Basudhara Roy
A crowd is faceless, they say, Anonymous, Homogeneous,
Like waters breaking from a dam Or from the womb.
It tosses and turns and moves Like a mass of curls
From everywhere to everywhere,
And I, a random point in its unmapped space Pull out from it
Strands of several half-remembered pasts.
A cyclist in a hurry rides by With the scowl of my long dead father
When he missed his morning daily
And suspected my mother of having Absentmindedly wrapped chappatis in it.
My fifth form maths teacher, Pillion riding on a decrepit scooter
Peers at me from behind a steel-scraped helmet.
Same eyes, same hair, same taut skin And but for the gulf of the nearly twenty years
Stretching out between the then and now
And the knowledge of the havoc that time had wrought
I would have believed the present to be perfect.
The bangle-seller musically calls out his wares.
The one from the village fair
In Midnapore who brought the best glass bangles Every year? But this is Delhi, I strictly remind myself, And nearly tweleve years thence.
Life whirls around with its disparate days, dubious years And all of a sudden swoops in, in a crowd
Sudden rememberances, springing surprises, flash-as-lightning recognitions The grids of the past collapse and memories roll heavily into one another
Like waters breaking from a dam Or from the womb.