Snehal Vadher \ Winter 2015
* Experience for my grandfather, J B Vadher Once, when three, you had almost drowned in the village pond. The light of Ankleshwar must have appeared as though in a pinhole camera ̶ the convex sky, the crowded market, gathering around that one distorted, tender face which kept evading through dense decades of strife and fulfilment, pettiness and disease, becoming a dozen streets, a neighbourhood, in a Bombay where you fathered six children, watched English films at Opera House, then took the last train to Borivali. You were ninety when she plunged her hand in the water and pulled you out by the hair. Epithalamium for Partho & Ishani The peepal leaves are bringing forth this season’s light in shades of henna. The roses in the balcony affront the expanding universe. We face each other, are two mirrors making a pact of infinity. The body longs to lean upon the river of another. The pulse is a man condemned to walk suburban lanes in the twilight of the heart, it never learns the right quantity of things beyond these planks, this woodwork. We are ilathalam bronze clangour, starlight beating on the planets, widening arcs of foam returning, ravished by the search. * |
Snehal Vadher has studied Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at universities in the UK.
He lives in Bombay, where he teaches creative writing at school level. His poems have previously appeared in Almost Island, Nether, Coldnoon and nthposition. |