(3+1) Men Versus Grand Narrative

(3+1) Men Versus Grand Narrative

     Took 38 years to find dadu's life and later death
expand hymn-like from the tinnitus of afternoon-family gossip

     When I touch the hard-bark of his face in poems
it whispers, "I was a man worth my salt. Though I couldn't keep thamm'a happy"

     He died young. He looks younger in his photographs.
I wonder, can he catch the smell of summer grass in heaven

     My father says, "do your homework", his voice
a far-away lorry's night-horn across a hill undoing coagulated silence

     I don't see my father, as I see my dadu. One has
all the doubt materiality confers

     My father drops and picks me from the bus-stop. I resist begrudging him
the eaten-away blue-scooter, my friends jeer at

     When thamma died, he spoke to me for 47 minutes. About dadu,
the long-deceased, and not thamma

     Grief is said to do this: making the near farther,
and the far, nearer. As the warning on a rear view mirror—
objects seem closer than they are

     He said, "as the end neared, dadu's stubble
mirrored parched Indian Willow husks." That's when
they knew     it was time.

     The precise term he used was pani joma. That's when I knew,
some stories become more than the point they make

     Now he gets nervous when I change my son's diaper. Through
the perforated cries a familiar inadequacy
     surfaces like a friendly ghost-ship

     the writing on its sails, how to soothe a baby
trapped in nightmares as brittle as leaves of an apple-tree

     When my son was born, he sang to quieten him on Colic nights.
They both looked their most human.