Slices
Bombay, 1993
i.
I lift the cover of the sandwich –
chunks of chicken in their eggy glue,
steel tables, static, the hum of the restaurant
(a flick-sweep of a soggy rag
and every trace of a diner is gone) –
a snack grabbed after your appointment
at the doctor’s pigeonhole of a pungent clinic –
she always arriving late
in her trailing saris,
her ball-of-yarn bun,
her fowl scratch,
deftly decoded and folded
by the chatty compounder lady –
paper packets bundling in her hands,
triple horizontal lines
smeared across her forehead.
ii.
The bombed-out façade of a building
as if we were in Rome
(which we would visit several years later,
tossing a touristy coin into the Trevi Fountain)
and this was a spectacular ruin
amidst the modern, riven megapolis,
bravely staunching her wounds, slowly
hobbling back to a scarred normal.
A whiff of terror in the air still
as I craned out of the cab window,
as I did out of the rickshaw
whenever we passed by Juhu Beach –
eager to catch a glimpse
of the latest painted avatars
of many-mooded
and bewitching movie stars.
iii.
Odd to hear the name of our suburb
issue from the lips of the prim newscaster.
Into a pot of simmering water
you dusted the heavy-smelling powder,
and though it was late in the evening,
my brother had not returned
from French tuitions
he insisted on attending.
Lost Chambers, Atlantis
Still-swirling flotsam
of a legend
long submerged
and like your mind
so often
my halls
labyrinthine and gloomy.
See my fish
how they zip and twirl
how they flap
glabrous fin and tapering
tail –
diving, swarming,
divagating
through manufactured myth,
wreck and ruin:
stingray, grouper, shark
and of course
my luminous
parachuting jellyfish.
And look up –
my lobsters with their clashing legs,
their frantic antennae.
Come, take a dive.
How old is the soul?
Have you been here before?
Allow me
to heal those ante-
diluvian wounds.
Your restless spirit, may it
find repose.
See how like chimney smoke
a column of water
effervesces
upwards
and how for more than
warmth
the fish – like eels
congressing in a weedy sea –
arrive
flocking.
Chiaroscuro
after Peter Paul Rubens’s Old Woman and Boy with Candles
It is as if we see her hand plunge down,
phantomming towards the flame. Light,
dimmed but undammed by her downcast
hand, licks the cave wall of her palm,
splashes over her well-lined face.
On one arm the dinghy of her basket,
at the other the kinetic child.
Excerpted with permission from Cold Renewal by Dion D’Souza published by Paperwall Publishing 2025.