At eight in the evening on a Friday, you are trying to find

Rue Saint Louis — a street with yellow colonial buildings

and smell of moth, as if,

history has a moth-smell all over

its body of work

and, it seems, somewhere down the road, a rendezvous

is written like a lone mothball

in a locked wooden chest

where you finally meet an old beginning

or a new end

 

Around the block, you sit at a corner table

in a restaurant

where the wall is glass

and the menu card is only in Tamil. Here you fervently wish

to donate Ovid’s memory of sex and death

to anyone who is interested

in this elegiac foreplay of ailing autumn before

a callous winter

and easily pluck and release frangipani flowers (as if,

they are white and yellow

butterflies with six wings floating on air!)

from a row of trees near the promenade’s edge

 

You know that this place was waiting

for you ever since

your birth and will wait for you even after

your death. You sit and wait endlessly

with a pint of Tiger beer,

a plate of Chettinad chicken and two restless ants

on the table for someone to come

back