Secret garden, swimming
in the amniotic light of a green afternoon,
where the trees are familiar, the pink musanda,
the thunder’s north-eastern baritone and its subtexts,
where much lies buried beneath generations of soil
and the thick sugarcane slush of rain –
a cosmic despair over algebra homework
rising with the aroma of turmeric and damp jasmine,
the silent horror of my grandmother
who watched her husband drive away her cats
through the stern geometry of her kitchen window,
my fourteen-year-old indignations
near dusty bougainvillea tresses
at belonging to a tribe of burnished brahmins
that still likes to believe its skin is curdled vanilla,
and the long amorous wail
of confectioned Tamil film songs
from the transistor of a neighbour’s gardener, long dead.
No, I am not sentimental
about the erasure of dynastic memories,
the collapse of ancestral houses,
but it will be difficult to forget
palm leaves in the winter storm,
ribbed, fossilised,
against heaving November skies,
building up their annual heritage of anguish
before the monsoons end.