow me to uncork you
in the middle
of days that rattle like Coke cans,
blow through alleys like old Sunday tabloids,
so I can steal a whiff,
a whiff, no more,
of your crazy liquor.

Decant into my hipflask. Settle down in my pocket. Stay illicit.

When the Fallows Arrive

When the heart’s sludgy tributaries
grow dry

trust the bones.

Their dry winter wisdom
will not deceive you

for in their white chalk quarry
lies something truer

than any of the fruity varieties of love
you have known.

One day the fingers will uncurl again,
the nostrils twitch, eyes widen

and the body will return to what it’s always been –
old antenna,

tuned eagerly, promiscuously
springward

but even then,
remember,
try to remember

the bones.

Or take Mrs. Salim Shaikh

Who ripples hospitably
out of her halwa-pink blouse
and sari (“Synthetics are so practical
to wear on trains, na?”). Who invokes
the protocol of Indian railways to ask
for your phone number even before
the journey begins. Who unwinds
her life story, well-oiled,
without a single split end.

She’s Hindu,
a doctor, like her husband.
The Matron warned her
about inter-faith unions,
but she had no doubts,
not even in ’93 when others did.

Her ancestors supplied butter
to Queen Victoria,
His grandfather, better still,
was court dewan of Kolhapur.

“I’ve been lucky
“The gods have been good.”
She eats and cooks non-veg,
many of her friends are pure brahmin,
her sons are circumcised,
her heart is pure.
“I practise no religion,
only homeopathy.”

Over lunch she remembers
the day her mother-in-law died in her arms.
She bathed her,
and when the body was taken away,
she told her husband
she wanted to be buried in the kabrastan —
it’s closer to their home than the crematorium.

Take Mrs. Salim Sheikh.

The Builders’ Lobby

(‘House Builder, you have now been seen; / You shall not build the house again.’ – Gautama Buddha)

Perhaps beneath the rexine and rind,
the pidgin and the patois
of these lives,
the odours of alien kitchens,
beliefs, groin-juices,

we share a common space

where nothing can enter,
no debentures,
no politics,
no easy fluorescence.

But it takes so long getting there
that maybe it was never meant to be.

Housebuilders build.
Doors slam.
As we sleep
mortar hardens
its resolve.

Opacity wins.