By Pervin Saket
The Thing About Ruins
And so in these final days, everything
that can be fixed is fixed.
She is tired of a rundown world
seen through mismatched curtains
and one blurry cornea.
Nails, hammers, glue and a rainbow
of paints make their way
to the unhinged cabinets, reviving
the drooping doorframes of our ins and outs,
and the dining table that can no longer hold
balchao for sixteen, nevermind
our protests of noise and dust —
she’s known enough clean silence.
But she won’t let us mend the rocking chair
wheezing lustily at any mention
of the falling armrest; it must resign itself
to a pillowcase-plastered arm
and the occasional frayed shuffling.
He read on it most evenings.
Afterwards she took to sitting there
so the chair might not be false to its name
until she had to sink into the dependable
stillness of their now-too-large bed.
Vertigo, I’ve heard her explain to the seat
waiting for it to nod knowingly
contemplating its frame
through the tubes that run
all manner of liquid in and out of her nightdress
which is now also her day dress,
and makes her look away in shame.
And so it comes to be that she is carried out
through a verandah of light and colour
past youthful, taut chairs
and florescent flowers on dewy curtains.
When we return, we are greeted by
the frangipani in bloom framed by
virginal window grills.
We walk through the newborn arches
marveling at the ease of oiled hinges
desperately rebirthing memories in various corners.
But when we think the others won’t notice
we take turns on the broken chair
that held our broken parents
and now, in its tattered truth allows us
a muddled grief, cradling our foetal bodies
until until until
we might
be ready for sunlit rooms
and
all
that
crap.
Not Another Love Poem
he exclaims, throwing his hands up in
exaggerated resignation before returning
them to the greyscale of newsprint
getting more irrelevant by the minute,
forgetting again, the chai under a blanket of milk-skin.
Beside us, Ganga scrubs the floor
ignoring our detached disinterests in each other’s
graphemes and backhands, in assonances and seeding,
she lifts chappals out of the way, and our feet rise
obediently when the wet of her cloth grazes against them.
We’re propped together by chemotherapy, by hidden
stanchions in the walls of this room, and laminated
portraits of our separate gods, united in their stares,
by the shadows of words we’ve remembered
to forget, looming over cold drips and hot breaths.
We’re corded by a shared history, which perhaps
is more cohesive than shared passions, and when he’s gone
They’ll also cremate the memory of that pig-tailed girl
who took for granted two breasts and one man;
the man has outlasted the breasts.
So when I look up from my typing and watch
him frown over the glaring headlines and the cold eggs
when I hear the sigh he doesn’t know
he sighed, I shake my head and affirm, no it’s
not another love poem.
Pervin Saket is the author of the novel Urmila (Jaico) and of a collection of poetry A Tinge of Turmeric (Writers Workshop). Her novel has been adapted into a dance drama featuring classical Bhatarnatyam, Kathak and Odissi dance forms. Her work has been featured in Madras Courier, The Punch Magazine, Cold Noon, Earthen Lamp Journal, Breaking the Bow - Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, Kritya, Indian Voices, The Asian Writer Collection, Veils, Halos and Shackles – International Poetry On the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, and others. She is a co-founder and instructor of the annual Dum Pukht Writers’ Workshop held at Adishakti, Pondicherry, India.