On a Saturday…

The bucket of clothes you left a week back,

Soaked in detergent of white powder

Has entangled itself in such dubious knots,

It leaves a black bed and a stink, you would not like

To carry with you to confession or to her,

Which makes you remember what you told her,

That it was all a mistake,

A familiar mistake beside the painting

Of the Fall of Man

With Adam, Eve and you the Serpent,

And all this while you have been thinking

What pizza you would order for dinner,

You have lost patience with vegetables

They peel so easily and boil so modestly,

They don’t quite deserve that effort you think,

You see the first wrinkles on your forehead

And remember a song line

“To enjoy the power and beauty of your youth”,

That you are now on a shopping spree for jeans

And T-shirts and stepping inside the latest salons,

So you flip out that phone and drop down list

And call out an old colleague of yours,

And say “Hey, its me here, long time, how have you been doing?

And you can hear her cough and sneeze at the same time

And say “Hey, am a bit busy now,

How about if I call after some time”,

And that colleague of yours never called up,

And you have tired yourself of sitting and watching passerby’s

And thinking about all the possibilities,

Till the most modest of them

“You being hungry” disturbs you,

And you are soon feeding yourself on burgers and ice tea,

You would love to have someone to listen to you today,

You think you have metamorphosed, you are no Mr Purfrock,

You are an engaging, smart, spirited young man who dares to eat a peach,

Till you bump into a local policeman on duty,

And he collars you to show the face of the chicken you are,

“Next time ill crack it,” you say to yourself,

And resolve to make a start again,

A clean table and clean sheets of paper,

Until the second question on the prep book

Confounds you and you know you are just kidding yourself,

The weekend you have waited all this week

To make a start is here but all you have to show

On Saturday evening, is you in bed with the FM on

Your table littered with page three news

And on the bottle of the half drunk coke a fly is perched,

You walk into tomorrows thinking about tomorrow,

You think you quite missed her giggle that day,

You are in retrospection now “What If indeed

Everything you had ever been looking for

Was contained in that giggle of hers that day?”

You have walked here as summoned

For your redemption, and like the timid customer,

Who cleared his dues on notice; you severed all your ties

While you still fear notice for notional and opportunity costs,

You quite forgot your karma playing catch up,

A crowd of amused faces have gathered besides a drain,

A man that’s fallen inside it emerges drenched in stench,

“Couldn’t he find a better place to die”, a man tells you,

“He must be having his problems”, you tell him,

“But that doesn’t mean he make a show of it here”, another tells you,
Which all makes you play out in your mind

Those last lines of that novel by Camus,

That novel you had read once but now forgotten except some fancy lines,

Like the one you are trying to remember now but don’t quite remember

Until you Google search it as:

“For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate”
august 2007