On a Bus Enroute Pandalam
My left foot is positioned between the aisle seat and the iron pole,
My right is numbed in its refusal to seek a pillar.
A man steps out of this afternoon-smelling crowd
And I grip the cold pole he had clasped himself to,
Now made warm for me
In a gentle, unwitting act of kindness.
The other hand is stationed on the edge of a seat
Splitting across a woman's flying mane
To the displeasure of the jasmine quietly withering in her strands.
The conductor’s daily chant for the ticket
Washes over Aayiram Kannumai on the radio
And everyone on this bus, too, is waiting for something
With their thousand hopeful eyes.
As the bus slithers swiftly through corners and curves
And wakes up the drowsing people with sudden breaks
I am glued to the bodies around me;
A man’s leather bag has made a coded imprint on my arms
A tall woman’s sweat-pooled blouse
Is beginning to dampen my cheeks.
The bird in the song has long stopped chirping
And for the first time in a long, long time
Held by the tender warmth of humankind,
I am no longer alone, I am no longer cold.
Note: Aayirum Kannumai is a popular Malayalam song. The title translates to “With a Thousand Eyes,” and follows the ballad of a lover longing for his beloved who, like a bird, has flown away from him.
Father Tongue
My father speaks English like a child
Forced to drink a cap of cough syrup;
Face convulsed with disdain for its wretched maker
And a stubborn conviction to never drink it again.
But necessity, like flu, finds its way to him
Through bank mails and trembling handshakes
And like a child feigning niceness in front of his mother
To escape the nightly dose,
He comes to me,
Asks me about my day—
Only a pretence to soften what follows—
And lays bare his heavy empty hands.
I loan him some English words,
Teach him how to pronounce them
Like the white men of history
And for a minute, I become his mother
And like his mother,
I leave him when my job is done
With the sharp words ricocheting in his head
And the hands weighing emptier than before.
My father works in Hindi,
He sits on his heated bike in Hindi,
Curses speeding drivers in Hindi.
In Malayalam, he sits on the floor and eats;
His fingers trace worm-shaped alphabets
As he mixes the peppery rasam with rice.
He crushes the oil-pooled pappadam in Malayalam,
Its sounds echoing the Onam drums.
In Malayalam, he gulps his kattan chaya
Washes off the mud of a foreign land
With the language his mother went mad in.
In English, he shrinks
Becomes ant-sized in front of his daughters,
Bites the finger that offers him comfort.
And in English, I weep
Offer him comfort in words he will never speak.
And like the English, I convince myself
That he is not my burden to carry
But my back, like his own,
Still aches.
Aparna Nair is a postgraduate student of English literature from Gujarat. Her creative work has been published in Pen to Paper: An Anthology of Essays and Monograph Magazine. Being a devout practitioner of finding beauty in the mundane, she enjoys writing poems, reading letters by authors of the past, and petting stray cats.