How terrible would a city be when
Octobers slips off the spoon before
reaching the mouth and your boy exclaims
cramps!
The lanes lonely, lonely as its neighbours —
kicks verb between every square of its guilt
We turn into our imagined theft —
Yet a few strangers write letters with
spelling mistakes — filling drawers like
bodies in morgue.
And in the morning when words are
washed under the kitchen tap with pots,
and pans, and plates, and spoons
The tongue combs the lost, loses the mild.

Each smell is a habit, every shape — a
bargain of its shadow, and names are
called after a push on the doorbell.

When rice bubbles into countless years of

tide before a serving — and chairs are
dusted off their swear and superstitions —
the windows widen; thick with scales of
grief. Rains come in crow wings.
It wanders, pecking on long days of sleep,
heads wrapped as cabbages.

Along the forsaken shivers of shirts where
afternoons clutter and the search of feet on
the doormat —
Absences stay back in last dialled list.

You shrink the wooden almirah in
naphthalene, heal the autumn with a patch
of boroline, and clip the purchase invoices
to the calendar.
Here you grow old. This is when your
mother and father die leaving no notes.
Memories what the mouth resists, silvers
the weatherbeaten cleaver of a
butcher.

We are all very slow here — winding
through turtlenecks and thanda gosht.

*

I started to write this poem when I and Baba together made the journey through his deteriorating health during his last five months. I completed writing this poem after his death.

…

Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario lives in Calcutta. He writes stories, poems, and essays. You can read them at: https://linktr.ee/ronaldtuhindrozario