A few women I know

1.
That day she cooked
The most delicious dish in the whole world
Which no one was permitted to eat



2.
The three urchins
Jumped into the dustbin
To hunt for bandicoots
Which they captured
With a rusty iron rod
Dipped in a flame

They prolonged their game
As long as they could
Until she got hungry
Picked up the bandicoot
And ran
All the way, home



3.
The six year old
Picked up the
Cyan and magenta crayons
And painted her version of the planet
Ugly, unaesthetic, irrelevant

But with no political boundaries




4.
What goes down
Will come up one day
She said
Inside her burkha
When we met in Luxor

After 30 years
Her prophecy
Is coming true



5.
The lady
Who launched a thousand face-lifts
Walked through a broken
Security system
Stared into the CCTV camera
Finger-printed her toe
After they had frisked her bag and body

One hour later
She hob-nobbed with power brokers of the joint committee
On the 17th floor
Discussed the resource crunch
With the fat-cat minister
Who used to mastermind kidnappings
In his days of youth

She
Walked out of the Secretariat
Carrying the Minister's fortunes
To Berne

Unsurprisingly
No one her frisked her
On the way out

Everyone merely stared
At the sashaying hips of
The Maharani of Money



6.
When
The child
Sang a nursery rhyme
The great classical singer
Was wonderstruck

As to how someone could manage to get every note
So horribly wrong
And yet be musical



7.
Every morning
You're not there

All that remains is
A crumpled bed-sheet, three half-read books
(Including Banna Bhai's letters which he penned in Central Jail),
Your asthalin pump, nasal drops, pain killers
A weathered saree you use as a pillow

My memory of the night
Is a blur

All I remember is
You slept
And I counted every single breath