Bangalore Lanes

Commercial Street
Residency Road
Where the good doctor lived
And so on and so forth
Past Russell Market
Where a beggar girl held out
Six lemons like orbs of gold
Past the Cantonement and the Jesuit school
The pig shop and the book store
The Catholic cemetery
and the cemetery for everyone else
The provisional badminton court
on a quiet dirt road where once I saw a man
kicking his wife’s head into a garage door.

But it was not all like that.
Once, the workers by the construction site
gave me a yellow chick
to take far away from their makeshift lives
where pots of food sat next to refuse
and I would rescue one small thing
in a larger charcoal sketch,
bring it back to our neighborhood
by the train tracks and the mosque
where the imam would sing at four
so loud it would rattle the teacups
in our Christian house
marking the end of afternoon
constant and commanding it would go on
as Mummy picked lemongrass,
Mr. Hanif took his stroll,
Mrs. Aria, the Parsi divorcee
lit a cigarette on her balcony
and the exiles from Mizoram
brought in their laundry.