Two Cities

Victory. Everything about you resonates with the sense of something

won.

And in a way, I guess you have. You finally turned out the way you were

supposed to.

Winning isn’t my strongest suit.

You would know. I see us sometimes in dreams of the wee hours.

Those intervals between showers and Sunday lunches.

I see myself wearing my mother’s faded hand-loom saris, remnants of

powder crumbs stuck on a face that one wouldn’t look at twice

You did.

For a while, I was all you looked at. All you thought of.

You would sit for hours on my porches drinking tea long gone cold. You would dream of all the things we could make out of ourselves.

I see the new ones. The skeumorphic shops. The icebox metro

cars. The bridges that seem to stretch on forever.

They all look like women to me.

Beautiful women. Women with hair that looks like nothing but hair.

Voluptuous, ample women, spilling out of themselves with an urgency

that I didn't have

They never wear flowers. I always wonder if you notice.

I remember some of the days.

It gets lonely here sometimes.

Views are only as permanent as the viewer.

If I wasn’t stuck high up here, I think that would comfort me in a way.

Something about old dreams.

A life lived in the midst of it all.Im still here.

You know I am. I see you sometimes.

Looking over shoulders. Hiding in high rises.

Painting over cracks that paint touched so long ago. Cutting trees.

Breaking things.

Choosing things to break.

You made yourself. I know you don’t believe me.

But I’m proud of you. From the bottom of my heart.

Every time I see the lights shooting across the face of your beautiful

boundaries.

Every time I see signs from faraway lands standing firmly on ground that

belongs to you.

Every time you do more than you say. Every time the world remembers

you as a city that survived.When I see that one wild curly head in a sea of straightened seraphs, I

see little lingering lumps with my name on it.

Every time I see the young minds that live in your corners rise up and

stand for hours vouching a belief that supersedes purpose,

I laugh a lonely little rueful laugh.

I realize now. You never really let me leave.

I live on. Theatre Road may be called Shakespeare Sarani.

Kids spend more money these days on dates than they ever had.

The glitter and glaze of places far away from home stops them for a

while.

They leave. Some come back.

And yet, in those twilight hours. I hear their young voices rise up in song.

Songs of love and hope.

Of the hearts that always seem to break, in the process of glueing others

together.

In those moments, far away from the burden of concrete identities,

among faces touched with the gossamer excuse of youth, I see

Myself

I fear little these days.

Oblivion is as welcome now as it was once dreaded.

But sometimes, when your streets fill with rain, when your skies look like

similes crying to become metaphors;

Sometimes, on moonlit nights,

I wonder if you’ll walk with me for a while, in an embrace witnessed by

the stars.

I wonder if you’ll sit with me over a cup of tea that would go neglected in

the face of our saved up stories.

I wonder if you’ll love me for a while

And then you can go back to your streets that ring of a victory I will

never see.

For an old lover, if nothing else, is worthy of a while.