Avirup Ghosh

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING At night, after you close the day like a book, you grope for a bookmark. That is peace, the house’s morphine, for which you pay the bank interest. The neighbour switches off the lights – darkness becomes a sound. The moonlight rests somewhere on the terrace, making of your house its inn. On a day like today, you want to send your house on a holiday, knowing that it will return to you like a little child does, when thrown up into the sky. Once the house was your child. Now you are its slave. It behaves like a pensioner. (There are the cobwebs, the house’s cuticles, always in need of paring. Dreams make the skull of a house, you know. You spend your life looking for the house’s tail.) Once camels could pass through eyes of needles. I laughed at the folly of my ancestors. Now, as [...]

ON THE SHYNESS OF BIRDS (From A Meghalaya Travelogue) In that shiver of leaves, a certain caution lives. It is a thought as precise as suspicion. Then, inside the gaps linking rain and dawn, fall the sure gasp of song. They are not afraid, no. Every move covers the hills, navigates the clouds. There is escape, quick whip strokes in the sky, a rustle of bodies in the scrubs, but they are never here. Their songs are shadows. The leaves are shaken by visitations. The only verification is shit. (Illustration by Avirup Ghosh) _________________________________________________________________ Nitoo Das is a birder, caricaturist and poet. She teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her first collection, Boki, was published in September 2008.