by Dhruvi Modi

‘Rememberings’

The curtains close
and my lungs spill.
Something about the way
the tambourine rings
rattle shut the daylight
that pierces my eyes,
much like rememberings
of my childhood that
clamp close my sight:
how I broke that girl’s
toy stethoscope and
white-lied my way out –
I haven’t heard hearts
beating since;
how I pushed away
my Ba, never once
letting her touch me –
she won’t anymore,
she can’t anymore;
how I chose under unjust
force whom I loved more:
Mom or Dad? –
the answer haunts all my nights
and superstition is my nemesis.
I’ve come to deplore
these pages of sunlight that
slant through my window,
and into my life
and wash away
my layers of grown up,
unpeeling them to the apple core
that they would all throw away.

‘Farewell’

the street bleeds coconut water,
creaking of gleeful squeals of
lukka chhupi,
then slips into silence,
like precious change tucked into a pocket
and the sun sinks into the sea,
a pebble plopping
into its wrinkled gray skin
and the mad crowd
crooks at the knees
with the receding beat of the drums and shehnai
and the cement embossed around
tiny footprints
is swept clean
by the tinselled edge of an impaling red saree
and a hand fenced in gilded bangles
is strung towards the harbour,
by another,
weatherbeaten and calloused,
and each footstep is
a leaden block dragged aboard,
to be lifted and set asail
towards the ineluctable truth,
like a plume of smoke
stealing out of a bleak factory pipe,
ebony dark, intense ab initio,
then spreading out,
shrouding all
that lies beneath,
and a single tear dribbles
down her mother’s chin and
somewhere,
a light is switched off.

Dhruvi Modi is 19, and a student at Sophia College for Women. She has loved reading and writing since she can remember, and is an unabashed, avid eavesdropper. She loves walking, being by herself, and has been caught talking to herself more often than she would ever admit.

Illustration by Sawani Chaudhari.