Chittaranjan Park, New Delhi (for Anisha)

There is no estimating,
how time and space
transmutes a lover.

So forgive those fish-market shanties
wearing concrete like a truism. The traffic,
and its delirious swell, like a whale’s lungs,
every day at 9 am.

Don’t begrudge the new traffic signal its ornamental impotence.

It’s okay
for new bungalows
to be coloured beige, mauve, fuchsia,
and neat ground-floor parking lots
replacing bougainvillea trees – where
a boy and a girl,
forever twelve and six,
negotiate the dwelling place
of an earthworm they saved
Forgive those streets,
for shrinking
like grandmothers
under the weight
of newer, bigger, shinier cars.

You see, it is only after you learn to unlove
that homecoming becomes
a matter of perpetual return,

the way afternoon chiming
of the kulfiwallah’s bells, the smell
of dhunochi, the taste of jamun
brings you closer to
something stuck in your throat
the night before, in a train

hurtling towards this dwelling place,
that was almost yours –
until you disembark
at the Delhi station.