Sitting outside, on a chair facing the Champs-Élysées
I get called "a bloody Paki" by a young kid
no more than twenty, on his way to unemployment
walking with his friends, as I smile.
(He had a shy smile, even as he tried to look mean
inviting a fight, while covering his own shame
I feel no rage, no urge to fight
just a mild disappointment at his confused geography)
It is a loaded word, this Paki
that conjured up a lot of emotions,
frustrations and memories
but the slight of the obelisque transforms it all
My parents' flat in Bombay, where I have spent
more time than any other address in all these years
had windows overlooking silhoutted mountains
and far away views of slow-moving trains
(It is a pity how I think so little of it these days
even though I remember those books I read on my bed
facing the ceiling, legs up in the air, balanced
against the wall, thinking of distant lands)
where in the morning the bai brought in the day's milk
and my mother, still half-asleep woke up
and started the noises of the household waking up:
milk cookers, rustling of the morning papers,
other evanescent noises of the morning,
yielding themselves furiously to purpose,
then by ten, abate their fury, I imagined,
to a daylong stupor breached only by servants
In the evening my father, an irascible man, drank
gin in the company of himself while I read
locked up in my room, listening quietly to
far away sounds of clicking metal of trains
(how strange all this is, sitting in a cafe outside Gare Montparnasse
thinking of Bombay where I read Somerset Maugham
writing about Montparnasse, truth and fiction, present and fact
all co-migled like a Bollywood movie set in Paris)
It is raining, outside the Louvre and the small starbucks
near the Nations where I nearly choke on a pastry,
before hurrying off to Pere Lachaise
to sit by Oscar Wilde and wither in the storm
Literally steps from Wilde, lie the Tatas
those doyens of Indian industry, right here in Paris
whose interest lie thousands of miles to the East
where my memories lie, bedraggled and suffocated
There are no simple ways to remember, except to just
let it all fall in place, one memory after the other
until nothing is left except a deck of cards of yesterdays
that precariously wait for a breeze from today
There are tears and rain and failures and betrayals,
Like the friendly shop keeper in Sakinaka who made paan
To the bus ticket inspectors in white uniforms
who tried to molest me when he mistook my general enthusiasm
for something else, I wonder if the boy who called
me a paki was ever molested, I wonder if you ever woke
up listening to the rumble of trains, if you ever understand
why the rains make me cry the way it does, especially
when it pours as if Gods themselves are crying
Sweet dreams, even if those are not meant to assuage
but the night is still young, even for this weather
Those boys have disappeared, and Bombay vanishes,
all the remains is an airport coffee and an uneaten steak.
