Return

 Return

You come back,

Like a line from

Ars Poetica:

Ut  pictura poesis;

A lost fragrance,

Wafted from the

Dilapidated public garden

On the wings of

Summer winds

From Rajasthan,

The seeds of coffee

Being roasted in

The back of the kitchen

Of the New Madras Café in the

Revamped Connaught Place;

A fragment from an

Old conversation:

--My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a

Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself.

We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out

twenty quid?

 

 

Athens?

Yes, I would.

---But who will invite an obscure Indian reading Homer and trying to find parallels, in the year 2013? They are watching Homer Simpson on TV, the family, while I lean out like an Eliot character on the parapets in half-shirts, while evening uncoils like a lazy cat ---

The trees whispered,

Near the Jhelum,

And we quarreled,

Patched up,

To disperse,

Never to meet again.

But,

These days,

You come back---

Involuntarily,

Like:
The smells returning from

An earlier life,

---I am a mere shadow of the original self, like a crazed van Gogh

Looking from his self-portrait, eyes piercing---

And forgotten

Lines from the

Past,

Now receding,

Those years,

Smells, sights, sounds,

Fleeting fast,

Like the evening long-distance train,

Thundering down the lines,

Amid the flooded rice fields,

In the grey rains,

Whipping us by,

Like an invisible giant- hand.