He talked of his home, his mom,
The sandalwood forest left behind.
He talked of those private isles with brick walls,
where human vendettas pulverise bonds.
Innocently he kept at it, our conversation....
Of existence, of myth, of geometry, of an unrealised God.
I didn't know what he was searching under a cerulean sky.
I didn't know what had tilted in my perfectly reasoned life.
I listened to those tangible callings that tempted him to chapels
of deeper belongings tucked in those white cassocks and brown skin.
He left home when he was 16
That white bearded man who came to his house
Spoke of Christ and meaningful existence gracing life.
The smoke misted my eyes
The beckoning coffee grew dark
I drank in that exquisite response of memories that evade one in solitude
It had the fragrance of a known sea fish curry of his village
and of a diaphanous adolescence that was tucked between us.
'Still in the abandoned compost of human roots' I thought
The relentlessness of my poem was building
as his voice was kneading our evening together
With nostalgia, with echoes, with tenderness, with the humidity of love
Impossible! Impossible!
I was looking at a man
Who had rolled in the sheet of yesterday's to opt for powerful humanitarian tomorrows.
How can I bind him to a home of separate times?
There will be the hum of cicadas and our laughter mingled with summer evenings....
There will be a red pathway to our small brick house....
He fondly told me about those lovely nieces and their contained happiness.
I saw him holding our child
Darkly compelling they cradled a little closer
Appreciatively I surrendered to the morsel I picked from the plate
The flavour burst in on me
I surrendered to that orchestrated dangling fiction for a while,
of different syllables and of soft indispensable yearnings.
He asked me, 'Where are you, darling? You seem to have gone from this table and you heard nothing '
Rinsing that image, dispensing off the words
Red faced, I looked at him
There was mannerly desire in his eyes
Isn't that obvious? The human monk
'How revered he is! God acknowledges him as his truly wedded son
His ascetic leanings stood upon the permanence of a buried past and a coffined future.
'His today and tomorrow ruthlessly contained in God , our dark haired dimpled babies remain unborn'
The cool lobby of an achingly turquoise evening was turning blue
Collecting the moorings of our cherished togetherness
It was time to move on.
I stood up to walk back to my life of a separated wife
And he to one of a betrothed monk.
We had our reasons, unreasonable as they come.
Our lives mingled, did sit together enigmatic and knowing one evening.
The sumptuous had to end.
Don't they all end to begin?
Festering thoughts of love, of home, of cravings, of him snaked through me.
An architecture of awakened longings of man and woman
As ancient as time.
All that poetry felt in the memorandum of moments are unplaceable belongings of flesh.
Soaked in flesh was I?
I wanted him to sin, i wanted to be the event for once...
I wanted to silence those rosary beads rolling in his heart
I had crossed leaving him on the other end, I despairing looked back for that one glimpse
My heart flipped...
He stood there watching emptied of the filth of human wants
That radiance was almost Godlike!
I was in love, in love with a monk...
