Poem I Anchal Soni
Returning from truck horns and desert highways,
my father lays down in my mother's lap
Perhaps, finding his mother.
And his shoes are laid parallel to Dada's sandals
equally beaten and coerced
like the feet they cover.
He spits tobacco after chewing it at a stretch
And takes it again after dinner just like his work schedule
Before and after food.
These two seldom spoke
They celebrate their relation on mundane Sundays,
repairing water cooler motors and electric wires
In the kitchen.
While maa wonders how to make them break the ice.
The coldness of years,
And make them travel
towards each other,
back home.
But the wires remain entangled and wanderers perplexed.
Dada is slowly losing his sight,
But he was always hyperopic to his son.
One day Papa's tobacco-chewing-pseudo teeth sob
after discovering a haemorrhage in Dada's head.
Papa rubbed his feet on the hospital bed
They weren't hard like the stick he used on papa
Or Dada's words.
Those words melted in my father's hands
calloused and tender,
The feet and hands
In these years of manning up and meaning nothing-
Only if they could speak beyond the norms—
Will he tell him?
That he is tired.
He misses his mother.
He likes to cook and clean.
And he does cook and clean when no one is at home.
That he is searching..
for home.
That day after we returned
from the hospital,
covering a journey of three generations.
Learning this is the way it is,
that we walk with home, rather towards it.
That families are metaphysical,
and escaping cities would never help
because it never helped my father.
Dada slept humming Kishor Kumar,
And Papa laid his head in my lap
and cried.
He returned home and,
I now know where to find it.