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.
We talk Buddhism,
Lata Mangeshkar, plot pedicures,
late into the night,
and she watches me
ancient peasant
canny harvester,
her eyes bright
with defeat
as I grow stealthily
into her body.
Here it is then –
the treachery
of middle age,
of love.
It gets no closer than this, Mum.