The World Literature Blog

Glopowrimo #11

Home away from homes after homes after homes...

Being born into a rented house
home was to me four people
not brick, stone and mortar
The four became five, then six
then five
and then finally a house
where the five became four
and then two were left
and here I finally start to include me
who became six
but we had to leave
five of us
back to rented houses
Then five became just me
in another country
and again in rented places
while four remained back
We occasionally meet
Life, a game of numbers
additions, subtractions, multiplications, divisions, tired miscalculations
and uncountable nouns
like joy, laughter, tears...

Where was home, ever?
In the arms of my mother?
In all those houses we stayed
or in that home my father bought
in Thiruvanathapuram?
In our ancestral dwelling in Punnaveli
or where ancestors and relatives dwelt
or later, in Alwaye and Banglalore
or in two places in Saudi
or one in Libya?
Where was home
but in the heart and family
in memories
and friendships
and in never having one
till my father died and gave me one
for the sake of my only autistic, begotten son
Where was home?
In the land that I bought
which has a well
or the village for autism
I plan to build but which has not panned out yet?
Or in this lonely self-imposed exile from
here to there
& then to now
a never-ending collage of images
I carry
the weight of which is like carrying the cross
killing me, but which I cannot yet set down?

Not that there was no happiness,
it was there too,
as Beckett says
in the smell of the kudamulla in one of those rented houses
by which my mother stood
herself, as bright as the moon
and in the neem tree's leaves that fell on the front yard
small, just a thin strip
just after she'd swept it clean
in the house that her husband had finally bought for her
where she would pass on to her 'heavenly abode'.

Where was home?
In the happiness of a few years in
the same house
with a laughing wench for a better half
and three golden children
like the stars
before life pulled out a red card
to wave me off
the football field
of my desire to live, crying foul to it
to punish me for sins done or good deeds not done...
as if I was more important than global catastrophes?!

Where was home when we went to a new town
and my chidlren tried to run out of their new school
two small girls
to try to stow away on a train to their old place
to be again with the grandfather they had left behind?
It was hidden for a while behind a dark cloud but revived in the smiles
of a little boy who could not speak
who became our rebuilt-time-and-again-home, the cement that glued
our lives again together
the kintsugi in our cups

Obscured by clouds
four there, one here
the Years fled by
while I walked strange streets
under foreign moons
visting foreign shores
where strange biblical waves
beat against the sand no longer of yore
not of the beaches of my childhood
blue bright daylit water water that looked black to me in the sunlight

Home.
The place that does not exist
unless there is one
around the arriving next-bend
home where even the lost years
the locusts ate
can be regained
One can only pray for that home
This is not poetry
Just a personal elegy
An attempt to build a temporary shanty
for the wayfaring
on a quest grown weary
to make ends meet
to have enough to
greet -
a home made of words and verse at which I am well versed -
the dawns and the tomorrows
the nights and the sorrows
to fare forth and be nearer
by not keeping still
keeping death at bay
like midnight's blue
so that before that there will be
a home
then death's home
and then that final rest-home of all
where even death has no sting
and cannot call.