Jail Mulaqaat
— for UK & BL
After four years of incarceration
and several refused bail hearings,
the jailbird finally becomes a real magpie.
Before, he would buy plum cake and milk chocolate,
woollen gloves, packets of shiny bindis
to drop in your lap and fly.
Now he stares, blinks,
as if he has time,
folded crisp like a rupee note in his beak,
watching the fine lines in the corner of your eyes,
noting every new strand of silver hair,
storing, hoarding the grain of your voice
to take back to his sullied nest.
Legacy
My Aaba’s idea of success was an office. Eighty-four, with diabetic legs that took on water like rasgullas dunked in syrup, it was the first question he asked my cousins and I. Did they give you a cabin yet? That’s what he liked to call it. A room with your name on a wooden plaque. Leather-backed chair like the one he fiercely guarded from his own wife and kids. You cannot just sit on the boss’s chair, you see. You have to earn it. Meanwhile, blood of his blood, we put down our names in smoky kitchens, drawn in aata and oil, on public bathroom mirrors in salty tears and on resignation letters in blue ink. We sat at cubicles and desks and dining tables and dreamed ourselves free of walls. Once, I sat by a waterfall you had to hike an hour to get to, wrote five couplets by hand, and called it a day. Then on a hot rock under a blazing sun, I wrote my name in cool water from the spray of a spring. It dried and disappeared before I could make anything of it.
Love Song for Enduring Friendship
—for SR and OM
On the night of your wedding in Calcutta
I sit at a bar in New York wine-drunk
telling anyone who will listen:
happiest day, couldn’t go, shitty work rules, stupid professor
watching the blur of yellow taxi cabs native to both our cities
painting a blazing henna sun on my palm
obscuring lines of Heart, Fate, and Life
It comes out a little warped silky moon reflected in a rippled pond
Later a professional henna artist commiserates
says circles are the hardest to make and I
put that same palm to the delicate birdcage of my chest because
I know.
To make a circle you have to risk a heart
you have to put it down between yourselves as bait
a kind of dog-and-the-bone game
except when you snatched up my heart I won
And then we filled that hallowed ground between us
with promises and playlists airmiles for large distances
potol posto in the fridge midnight rescues
admonishments hair oiled and pulled into braids
side eye down on your knees to fix my saree pleats
until the circle became its own universe
signs of life on nine planets protozoa ready to walk
across seven seas just to see a face, hear a laugh, taste a smile
On the night of your wedding
I drew circles cool and brown
around Calcutta and New York
adorned them in vines, flowers, sacred soil
a picture of the vast earth between us on my palm
so easy to lift to my nose and smell
so easy to hold to my happy/sad heart.
Nikita Deshpande is a poet, author and screenwriter based in Mumbai. Her poetry appears in The Prose Poem, The Hooghly Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, and an anthology The World That Belongs to Us. She won the 2023 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and was awarded a 2015 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship to work on her fiction. She is the author of a novel, It Must’ve Been Something He Wrote, published by Hachette India and a short story, ‘The Girl Who Haunted Death,’ most recently reprinted in The Deadlands. Her favourite poets include Jane Hirshfield, Aimee Nezhukumatatthil, and Ada Limon.