When You Visit
We lock eyes in silence, you and I,
across the threshold.
The last bars of the doorbell carol,
the trunk-call echo
of voices from an inner room.
Have you eaten, kanna?
There’s chikoo in the fridge,
your favourite.
Bringing you the Resnick & Halliday
with the Rahul Dravid pictures
you’d pressed between pages,
I begin to tell you how
his career panned out,
but you’re tired, you need to sleep.
Later, you say. Later.
You sound different, I think,
I can’t be sure.
Each time you visit,
I trust less and less
the voice I hear in my head.
The tape we made
of your summer-camp songs
jammed up years ago.
Toothbrush Queue
Earphones hang from the upper berth
and Marple lies by your side,
facedown,
spine cracked in two places.
In the trapped air the lingering reek
of fenugreek and stainless steel.
In a patch of wiped condensation,
silhouetted birds on silhouetted lines
spectate,
as Larkin’s tearaway delivers
a ball so fast it freezes
at the edge of this moving frame.
In the reading lamp’s feeble light,
words overheard become words
recalled,
words reworked, reworded.
Your finely tuned sub-editor’s sense
kicks in weeks too late.
Stations pass in the toothbrush queue
in order vaguely remembered.
This city
of deflated duffel bags on disused exercycles
in box-grilled balconies that overlook
fading ads for Juliet Bra.
Karthik Krishnaswamy is a cricket journalist by day and a photographer by night. He tries to fill the gaps with poetry, if poetry is what it is. He lives and works in Bengaluru.