We were brought up by folks who respected the encrusted time,
wound their watches every morning, opened windows to days.

They swept the morning breeze with either their prayerful ways
or brisk footprints out about the gardens of mint and marigolds.

We were taught to eat with hands but not lick the fingers too much,
sometimes given spoons to scoop up manners away from the old world.

Also made to brush our shoes black as squeaky bumblebees on the run,
rub wet chalk every Saturday on the white canvaswear like ghost tales.

We were brought up by a man and a woman who valued hugging
and cracking a silly joke or two, elbows pirouetting at the dining table.

Solitude meant suddenly finding hand-holding as the unexpected.
Years have gone like oil slipping, taking away easy tactile closeness.

Nothing changed as we spotted snails in the grass. She still cooked
while he got the monthly grocery home, counting money with care.

Days of déjà vu-ing didn’t matter. He read the inscrutable Prufrock
in his gong-wide voice; she sang full throated. They didn’t call it therapy.

The music was always a rousing breeze through that receptive ceiling.
The food was quite reluctant to let its own vital aroma fade and die!

It’s not to say we did not hop mad after the moon or swoon in the rains.
We brought mud with our shoes, ran amok like twisters on the sleepy town.

He sneezed too hard some days and scared the alley cat, and she
scanned the city on her tiny feet, eyes lush gooseberries, her face small.

Nothing took the rhythm away from books and ink and weekends,
Ice cream treats, water colour tablets in tin boxes, the neat domestic talk.

Hidden within a textbook I read the Kamasutra, when the noon held
the neighbourhood on its lap in repose. Yet they cried: i-s-o-l-a-t-i-o-n.
What was missing, oh, what was missing, people sometimes asked:
Not doorknobs, not the bloody ancestors, not new birds on chipping beams.