Often the woman with a wrinkled face
inside the dark lanes of past I created
visits and asks many questions.
She is worried why I move about in the debris of home
I left long back and did not care to repair
and tells me to go ahead and not to look back.
It assures, for I was the reason
who dared to forget past and wanted to go
to the other world of light, hope and applause
and insignias of status.
II
To the wide roads and the sky-touching structures
it was a wish to expand and write another tale of life
with doors that closed and windows that did not permit air.
It was living of privacy in utter feel of freedom
And slowly forgetting the white-brown cows,
the wooden pegs and the wide courtyard
of a huge mud house
the little chirping sparrows, cuckoos and the grey pigeons,
who sang songs of harmony as the old woman
sprinkled many fistfuls of grains and put an earthen bowl
full of water that quenched thirst of long past.
III
She often told me she had a house of many doors
where windows felt the air and voices
of the birds, animals and of men many, and did not
close and inside the house you could see the sky
and through the walls and doors you noticed the world
and probably it was roofless and I formed images.
I imagine how it filled her eyes with a supreme bliss
and thought she was a saint in the house of a sage,
a house that I turned into ruins and wrote an epitaph
on the hesitant white stone of memories.
I stand up to welcome and see the eyes, the warm hands
a consoling hug but it is just a feeling a dream
as I find Ma walking away with whispering lips.
