The Bridge

 

 

 For Grandpa
“….Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I`ll dig with it.”
Seamus Heaney-Digging
        
1
I remember the first half of palapea,
My mom offered me one afternoon
As I was squatting opposite her
On the newly daubed floor
Of the old kitchen
Chatting with her about some matter at school
As she was preparing the dinner.

With the crispy skin, ridged,
And yellowish like butter on the head,
With a crown of brownish fibrils,
And snow-white on the bottom,
With soft cottony flesh,
It tasted so coolly delicious,
On my tongue,
Tingling my proverbial taste-buds.
        
2
My grandfather used to bring us many of them,
Strung like white bulbs on a raw ekle,
When he returned from Siriwardena mudalali’s,
Where he removed husks from coconut,
My father would say, for chickenfeed,
Until a rash on his legs,
Forced him to quit his job.
      
3
Once Jusiappuhami, the cart-man, sold palapea,
By the road-side,
At the northern boundary fence,
Of our school.
In an open box made of rough-hewn mango planks.

He`d keep his merchandise.
His charges for them were proportionate:
The bigger ones would fetch five rupees each,
And the prices would rise
In direct proportion to the sizes.
But the cheaper smaller ones, we found out soon,
Tasted better.

We would constantly badger our moms,
For money to buy them,
During the interval,
Over the barbed wire fence,
Until our principal,
For reasons that we never knew,
Forbade him to ply his trade,
At the fence by the jak tree.

After some time, we heard,
Jusiappuhami was confined to the bed
Having been attacked by his own bull
That dragged his cart,
And a little later on
We learned he’d died.

4
One August over two decades ago
I persuaded my next-door friend,
To go to Siriwardena mudalali’s,
Where with dagger-like, spiky knives,
We coerced palapeas out of the coconuts,
Split with a curved machete,
By a shabbily-dressed, stony-faced woman,
Who seemed to fit the definition of a shrew,
And put them into the old grocery bags,
We`d taken with us stuffed in our pockets.
Once I`d been cloyed with my spoils,
I offered them,
With uncharacteristic generosity
To my mother and my brother.
        
5
Now my grandfather and his employer
Are both no more here, either
And my friend is a coconut vendor himself,
And I, a rustic poet with an unshakeable past
Trying to link the two worlds together
With the bridge of language.

Let me be the bridge.
Let me fill the gap.

Picking Eraminiya

Along the grassy footpath
Running atop the wide bunk
That walled the brook from Piyadasa’s paddy-fields,
We shuffled on through the dense sedge,
Peppered with Nidhikumba bushes.

Lining the huddle of king coconut trees
Over the brook,
Like old sentinels,
Stood a row of Frangipani trees,
Bearing more flowers than leaves on its gnarled branches
The mute witnesses to the start of time.

We forded the shallow brook
Whose murky waters were infested
With larvae and tadpoles that swam forever
And where the briery Eraminiya bush,
With its rash of green and scarlet nuts,
Lured us out of our way.

I, the taller of the two,
Held down the wiry, springy branch,
Scuffing the softer skin on my palms,
For my friend, the nimbler picker,
To pick the ripe nuts.

He picked the nuts off the thorny branch,
Into a habaralagotuwa,
Teetering on a scrawny Pila tree,
Teeming with dry prods.

The grazed skin on my palms and forearms,
was smarting and bled.
Still, I held it down
With grim determination.

As soon as we`d harvested enough,
I let up my grip on the prickly branch,
And let it spring back.

Sour and sweet, sweet and sour
The teeny nuts tasted
So like life.
So much so like life.

Blank

Still, the memories assault me

With the unforgiving force of a hurricane

The invisible wound

Inflicted so long ago

Feels so recent and raw as a moment ago

Love is so short but forgetting so long

The eternal wisdom of Neruda’s lines

Ring painfully true

In my mind’s ears.

Along the corridor

By our classroom

You still stroll by smiling at me

With the smile

I still believe, is the loveliest

of the whole universe.

You, my love, still take up

So much space in my heart’s abode

That there’s hardly any room

Left for another.

Anything but blank.

Infinite.

In Spite of the Ravages of Time

“…Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom…”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Love in the Time of Cholera

Returning from the shower,
I got dressed for the next virtual meeting
A t-shirt over a pair of shorts
And walked over to the looking glass
 And began combing my hair
Unkept, damp and dishevelled
Greying fast at the temples
And on the rest of my head, but a little less so
My two days’ stubble too showing more silver than black
At the vanity’s irrepressible urge
I scissored the greying sideburns out…

Scrolling down my Facebook wall
In a coincidence of coincidences
I stumbled on a photograph of her
Is this really her?
My eyes faltered for a moment
Despite the flash of recognition.
Lost was the glow of her plump fair face
And her flirtatious smile
I’d been mad about then.
And the gleam in her
Bewitching brown eyes….

In spite of all the ravages of time,
Far too clearly visible
On our once youthful visages
And in our once happy-go-lucky lives
I know sans any doubt
In the deepest of my heart
The flame of my love for her still glows
Where I still burn
Like the proverbial moth
But, also unlike it
I still burn far too many times over
Over the embers of memory.

The Epitaph

“…like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves…”
Only Death - Pablo Neruda

Still astride the bicycle,
I let it lean against the dusty old
Crumbling bank of the sidewall
Littered with an assortment of ropes,
And a rusty metal bucket
Where sat some empty bottles with rusty caps
In a tight squeeze,
Before I climbed out.

