Home
1: We lived here for fifteen years:
All our stuff is in boxes
the house is so bare now
there’s no warm green couch
no curtains, no books or teacups
I say “goodbye,” softly and turn to leave
and when my voice echoes in the emptiness
I hear the house say goodbye to me.
2:
When I was a child, we moved many, many houses. And when I think now, about which place felt most like home to me, I think of 6/2 Royal Road. There, I’d sit under a study table making it my roof and the square of space under that table my corner to retreat to, when the world got too much.
This is what home means to me, a corner where I recover from the world.
3:
When she leaves in the monsoon
the old Goan house begins to weep.
You call it ‘seepage’ and place round steel vessels
and a pink plastic bucket to collect the endless drip,
the patter fills your ears like endless complaints
the house groans so much….
shudders, creaks and howls, so much
that you can’t help but think; it weeps.
4:
when my eyes rest on your eyes
my body finds a home in you.
5:
Home is where you know the secrets of every drawer, where the tea is, and that the yellow knife is sharpest. Home is where the food is familiar enough to become comforting. Home is home for so long that you forget that every home has a smell and yours does too. Home is where a water stain on the wall now looks like a face you know. And when you come back in the dark, home is where your hands can find the lights.
6:
We moved into a house without windows
but we were so young there, so happy,
we never missed the sunshine.
