Every window has a story to tell
By Probal Mazumdar
if you sit next to it long enough.
You can almost hear a mother and son,
walk back from the school bus-stop, talk
about Jack and Jill, and Will, his best friend,
and Roe who always pukes after a meal.
And you can never miss a father's whistle
from the car park, after he returns from work,
and then his son's stomping down the stairs
for a few rounds of frisbee together before
they merge with the kids playing in the park.
Sounds live in echoes, long after they're
no more. Every morning daylight squirrels
into the room, searching for such seeds
of the past, lodged in the cracks and corners
of a window, that is a window no more.
It was a week after Rahul's third birthday.
The sundial's shadow saber-shaped sitting somewhere
between his return from school and his father's
return from work. And then he climbed a stool
and craned his neck too far, out of the window.
Mom still talks about that one, on the room
on the first floor facing the park. How easily
life chose to wiggle out of it, to grab a stray
kite, while she was cutting carrots and capsicums
in the kitchen for dinner, carrying my weight inside
her. And when she heard the cry, she felt it was
me. Soon, the window was wiped off of the wall's
memory. Yet decades after, when we touch the sealed
corners, our hands gather the shiver of a kite
caught in the cross-pulls of the wind and the earth.
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Probal Mazumdar’s poems have appeared in Wasafiri (U.K), Acumen (UK), Red Rock Review (USA), Xavier Review (USA), Indian Literature, amongst others. His poem “Grandmother” had won the First prize in All India Poetry Competition in 2014 conducted by Poetry Society of India, New Delhi. Probal writes poetry to explore the unseen in the seen. He works in the IT industry and has also published a novel – Key To My Soul.
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