In Memoriam

I. Relics

You didn’t leave much behind when you slipped

silent through some unseen crevice in time.

The scent of a name swiftly rent by tearful

chords (shreds hung in the air, just out of reach).

Biannual torrents of dayspring rites

when payasam and prayer flash-flooded

the neighbourhood – baffling me for nine years …

Shadows from laughing eyes I had found

frozen on cellulose strips ( and long thought

were mine) crypted within the covers of

velveteen books on a high, unfriendly shelf.

A three-line memorial in a pale blue file:

life and love scaled to disease, diagnosis,

death with date and description, nothing

more – aseptic headstone raised for a ghost

star who didn’t leave much behind.

Other remains crowded out yours by and by.

Wordless fury at survival kept under cobalt

paternal lock, bluebeard’s chamber that opened

only to one knock;

glaciers of growing

loss left as moraines on a mother’s face;

    rising

debris from the link between you and me –

neatly piled beside the same crevice I lose

my way back to, over and over, with no effort at all.

You didn’t leave much behind, but nothingness

can expand into a red giant with grief at its core.

II. Resurrection

I tried remaking you with swatches of stolen

memory, seaming a harlequin next-of-kin.

First raided the maternal troves: traced

shapes out of mother’s soundlessness; snipped

yarn from her three chirpy younger sisters.

I didn’t spare granny either, sifting her

cataractal mind for traces of your smile.

(kept clear off the men folk though: they stood

guard night and day over theirs, buried ten-foot

deep in child and prowler-proof vaults.)

You stayed sketchy, all dots, shades and split

helixes – a silhouette behind a shattered

pane, touching which made thoughts bleed.

So the thieving spread wider and wilder.

I sought your colours, contours all over:

A head among tousled monsoon clouds

your gaze on the burnished afternoon earth

the voice in local summer tides.

The name, the name grew everywhere:

in myths and magazines, or family

trees, fiction, television – any one I chose

could wipe out another possible you.

You walked with me, travelling through

childhood, teenage, voting-right-hood …

I changed templates, crafted new ones through the ride.

Till the time it felt too much like work,

too much a snail within a turtle’s shuck.

Unravelled you on land’s edge, then watched

my patchwork sibling return to the clouds,

the sun, the sea – and someone’s memory.

Karthika Naïr, 10/02/2008

Because sometimes I can forget, though not what lies just ahead. And today is a time to remember.



In Memoriam was first published in Bearings, HarperCollins India, 2009.