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.