with flies. Later, I will leave you, knotted

in a ball of sleep. But for now, I am

like one of those ragpickers — sun-bleached,

unseen. I lift up my skirt to squat

over a tin hole in the ground, and it feels

as though I’m squatting over the universe,

raining down on it like a queen.

The Dream

The dream has always been simple—

a porch so the old folks

can sit out in summer,

a garden for vegetables,

children, pets,

a picket fence to keep them in.

The dream has always been about safety.

So even as we sit alone

in our high-rise buildings

and basement apartments

where the outside world comes

to sit at our windows

like a tattered, yellow thing,

the dream is always

on the horizon—

glittering.

The Adulterous Citizen

I am an adulterous resident; when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.

SUKETU MEHTA, Maximum City

When it comes to it,

there’s only the long, paved road

that leads to a house

with a burning light.

A house you can never own,

but allows you

to sleep in its bed

without demanding sex,

eat from its cupboards

without paying,

lie in the granite cool of its tub

without drowning.

And only when the first shards

of day slice through

the blinds

of the basement windows,

nudging you

with something of a whisper —

something like, Maybe it’s time to go —

do you finally drag

your suitcases

up the carpeted stairs,

out the front door,

on to the summer pavements.

It is nothing

like losing a lover,

or leaving behind

the lanes of childhood.

Nothing like scaling

the winged walls of memory

to discover your friends

have packed up their boxes

and vanished.

More like stumbling

into a scene from the future,

where the ghost

of a husband

beckons with pictures

of a family

you no longer recognise,

and other people’s children

race across the grass,

lulling you into belief

that you can always return like this —

without key in hand,

to lie in the folds of one city,

while listening to the jagged,

carnal breaths of another.

The Immigrant’s Song

Let us not speak of those days

when coffee beans filled the morning

with hope, when our mothers’ headscarves

hung like white flags on washing lines.

Let us not speak of the long arms of sky

that used to cradle us at dusk.

And the baobabs — let us not trace

the shape of their leaves in our dreams,

or yearn for the noise of those nameless birds

that sang and died in the church’s eaves.

Let us not speak of men,

stolen from their beds at night.

Let us not say the word

disappeared.

Let us not remember the first smell of rain.

Instead, let us speak of our lives now —

the gates and bridges and stores.

And when we break bread

in cafés and at kitchen tables