I galloped the single step,
Clutching the rickety pole
Tied to the triangular end of a rafter,
A handrail of the oddest sort,
And stepped on to the landing,
Carpeted with an old gunny sack,
Where I felt the grains of sand
Crunch beneath the soles of my slippers.

The well-sawed, but cheap sandy double door
Had swung wide open
Both parts resting against the wall,
Where the limewash barely concealed
The plastered cracks,
Standing out like continents
On the world map.

As I walked past the grandma’s bed,
I almost heard her mumbling, ‘Kollo…’
She must have mistaken me for my father, her son,
Lying on her back towards the wall,
On the clumsy bed sheet spread over the rush mat,
Covering the coir mattress,
Whose gunny sack cover had torn,
At several places.

I slipped in,
Without saying so much as a word,
So accustomed had I grown
To taking her grumbles and gripes for granted.

And I must have been deaf,
To the plain fact that her voice,
Was more markedly feeble than ever.

When I walked past her bed again,
She was lying on her back facing the wall,
Next to the bed,
Her right hand, almost limp,
Stretched outwards to her right,
Rested on the bed.

I convinced myself
She was breathing yet;
It was only when Aunt Rani, our benign neighbour,
Who came to feed her
Pronounced her dead,
That I knew I’d got it all wrong,
But, still wished I were right.

Perhaps, that was the way to die:
No final words, no last will,
No lachrymose leave-taking;

Now she was alive,
Now dead.

The Definition of Certainty

 For TNJ

“…Our sincerest laughter
                With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought…”
P.B. Shelley – To a Skylark

For hours I remember,
I’d keep watching the corridor,
Running by our classroom,
To catch a glimpse of you,
Knowing  you’d gift me a smile
I fondly recount even after the passage
Of a decade and a half.

On many a morning,
I’d come, soaked in sweat after a two miles’ ride from home,
To see you sweeping the leaves,
Around the Nelli tree
Where I’d see you hanging out with your friends.

The Angel of angels!
My heart still yearns for seeing you smile
Into my eyes,
For seeing the mischievous gleam
in your brownish eyes,
For chattering with you for hours on end
On a multitude of frivolities.

In a world that’s full of uncertainty
and change,
For you, however,
I’m the definition of certainty.
I’m the definition of constancy.

You are the wind beneath my wings

Mr.Weerasuriya watched his wife picking wathusudda with their daughter, Sachini, a six year old. Upeksha, his wife picked the flowers and cast them into the plastic bowl the child held in her hands. When she saw him watching them, she smiled at him the same dear smile she had given him when they had first met at the school some 15 years ago. It was clear that her youthful features had begun to fade faster than his. But, he knew they had grown dearer still to each other. And Sachini`s arrival into their lives had increased their conjugal bliss almost thousand-fold.

Mr.Weerasuriaya, in his early thirties, was a lecturer in Accountancy at Sabaragamuwa University. He was of medium height with an intelligent brow, sharp eyes beneath dense eye-brows and a small mouth that occasionally broke into a tender smile. His complexion was more dark than fair, but he was certainly not coal-black. Upeksha, his wife, was fair and buxom with a fine mouth, large brown eyes and cheeks that dimpled when she smiled. It was with her smile that she had bewitched him, he remembered with a smile. The folded newspaper lying on his lap, be now began to reminisce dreamily.

He met her while they were both studying for their A/Levels in Commerce stream. She outdid him at the studies and at the exams. In fact, it was from her that he got further clarifications about some concepts in Economics and some sums in Accountancy. When the results had been released, it was obvious that they were both qualified for university entrance. And she had outranked him. But so poor were their parents that it seemed that neither of them could afford to enter university and continue their higher education.

Upeksha, the unselfish girl, then suggested that he enter the university and told him she would secure a job at a garment factory. It, she assured him, would help him continue his studies at the university. First, he never liked her suggestion, his masculine pride forbidding him to depend on her and wanted to find a job. But, as she pressed him continually, he gave way and entered the University of Kelaniya to read for a degree in Accountancy. Despite her parents` warnings and admonitions, she got a job as seamstress at a garment factory nearby and gave him over ¾ of her monthly pay to meet his expenses. As he studied at the university, he was constantly driven by the need to excel at his studies as he always felt for her over her generosity. His parents too helped him in the small way they could. His hard work eventually paid off and he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kelaniya, which offered him the chance to join the academic staff as a probationary lecturer. Later on, he joined Sabaragamuwa University closer to his home town.

Overjoyed at his success, his parents brought him proposals from wealthy families, ready to offer whopping dowries. His mother was in earnest and constantly tried to persuade him to forget Upeksha and get married with a richer and more educated girl. But, he never heeded her reasoning and went on to marry Upeksha. Although his mother still chided him for his decision to marry her, he was more than certain he had done the right thing and he would never regret his decision.

And they were a happy family now. He knew it was love, pure love and not marriage that bound them to each other so strongly. It was Upeksha he knew who was the wind beneath his wings. He loved her for that so immensely, so completely. It was not the sort of love that evaporated with time; rather, it drew them closer and closer still to each other and strengthened their ties as time went by. Such love, he knew, worked wonders.

He felt a spray of cold water on his face, which awakened him from his reflection and saw Sachini grinning at him with a bowl of flowers with her smiling mother behind her.