(for my grandfather, who passed away in march 2021, a few months after this poem was written)
by morning, we arrive & the first thing I see
is the handpipe planted in the frontyard with
a hose running all the way to the toilet in the
back fitted with a new western / grandpa gets
up from his armchair & looks at us & sinks back
in the last of his skin holding onto his bones with
fingers around an inhaler / as he breathes into it
the capsules inside dance like djinns / it isn't
as easy as it used to be, he says / we cousins sit in
silence & watch the justcleared sky with a harp of
smoke strung by a singing wingspan / come see me
if you want to see me alive for the last time, he had
said to his children & his children came, taking us
along / I find the last VHS of my parents' marriage
unspooling enwombed in a rotting closet but not
before they salvaged it onto a hard disk / but not
without pink & green glitchstains / dad cuts banana
leaves & aunt serves us fish in it that tastes more of
earth than water / a single strand of steelwool is then
a memory sitting down crosslegged on the winterfed
mosaic floor / a luxury to have made hunger patient
by habit / the children keep forgetting what they came
for / their father on his armchair in the verandah, inhaler
to his lips like the beedis in his youth, talking of spirits
that have stopped coming because they're afraid of
electric lines / regrets his career in the EB but collects
his pension anyway / pointing at spots in the sky where
rainclouds snakecharm peacocks / it thunders like gods
cocked a gun into clouds & went bang / a dog takes cover
under a coconut / my cousin on his phone returns a smile
that sinks somewhere between us before ebbing again
at the first scent of his ringtone / it isn't as easy as it
used to be / there will be ash on our shuttles as we
homecome / the evening is purple & we have to do
something / we shuffle a deck of cards stitched
together from two incomplete sets with a speed
twice removed from the speed of past / a game of
donkey becomes the saltburdened mule with each
passing round / the smoke of the kerosene lamp
licks my grandma's portraits in which she was
edited into a sari she never wore with a necklace
she never had / to prove we have lived / to show
we already had what we have gained / at night a
whiff of the mat with its fraying weave undoing
the palmfuls of effort wished into it / we resort to
grandma's old saris sunk in a mothball mood of
closeted air / the glitchstained TV is plugged out
to make way for the tablefan / from the stool
it scans us like a god's judgment encrypted in
a theory of winds / we go take a piss before we
go to sleep / it thunders but the tired sky only grumbles
with djinns clouded in wrinkles / the toilet has a rope
so that grandpa can get up by himself / burnt firewood
ash meets the ebbing of the water all the way from the
yardpipe / we boys can go in the opened woods / we go
to rain / come back wet & wait for the others to return
look at grandma's portrait with a garland shriveled to
rosary / a lizard behind the smokelicked frame fat with
ants rainblown off their nuptial flights, spilling the cuticular
treasure misered in it its jaws / when everyone has returned
we go to sleep on the winterfed mosaic under old saris
spirited with windy judgments / dream of a dog with a spine
of sawdust walking through a dam of coconut shells to unbury
a VHS & some pills & a corpse of a fat fucking lizard / by next morning
we depart, waving hands to erase some inevitable unseen shape
~Ajay
19/11/2020
