It’s always the girl in the middle row
in school photographs of Class Two –
the one with two plaits, gaze as vacant
as a chorus, the one whose name
is on the tip of your tongue,
as you leaf through old albums
on weekend afternoons, a name that never quite
manages to emerge from that muddle
of almost and not quite, until
one day someone casually mentions
she died ten years ago,
and then the click
of revelation –
blue water-bottle,
school-bus regular,
monopoliser of seesaws,
Ami Modi, more vivid and centre-stage
in the mind’s proscenium
than ever before,
and you believe the details
must mean something, add up
to some vital clue
and you almost know what,
but the knowledge remains poised
on the tip of the tongue,
awaiting another nudge,
another infinitesimal lurch
into the bigger picture.