There’s a door that doesn't really close. It only opens.
Out and in. Outside, a field pans out to a neighbourhood
of gabby gossips, winter-orange and summer sherbet-berry
camaraderie and the indispensable pestering of hawking
vendors. Yellow-footed green pigeons, ruby-beaked parrots
and feisty crows lay claim on tall trees, a determined sun
and torrential downpours sustain the green as the park
does generations of football and cricket players.
Girlfriends from average families gather on the street
to outgrow their shadows by playing hopscotch. Treats
and secrets are shared. Sitting on nylon cots, their
mothers and aunts measure the length of their knitted
yarns and the salt and acid of their tears. Inside the door
is a world too. Of a tiny banana grove, a patchwork
of an edible garden of Malabar spinach and bottle gourd,
papaya and guava, a grandmother's cartography of
transplanting wholesale memories of a green home. Inside
is where conversations with the sun and the green birds
happen, where fears are released to the southern wind,
where the promise and disquiet of the outside is
negotiated over fervid postmeridian orange peeling.
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