Repository of Broken Idioms
Translated verbatim
my other words sound funny
to you.
For breaking dawn, I might say:
Sky tearing white.
“This is not how we say it
in our English,” you might say,
“This is not the way
our words turn
catching the eye of beauty.
Where is the pink
in your dawn, by the way?”
I have a long list of terms
I have stacked away.
Strange, off-putting,
like homeland,
or a name in my vernacular
for the color of blood
that we spilled
when we slaved
for the paved stones
from your ports to our hills,
and the flower-trees—
red Gulmohar—
that sprouted, lining them.
Translated
to your English,
my other worlds —
drained, salt-less,
shriveled like artefacts
you love to conserve —
they sound dreary to me.
Dharam
When he said Dharam,
in that heavy roll
of his northerner tongue
I mistook the word
for something else,
something other than
how he lights
lamps in ceremony,
on temple days.
I thought he meant a path,
a code that one abides by,
that makes one pat
the sprightly lad bringing
steaming tea to the car
at the road side eatery,
and call him
Chottu.
And wonder whether the cook,
hiding behind
a smoke-dark window
of the drooping shack,
wears a sacred thread.
My friend and I
scrolling through pictures
in my cell phone
in a dusty plain
in a battered jalopy
sipping tea,
far away from my emerald patch
suspended in a monsoon drop.
“How can you marry this Chudail?”
he glared at our photograph,
from the hushed wedding
at the courthouse.
‘Thumhara dharam
alag hai’–
Your faiths are different.
I gazed at the long sun
setting in a sinking arc
over the barren fields
of his home town,
and looked down
at my dimming screen,
and thought, maybe,
our fates are different.
Mime Makeup
(September 11, every year since)
Air filled with soot,
viscous with regret.
Ash-wings hover
high over singed trees
and burning buildings.
Air that is dust,
imperceptibly fine,
coats the mouth
and our mute faces.
Now we are made up
to mime.
And this air we breathe,
dull, trapping a little light
in the dust it suspends,
cakes
our crusting insides.
Grape Blender at Noon
The sun is a blob of red grape.
We suck on it.
The skinned globe splays
on your tongue.
Pellets of sweat scrape
your smarting lips.
This crystal cup
we lift to the air
is filled with sticky syrup,
its colour —
that of old blood.
We sip from it.
And crinkle our noses
at the cloying sweetness.
Too much sugar, you say,
too much burnt sugar.
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