Adityaha

Adityaha

The car with a heartbeat throbs past
and the road is desolate again.
Sleepless.
The woken leaves sigh.
Another day lost
in thoughts of a once-lover.
Or a month.

The last of the rhododendrons must be dying now
against the mountain dusk in shimla
like so many embers.

Here dusk is
a paintbrush dissolving orange
over the golf course
while the city fumes and pants against end of day.

It is the caw-caw of crows over
the trees of my childhood
in Gandhi Bazaar
where women clutch bags over their shoulders
in one hand, saree-pleats in the other
and buy jasmine in strands.
Where red stairs lead to the red-stone floor
of my grandmother's once-house
and the stories wait still
on empty shelves
stories of balarama and the huge snake.

And you come calling
up the stairs

in so many pieces

across a continent.

Dusk is the woman who sits hunched
on the park bench

while I circle endlessly
like the bats above.

Sometimes she cries
sometimes I do.

And a poem comes.