DEATH AND ELSE by Nabina Das age seven: a white-sheeted stomach an upward motion drowning breath. i’m just a fly on the wall thinking why the old man won’t sit up any more get his shirt worn-out leather belt soaked dentures and just go. age eleven: grandma is all marigold petals her widow kitchen shut and swept clean. the hens she shooed from the porch aren’t happy either. they miss her rant as much as i do her cow-dung mud floors ladles bent brass plates lying idle. teenage: she recounts the story at our sleepover – her sister had sat where i sit under the same ceiling fan from where she later dangled. they had a song about skirt hems secret love letters. her voice rebounds against the ceiling’s hurt old rose wall sister’s school sash the familiar ant crawling up. early youth: newspaper packagings never fail to surprise, to raise curiosity about a life in black and white, so i sit down cross-legged poring over THE TRIBUNE with no dateline. soon the newsprint too gets shredded – strip limbs defaced alphabets police-record names. time of lust: we kiss in a living shadow away from the dead body lying gently in the front yard. no one notices us and the mourning tastes like his stale cigarette-tea-tongue my chipped nails fail to dig into his skin and we miss the dead. the other day: my father’s face is held in four frames that don’t contain his timex watch the steel-rimmed glasses a karl marx tie pin and a pen of many decades. the frames box him like all things past, they smooth his tender jaw and here he is young he is in love.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 05:49:29 +0000
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