Aavaan Jaavaan
When I arrive
for one month at the end of every year
there are certain arms I collapse into:
The eighty year old father
whose angina and articaria
embrace me together
without making me feel
the resurgence
of my prodigal son disease.
The eighty-one year old mother
who feels the congealed blood
suddenly gurgle and circulate
in her "swollen" and "damned" arthritic knees
as she holds me tightly in her arms
cursing all saints and doctors.
The middle-aged sister
who takes all my fingers,
one by one,
and makes them trace
the yearlong web of painful nerves
that made her scream
from the hibernating herpes
that still stalks her eyes
like a jealous
and resentful brother in exile.
When I depart
a month later at the beginning of a new year
there is an entire empty house
with its amputated silences
to collapse into.
My cat is dead.
My only son is away at a university
and all the books on my shelves
are undisturbed.
My frig is cold
and the food inside,
left as a surprise
by my ex-wife,
is frozen.
It needs to be,
unlike the familial memories of twenty-two years,
microwaved.
But there is always the pleasure
of unpacking all I have brought back.
I can daily live on that,
eat on that,
drink on that,
till that time,
at the end of this year
when I'm ready to collapse
into an avaan jaavaan again.
Adjectives
This pretty American city
in which I live
for eleven months of the year
hardly inspires any adjectives.
The grass is just green here.
The water is just water.
And the blue of the sky
like the yellow of the sun
and the white of the moon
remains tediously the same.
There are no four seasons,
no extremes of weather, here.
Just one daily day
whose proverbial pain is
like a fever that
will not make me forget
all those plethora of adjectives
that the Kala Ghodas
of my fabled Indian city
had colonized
my subconscious with,
and I go looking
once again:
for the Flora in the Fountain,
for the Martyr in the Chowk,
for Rani Victoria in Shivaji's Terminus,
for Crawford in Kipling's Market
for the Bhika and the Behram
in the sacred Parsee well at Churchgate,
and for the Afghan
in Colaba's farthest church.
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