I
For how many years did you fly red paper aeroplanes, counting each one falling into the sea? The fragile bit of pumpkin light knows when war thickens in birth names. You wait for the sun to burst spit bombs on history’s killings. Except for their men and their mothers who married for the second time—we are only the leftovers on wooden horses in a desperate marketplace. Everything around is a stained or fallen tooth before I reached the fields of scarecrows that promised an afterlife. I surrendered to those fuller white mounds, sagging to the season’s last drought. You hadn’t known of a time borrowed upon Fra et romersk osteria asking nothing much of us, but to stay. The Sistine Madonna from the altarpiece secretly wished to give her boy to you. Soon the headhunters would arrive wearing a patch of buffalo skin. Their rough silences in tight knots seek gods on park benches. You cradle your heart, an ancient keepsake, in the stone water jar of Cana. If ever there was a promise so terribly made upon Ebenezer—the archaic king’s men, camphor and calcium, the disquieting la vita è bella. Any more to a wretched sea dog’s ulcer—conjure the dusty old fangs in the requiem.
This body with its tools is always a lover that the leap year unmentions in its suicide note.
II
How oddly the house window is disobedient to the outside, showing our back to walls glued to cinema posters. And baba would stand waiting at some end-lane like a fisherman—collecting faces of whimsical magpies.
You empty the domesticity of folklore cobbled out of parenthood. The inexperienced Pied Piper prides in the fallopian denials. What if the air shall stir a myth again, and we would shrink inside overpriced grief learnt in the native tongue? Through the winding wobbly fence of yesterday’s sleep, a sheepish fallow plot of sow thistles steals the bellbottom feet. You fold your midlife in a hovering city of paper bags. Every mirror before the windshield that swallowed your image outlived any maid’s reflection, and you know it holds the advertisement boards in a job to be popular long after the crowds have gone back home. This autumn, filling the adulterous sighs of Old Monk with tiring songs—stops speaking about us. After a busy world’s desperate hurtings, negotiations deepen your Jamini Roy eyes. Someone will pull down the prayer flags. Somebody will break the ribs of St. Peter’s chair into four pieces. Yet you would pick up a sacred kind of courage in a moderately working sewing machine in its arithmetic register: Whirr… vrrr… tick-tick-tick…
Dear mad one, in this one unforgettable life in vain, you will walk far and farther away—to an opium October night hanging in black fever. To a familiar voice of a stranger. Salvator Mundi.
About the Author
Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario lives and writes from Calcutta, India.
