Childhood Home
I have craved the warmth of my childhood home.
I envy people who live in homes where birdsong is louder than traffic and trees larger than their homes.
As a child, I remember peeking into people’s windows – a bedside vase radiant with flowers, a chiffon sari fluttering gently on a clothesline, an elderly woman grinding turmeric in a mortar and pestle. It all told me something about the person on the other side of the window whom I’d never meet.
Modern day windows disconnect more than they connect.
I have craved the warmth of my childhood home.
The simple joys of tangible living:
Keeping a diary
Writing letters
Meeting people in-person
Plucking gooseberries
Climbing up three ramshackle floors
The smell of homemade tomato sauce
Memory is timeless when it is not curated for an audience.
I have craved the warmth of my childhood home.
The swirl of ginger tea fogging my grandfather’s spectacles, and how he wiped them with the hem of his ganji.
A compliment I received that I still think about
A nourishing slow-cooked meal
The flicker of diyas
Chipped walls
Lying on the terrace under the stars
Natraj pencils
The simple things that nurtured me in all seasons.
I have craved the warmth of my childhood home.
Attraversiamo
Even in this uneventful month,
my morning tea is hot and flavourful,
my daughter and I doodle on windows
foggy from last night’s air-conditioning.
Three friends and I swap stories over dal baati churma:
cancer, miscarriage, separation,
a mother’s deteriorating health,
a father’s dementia.
Everything you love can disappear in the blink of an eye.
So much of thirty days is flammable:
half-baked ideas, lousy poetry,
hopes and expectations and
unrealized dreams.
May the new days be kind,
gentle,
peaceful,
unremarkable, even.
May I reflect on what brings purpose and joy
and elevate,
spiritually.
May I take nothing for granted
and celebrate my blessings
daily.
May I stick my neck out of my shell and live
fully.
May Shiva give me the courage to cross over.
Magic
“Santa Claus!”
My three-year-old exclaims,
looking at the cloud of shaving cream on her papa’s face.
Magic lives in the everyday.
A white beard is Santa,
a white quilt lands a mother into space.
I am wrapped in a white quilt on a chilly night.
“Mama is an astronaut!” she excitedly says.
Mama is floating in space in her wide-eyed gaze –
tonight, mama is going to the moon.
Magic lives in the everyday.
“Tug of war”, she howls, a few minutes later,
as I snatch a tweezer out of her hand.
“Mama huffed and puffed,” she cries
when I lash out at her.
The wolf in ‘The Three Little’ Pigs huffs and puffs
to bring the houses down.
Magic lives in the everyday.
The magic of childhood –
when the moon follows you home,
when Santa fills your stockings with candies,
when the frog in your bed metamorphoses into a prince.
To read more poems by the same author, click here
About the Author
Swati Moheet Agrawal is preoccupied with arranging things in a certain order. Be it her daughter’s toys, books or her own words, her fixation with symmetry and exactness continues. Her work has appeared in Muse India, Setu, Active Muse, Kitaab, The Alipore Post, Sledgehammer Lit, Five Minute Lit, Café Lit Magazine, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Pangolin Review, Paragraph Planet, Nailpolish Stories, Modern Literature, Indian Periodical, Potato Soup Journal, Rhodora Magazine, Friday Flash Fiction, Ariel Chart, Thimble Lit Mag and The Criterion among other literary magazines and journals.
