Raju and Chamni the bitch with 7 pups were my only friends but I never felt alone in my dadi’s huge house- always devoid of people, with only the front room in use- even when Chamni died and Raju went away with the rest of boys.

Now that I had grown up and can no longer squat at someone else’s aangan[4] collecting twigs and making patterns in the sand, I content myself with sneaking up to the terrace in the hot summer afternoons - the music of jute strings of the cot has long been replaced by the muteness of foam beds- I peep down at Raju’s gher [5]and look at the neem trees, now thin and wilting, the tired cows, the empty spot where Raju’s baba used to lie in his cot, the crows have left too it seems- I no longer see the rushing footsteps of the wind on the baked earth as she hits the unresponsive concrete – she mourns, silently her estrangement from the lake- they have built a wall where they used to meet behind the last row of chamaar’s houses. Her heart alone like mine, remembers still the melodies of sweet summer gone…

There is a black bird that sings atop a neem tree in the quiet of the afternoon heat, when the cows doze off chewing rhythmically too lazy to shake the flies away with their drooping long ears, when the wind makes a low rumbling sound in the distant fields carrying in her arms the sleeping dust on the road. I crawl out of the cool darkened room my grandmother lies in whistling softly through her mouth. Loose lipped strings of the cot complain to her of my escape. Calling out my name in her sleep she says, “so ja babu, kaha javegi dhoop ho rahi hai”[1]. I slip away.

Sunlight dances in the distance, her golden footprints tracing the baked earth as she larks about the lake, rippling her cool murmurs, tittering shyly behind the last row of the chamaar’s[2] houses like friends uniting after a long time.

Squatting in Raju’s magnificent verandah, I draw outlines of fields, intricate patterns of tube wells on the floor, digging the cool mud with my hands. We compete with the birds for the fallen twigs hurrrr the panicked flapping of their wings making us dizzy with thrill. We collect nimboli[3] soft round and green scattered by hundreds under the lush trees while the crows caw at in anger for plundering the gifts of their trees. Cows sigh and roll their sleepy bloodshot eyes, curses foaming at their mouth as we hold back our giggles hushing at the slightest break in the rhythm of Raju’s baba’s snores -a cue to flee before his arm reaches the thick stick by his cot.

The world seemed enchanted in those moments, as if everything, the sun the breeze the shade of the trees the taste of sweet water from the handpump at the back of my throat, was there in that moment for my pleasure and I for them. As if they needed me there to touch them, to listen to their secrets. I did not know then that the wind would whisper to me still, that the song of a black bird would in an instant take me back to that sun scorched verandah regardless of where I hear it.

wet backs of little black boys 

chase the rubber tire they beat with joy

their excited thin shrieks

rouse the dogs who sleep

under the cots of where the bedridden sleep

lifting their eyes ever so gently

moving slight, they growl silently

at glistening backs and thin brown legs

donned in socks knee high by the white river bed…

Alone on that tree,

sings the black bird for me

for she cannot, like me

leave here but stay

to look after the decay

Translation:

[1] Go back to sleep little one, where will you go, it’s so hot outside.

[2] Vernacular name given to people of lower castes in Northern India.

[3] Bitter tasting fruit of the neem tree

[4] Another term for verandah

[5] Farm or the space where cattle are kept.