Glass Palace

There’s a place

Where tamarinds and flowers grow and crickets breed

Somewhere in the city

It breathes like a secret

Away from the humdrum and bonhomie

Trapped

Inside a bubble of gray-blue dreams

There was a glass palace there once

That glistened in sunbeams

And in drops of rain

And it was a strange house

With a strange attic

That reeked of rivers and storms

There’s nothing sadder

Than a house standing in rain

Like a lonely old couple with sticks

Yet once

There used to be cherry trees

And spring

Dancing like lovers

In its balconies

And golden blossoms that flamed

In autumn’s sun

And burnt

And clouds that crowded the skies

And melted like small wisps of dreams melt

Into morsels of memory with time

There, I once wanted to live

With a man who reeked of

Rivers and coconut trees

Away, after nightfall and away, before

The breaks of dawns in summers

To melt like clouds; and to waft like wind

In springs.

And is there anything sadder?

Than a house waiting in the rain?

He smells of river and coconut trees. In the city he comes from, it is a taboo to fall in love. In the city I come from, there is a piece of my heart beating in another's body.

Sometimes we sit on an abandoned rock at night. Sometimes he settles my hair and whispers in my ears. Sometimes it's morning when I return and peacocks cry from a distance.

There's a house we've built which smells of river. It hangs in the air like a supersecondary structure with random strokes of gray-blues, the colours of dreams. It twists, turns, sashays and morphs to form new structures.

Whenever the river of his place feels lonely, it looks at the space between its fingers - that is where the silty, slender fingers of the plains will perfectly fit in.

And there, sometime at the terrace of our House that-can-never-exist, sometimes under the sky that has neither stars nor moons, sometimes behind the bushes where crickets sing, I surrender to him like river surrenders to land.

Chapter Closed.

And there were no stars in the sky then.

I have nothing to say.