I’m wearing my mother’s sari,

her blood group,

her osteo-arthritic knee.

We’ve voted

for different men, same governments.

In dreams she plays

among trees of rubber and betel palm

outside a home in Myanmar

while I scamper down

dark service stairways

in Bombay buildings, sharp

with the smell of urine

and kesar agarbatti

smoking out of the breast pocket

of the seventh-floor madman.

She lusted after Dev Anand,

I after Imran Khan.

On television

both still sport

headfuls of black hair.

She treads nimbly

across language.

I vowel every now and then

into mouldering inertias.

I come undone

with muzak

or a compliment.

My mother’s made

of sterner stuff.

Sowing the same dream

in a different self –

the cussed logic

we both know

behind aeons

of parenting.