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.