A bouquet of men throng outside
Wimpy Wines. Wilting arms petal
outward to grab the closest bottle,
the darkest liquor, the most pungent
spirit. Blooming backwards, their bodies
bend at the stem, fall onto the street,
shed colour onto the footpath. But their
eyes, they stick upward, black buds
reaching towards the gleaming yellow
bulb hanging over Wimpy Wines (the sun
never sets over Prabhadevi’s favourite
theka). You can smell it before you see
it: this dishevelled cluster of flowers
(gulmohars and mallipoo and copper pods)
peppered over fallen copper wires,
frayed cables, and puddles of oil
and water lingering far too closely.
The stench lingers in the air, travels
through crows’ beaks as they gnaw
at anything that seems human, flitter
from body to body until they hover
above my head. What am I doing here,
I wonder, in this slanted body, this
pieced-together frame of male and female,
seeking comfort at the end of my
lane. Right before it’s too dark, too drunk,
too full of despair. Right before autumn
comes storming in, peeling petals
off flowers, skin off bodies, gender off
flesh. Before I am noticed, I cower
away, trail on home. Appa is there, picking
flowers from the Swami Room, his hands
sparrowing from one moorthi to the next,
carefully plucking the red hibiscuses and
orange saamanthipoo and white mallipoo
hidden between the gods, shared between
their outreached hands. He’s made dinner,
he says. Eat properly, he says. It’s a little salty
but overall okay, he says. When he looks
at me like this, like a bright mind energised
by ideas, forgetting it belongs to an ageing body,
I am reminded of myself. We share the same
face, appa and I, the same eyes, the same
droopy mouth. The same restless hands possess
us both, steering us away from consistency.
We’re swept away by the frantic need to do, and do
now. Our love for languages — his, math,
mine, poetry — constantly jostles against
our maya-driven, caffeinated legs, always
running to grey offices and grey meetings.
Such is the fate of those of us who cannot wait,
who refuse to bloom when the conditions are
just right, who rebel against sunlight and water,
who sprout oddly, wrongly, in somersaulted bodies.
Saranya Subramanian is a poet, writer, and theatre practitioner based in Bombay. An MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco, her writing has been published in Frontline, Lithub, The Caravan, Madras Courier, Aainanagar, Outlook, Vayavya, Kitaab, the Museum of Art and Photography, Scroll, The Bombay Literary Magazine—to name a few. Her essay, “The Cockroach and I,” was published as an ebook by Penguin Random House after winning runner up to the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize, 2020. She runs The Bombay Poetry Crawl, an archival and research space dedicated to the 20th century Bombay Poets. And she writes because, well, it’s all that she can really do.