A box of Darjeeling tea and a beefsteak
sinking in the oasis of mashed potato
Peek their heads from an array of things
On the kitchen counter heaped.
Blessed be the grocery store
that falls under the shadow of my home.
A ray of light pierces through the wine bottle.
And the slender neck bleeds.
The instructions on the box merge with the crime.
Crimson Crime.
I read.
The way they taught us in school.
Letter for letter
Without feeling their bones.
To read.
Never weigh.
The a,b,c’s.
The History.
If you do, you shall seek.
If you seek so, shall you rise
above the letter, words and sentences
To form a question
Who am I?
-And there is no answer in chemistry
No formulae in Mathematics.
Non retractile like a canal of birth between a mother’s legs.
-To trace the origin of the origin.
Despite the knowledge,
I frolic in the fool’s garden.
I touch the bones, feel the ghosts of the words lurking underneath.
The water boils inside the rice cooker.
The imposter inside me churns.
Tea- does- not -go -with- beef -steak -and -curry.
And I dare not look at the luminous plastic beauty.
A lone brewing ceramic cup for its face.
A pretty box of tea.
Instead of all my mothers and sisters smiling,
while they pluck their grief, leaf by leaf.
The wisps of vapours that rise like their apparitions?
Effervescent like their aspirations.
Tea also suffers.
Perhaps.
The imposter syndrome.
At the school Assembly, nuns made us pray to Almighty in heaven.
At home, father lit a pyramid of sticks
Glazed with gasoline
To invoke the spirits of the ancestors. Our Gods.
Mother made us recite the Gayatri mantra.
The pandit talked of the creators of the universe
–Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwara.
Lesson by lesson. History an eraser erases.
Civilisations group, regroup.
Languages conglomerate.
Maps reshape.
Through the calloused hands of God, they sift and slip
Like his diminishing breaths.
I am standing inside a split vein.
A war-paint of red.
Ready for lessons on red wine and beefsteak.
I swallow my newly acquired German-ness.
Thick creases of curry wurst and pommes on my tongue, drowning in
creamy mayonnaise.
The tiny grocery boxes undulate like cemeteries planted on a hill.
A bottle of ancestor’s wisdom
whittled from the pale foreign radishes
soak in mustard oil, Indian herbs and spices
sitting on the windowsill.
Nothing of which my son knows.
The summer breathes like a bloody tyrant.
on my neck,
on the oil- soaked bottle,
on the plastic wrapped tea leaves,
on the beefsteak.
Who is the imposter here?