it is still too early to say what memories will crystallise around you for now it is the bedpan not emptied from last use and your room smells of ointments and pills and your damning of the whole world but once my tears have dried and the puja flowers withered perhaps you will freeze i will put in the black and white photos on a boat in a lake in a cheap hill station when you first let me down and the mundan of the first-born where your mother made such a fuss and that stupid photo from a middling age of the reception of some cousin of yours and yes the shaadi ka video and the cassette guiding our kid reciting nursery rhymes certainly all the unrecorded fights for you never earned enough and drank too much and never bought enough flowers and that never do well son you gave me who lamented loudly at the funeral and your sisters let us not talk about your sisters no I will not make up a box of memories because you know I would not myself be reduced to an...
The message is supreme;
Born in the heart,
and lilting itself
from tongue to tongue,
throwing its scent
over wind and wave;
travelling on dots
or fingers
when blindness
or silence bar its way.
It hews itself into stone
or burns itself onto magnetic discs;
it is the message that lives
and I exist
solely to pass it on.