Listening to Mukesh by Pooja Nansi
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
listening to mukesh Driving to your block, I slide in my father’s cassette of old Hindi songs and I am humming in twilight to the legendary playback singer’s baritone releasing those sounds in that language that makes me feel like I am home. In the back of my throat, I can taste my grandmother’s translucent thin chappatis that as children we would to the light, the dough so evenly rolled out by her hands that not one lump would show. I never appreciated them till her hands she could no longer grip the rolling pin. I hear the children from the slum two-storey apartment block. They are swearing in that deliciously punctuated rhythm only the born-and-bred tongue can dance to. I am home for a while. I can smell dust and kerosene in the air and hear blending without objection into the stone thud bass Jamming my brakes at a traffic light, I realise home is supposed to be these dustless streets and the smells are alien culinary concoctions, that my migrant tastebuds I have taught my tongue to like the garlic sting of Hainanese chili paste and form some Hokkien curse words. It even enjoys the harsh bite of it, but it is not a taste, a language that makes my heart sing like these notes on my car stereo. Jaoon kaha batayen dil, Duniya badi hain sangdil Chandini Aiyen Ghar Jalane Sujhe Na Koyi Manzil. Tell me where I should go in a world filled with indifference. The moonlight filters into my house, But I do not belong, neither can I think of a destination.
hold up
shook so much,
that emerged behind my grandparents small
high-pitched devotions to the gods
of the latest film song.
like pigs’ knuckles and chicken anatomy,
cannot migrate towards.
1 Comments:
omg...all day iv been hearin poems about India...i miss home!! :( been away for 1 n a half months now...i can so relate to this poem ms nansi! :)
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