Every hotel room has some flaws — this or that
You search it out
before breakfast. The bathroom has a noisy faucet
as if a whole river is trapped
somewhere
You can almost hear gulls screeching, water gurgling
and nothing more
You pull back the heavy hotel curtains, beige, in the windows
to find an emerald tin roof
of a wooden house, now closed, and an old jarul tree
with mauve flowers. A whole assembly of wet crows
looks at you
from its branches, only slightly curious
Nothing more, nothing less
The mountains are not visible now. They are brushed
by the rain,
a single master stroke in watercolour
But you know they are there
beyond the watery white of the sky. Like our eyes in sorrow
Now that you are visiting your old hometown
without a home
at the soggy toe of the Himalayas, you can somehow empathize
with your friends and enemies;
they also touch
their own grief and move away, one by one
You close the window and open the wardrobe and find
an old Tibetan rosary
hanging from a clothes hook.
Someone might have left it there in a hurry
You keep the rosary on the writing desk
and look at its 108 beads questioningly
as if awaiting some answer
or further instructions before you touch it
with your right thumb and heart and count your thoughts,
one by one
But, around the rosary, there is a dead hum
You close the wardrobe and open the windows
in the opposite direction;
you find an old woman, Tibetan,
walking on the Hill Cart Road with a red umbrella
in one hand
and a rosary in the other. She wears black lipstick.
(Sekhar Banerjee is a Pushcart Award (2021) and Best of the Net (2023) nominated poet. He has been published in Stand Magazine, Indian Literature, The Bitter Oleander, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Muse India, Kitaab, Madras Courier, Outlook and elsewhere. He lives in Kolkata, India.)
