Catch a shooting star
If you proceed cautiously
holding a man-sized kerchief
in your hand
You might chance upon
the shooting star that fell behind
the building that faces our house.
That derelict building with
dim neon-lit rooms and
tired laundry hanging
on limp clotheslines stretching
across dark smelly verandahs lined
with old withered grandparents wearing
blank hopeless expressions, waiting
hoping, waiting for death to claim them
preferably on a weekend when
there will be neighbors and others to
carry the stretcher, assist with
the cremation that
will have to take place in the
leafy avenue by the sea,
off Shivaji Park.
If you proceed cautiously,
treading very softly towards
the shooting star that
fell behind the building that
faces ours-
That derelict building that
screams and snarls with
domestic violence, where
the policeman visits regularly, stands
crushing tobacco between thick
palms on hot long afternoons and
surreptitiously pockets the money to
not register a case against the
boorish husband who
smashed his wife’s ribs in
a drunken fury, flung
the baby on the cold floor
It’s wailing stooped so abruptly, it
could have been a
walkie-talkie- baby,
made of plastic.
If you proceed cautiously, mum said,
placing one ballerina-clad foot before the
other daintily, like they teach you
in your fancy school
holding the kerchief ready before picking
up the pulsating bright thing
(It could be hot, you know,
it just feel out of the sky)
If you could turn your nine year old face,
sweet innocent face,
away from that derelict building
that faces ours
a blot on our gracious residential colony
of uptown Mumbai,
that terrible down market building stinking
of death, decay and old urine.
If you ignore that building, lovely child,
go around it with eyes closed,
pretend it doesn’t exist
you will discover such magical things!
You might even find, precious one, the
shooting star that just now dislodged
and fell out of
the night sky.
-Kankana Basu
(Unpublished poem from the collection I, Alien: Mumbai Poems)