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| Poem Madras - Arundhathi Subramaniam e-mail: arundhathisubramaniam@gmail.com April 14, 2012 (Courtesy: Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Publishers, UK, 2009) I was neither born nor bred here. But I know this city of casuarina and tart mango slices, gritty with salt and chilli and the truant sands of the Marina, the powdered grey jowls of film heroes, my mother's sari, hectic with moonlight, still crackling with the voltage of an MD Ramanathan concert, the flickering spice route of tamarind and onion from Mylapore homes on summer evenings, the vast opera of the Bay of Bengal, flambéed with sun, and a language as intimate as the taste of sarsaparilla pickle, the recipe lost, the sour cadences as comforting as home. It's no use. Cities ratify their connections with you when you're looking the other way, annexing you through summer holidays, through osmotic memories of your father's glib lie to a kindergarten teacher ('My mother is the fair one'), and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca suddenly awakening an old prescription - Peabury, Plantation A and fifty grams of chicory from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple. City that creeps up on me just when I'm about to affirm world citizenship. © Where I Live by Arundhathi Subramaniam Post your comments Please provide your name and email id when you use the Anonymous profile in the blog to post a comment. All appropriate comments posted with name & email id in the blog will also be featured in the site. |
