calls out for a father and traces through his large, muddy

footprints into a kitchen void of mother. The housefly freezes

into a corner, gut twined but wings fluttering, its docile

nonchalance ready to be absorbed into a spider web, right

behind. The black ant, voracious, spirals up the sink to the slimy gizzard

stuck in the limed valve, turmeric washed and blood drained,

nearly slipping on the speck of morning’s washed away rice.

All, part of my breakfast. All, part of me.

The wall tile, each square serving a plated piece of fruit,

an apple or a bunch of grapes, some covered in cathartic foam but all,

equally yellow. The floor mat, unoriginally black, sprouts

torn, strewn curry leaves greener than mother’s varicose.

The milk has soured into curdles, unmoving as a paralysed marriage.

The dirt wouldn’t settle down the drinking water (yet)

and the neighbour’s wife doesn’t have an answer to

her husband (yet) or his beatings (she says yet). The other

neighbour never comes out. The housefly, no more fluttering,

turns into another black dot in a wall, in this kitchen,

in a house where the provenance of three knots1

could hunt down poems like these, for the years

we passed and the next twenty to come.

The father is busy, ear against a different wall, listening.

Only the cement inside keeping us together,

as the ghost in his voice shouts

to ……wait for mother to come home.

1 three knots : refers to the solemnisation of a marriage, according to Hindu tradition.