A billion faces in tandem with a hundred different tongues
in a thousand different towns; India was never so little that it could fit
into the map of my mind.
At the foot of my grandma's flat are
dozens of bare feet treading the pavements,
the asphalt, the double yellow lines whose homes
we could never name; sole on plain Earth,
soul in plain sight - telephone lines thousands of
miles away offer a voice to cling onto,
because a loquacity not quite localised is the way
to rise above all that foreignness of a land
that hides you away in its folded corners,
as if pages look better with creases. For every
road kerb romance, street side slow dance and tales
tall as that multi-storied carpark, there are men not alone
but lonely, men wistfully wishful, men
with garlands of grace but then confined
by race - they should have known:
their feet would not keep up.
--
"Tell them to return to their leeches and floods / but not before they have raised our buildings and children" - The Marooned Island by Alfian Sa'at
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