I Come Back to My Flat

In the living room
you’re sitting on the landlord’s sofa
tying your shoelaces.

In the study, I am
pulling you behind the shelves
for one more kiss.

In the kitchen, you’re putting
the three extra spoons of sugar
in your morning tea.

At the washbasin,
naked, you’re cleaning up
the mess we’ve made.

In the bedroom, you’re
sitting up on my side of the bed,
your back reticent.

In each place
you’re always there.

In each place,
you’re readying
to leave.

Night Sounds at Safdarjung Tomb

…now I am the mourner for drifting leaves.
– Intizar Hussain

The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
– John Keats

The rasp of the jhingurs scraping
their forewings behind the hibiscus.
The floating arguments of the mynas

returning to their nests. The prowling
echoes of the skelter bats. The headlit
horns whetted by a red signal outside.

The alert clicks of a camera in the small
hands of a curly-haired novice. His “Chalein?”
to a friend when they’re done. The shuffle

of their feet on old gravel. The footsteps
of the short guard minding the stanchions,
keeping a stray couple from the night.

A parrot’s drop, light as a kerchief, in the hauz,
the sandstone of the tomb suddenly rippled.
The quiet press of a band of pigeons on the

dome drawn by an expert Abyssinian hand.
The guards discussing their change of duties.
The anomalous graze of a landing on a nearby

airstrip. Under the rococo sky, the disturbed
sleep of the Wazir ul-Mamlak-i-Hindustan.
On my shoulder, the thin crush of your whisper.

Day One of Learning Italian

Before we learn the verbs for eating
or drinking, or the nouns for bread

and water, we are taught the words
for man and woman, girl and boy,

as if those are the survival skills
for the first day in a new country.

We step into a new language
through the customs desk of

gender. I don’t yet know how
to ask a pretty stranger for an

address, or request bartenders
for a glass of water (or a beer)

– all useful skills, mind you, as
first days go. All I know is to show off

my ragazza and ragazzo, la donna
and l’uomo. What is the need of

learning a new language if you
only confirm bits of plastic scenery

you thought you’d left behind? What
is the need to travel five and a half

seas to find new nouns for old things?
The teacher is impassive – “Why expect

a language to be kind on its first day?
Why make it into a djinn?”

It doesn’t live to answer some simple wish,
it won’t allow you to step out of everything.

Darwin

noted a furrowing of the forehead and
an “obliquity of the eyebrows” caused by

two separate conditions, one, the influence
of grief, and two, when staring at the sun.

He even made three of his children “look as long
and as attentively” at a needle-tip of a redwood

against a scorched sky to make his case. In all
three, he saw the “grief-muscles” contracting.

Grief-muscles: how strange to turn the long arrears
of sorrow into small bundles of fibrous tissue,

the passion of Christ into a materialist consolation.
There must surely be a secret search for respite in

locating the cause of grief in the same place as
the source of light, to read in the lines of a troubled

forehead an insistence that, when it reaches flesh,
your touch and the sun are indistinguishable.

Excerpted with permission from The Last Time I Saw You: Poems, Akhil Katyal, HarperCollins India.