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Moveable
Alright I admit it, I am struggling, I am.
Naming the sacred is not a job
you take
lightly, not, that is, if you want to live
to any half-ripe
sort of age. Until 1989
we were frequent companions, I visited
you,
entertained you, in Bombay behind
the Byculla zoo, and, merely a month
later,
in HK, we lived in Repulse Bay on a junk.
After that my memory
becomes hazier
with pain. Was it you I spent a month with
in Chiang Mai?
Smoking opium in a stilt-
house with the chief and his daughters?
We had
so much money then, it was as if
we were on vacation from real life forever.
I remember: I am bringing home goodies
- imported coffee, cigarettes,
geraniums
in a jar. I am sitting on a scooter,
you are in the sidecar,
laughing in tongues.
Who would have guessed the disaster in store
for us
or how rarely you would appear
in the decade of denial? I am in my thirties,
shirtless, a baby elephant's head grows
out of my shoulders, I carry a
beer-
belly and shades. My mother is bathing,
I am on guard duty, which
I enjoy.
As my Asiatic time came to a close
you and I grew reckless,
racing borrowed
toys through the streets of ghost towns
patrolled by
soldiers, priests and guard-dogs,
and always the inscrutable face and
lotus feet of the first godman, Sri Sri
Baba Ba. On the airplane we sat
by the aisle, sharing drinks, magazines,
maps to the world, measuring
our journey
in statute miles. At JFK you scurried
off for coffee. "Back
in a mo," you said,
"and remember, yaar, the nail in your head
is
moveable. So move it why don't you?"
In the winter of 2001, I do, I walk
from Roosevelt Station to a basement room
in Jackson Heights, past Hindi
movie-houses,
kabab halls, cut-rate travel agents, suit-
sari shops,
psychics, paan-DVD parlors.
You, I am beginning to suspect, are not
here.
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