My Mother’s Foot
Elephantiasis made it cute
like a porpoise’s head;
and if I lost my temper,
mother became big foot.
To others, it mostly remained
hidden behind her saree, her
fluency at walking, until
we’d enter a shoe store
and get her feet measured-
Laurel and Hardy; and I’d be
a little ashamed seeing
the clerk maintain a straight
face while coaxing its bulk
with his fingers, surely
hating his job more than ever.
And I’d often wonder if this
mattered to my father
when making love, how he
could not think about her foot
even as it scraped against his.
Butterfly Effect
Cochin, 1987
Under her nose, in the bank’s
conference room, I dipped
into her purse all day long,
fetching one Tintin title
at a time from the bookstore
on MG Road.
If I was
then tall as three such books,
now I’m double the height,
more than five times the age.
And forever written out
of her will.
The Big Boss
Madras, 1985
More than the legend of Lee,
Or the movie after—
The Melting Man/Icarus in
B grade. More even than
quails in the other room
and its fish-tank, the evening’s
immortality is owed
to the swift orchestration
of our mothers’ hands
darkening our eyes to the flash
of breasts. Nothing else
in Cine being as rare
as that pair lit with maternal
censorship by the pair.
Arjun Rajendran’s latest book is One Man Two Executions, Westland, 2020.