(For my grandfather)
Yogesh Maitreya
Today, there is longing in my eyes
To play on your shoulder,
But your bones are liquidated
Into particles of scented soil.
Sorry for that.
I don’t mean to delay.
But I realise much later
In the university’s library
That you are the book of my history,
A storyteller of bloody tales,
Mirror of my old self,
Clue to my possible martyrdom or yours
To being an untouchable
Outside of the village,
Which I die to read again and again
In this age of identity crisis.
When I ask papa now, about
The name of your grandfather,
He finds no books
In which the story of his name
Was written.
Well, he doesn’t read books as well.
You both are silent now,
You, behind my eyes,
As binoculars through which
I can see the blur
Of our vanished stories.
And papa, before my eyes,
With handicapped words
Of alcoholic silence,
Of which I am the victim,
Deprived of stories
Of our old selves.
Yogesh Maitreya is from Nagpur and is doing his M.A in Criminology and Justice (2013-15) from TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai).
