By Tanisha Desai
In the smell of delicious musky cracking cement
Wafting upto my nose and
Cradling its palate
They haven’t fixed it for days.
Days crawl into months, and
In months engender years.
I only see the clock which this
dingy wall frames.
The Old grandfather clock which
lived up to its name, probably
in age. Always adorned
with reverent spiderwebs but
always faithfully labouring.
Soupcons of nebulous numbers
have now broken and mislead.
And now that clock for the first time
breaks its cycle as it turns back.
Back and back and back some more
Like a sempiternally spinning, untiring wheel.
And now suddenly, I’m back there now
Feeling the cool hard magnolia of the wooden table and my
Fingers feel the unwelcome greeting
Of an etching crudely carved
Some decades ago by an infatuated pair two initials.
They’d long gone their separate ways
But immortalised always in that little engraving.
And I’m suspended in a gloss of time
As the world around me freezes.
A paper airplane is airbound, mid-flight, wings worn and crusting from use. And nefarious notes with cruel caricatures mottle the floor, wickedly torn. And in these little things, you would think there is no life.
You would be wrong.
I look around. I have never felt more alive than I have in this suffocating little classroom. These scintillas of memory infuse
This life in me.
Its infectious.
Infectious as the notes we pass
In furtive glances and excited giggles we pass on that life
To each one of us
What’s in our hands
Is that fire of life, hopeful, burning, proudly and fiercely flaming
And to remain alive we can never
Blow it out.
Occasionally that fire will burn you It will scar and
It will leave a mark.
But that fire also
Gives you
Light.
By Tanisha Desai
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