Spotlight: Note from a Loving Friend / Love and Loss in Ludhiana
Note from a Loving Friend
I.
For weeks, high school girls giggled, slipped folded notes
to each other, their noses pruned, leaving me on the outskirts,
alien that I was. True I had my green card, always in my wallet, but still
I did not know why I felt alone in their company.
I read their note to me folded so pretty
with numbered pages and bubbly letters. The gist:
“Please do not be angry with us. We have discussed
this with each other and the school counselor
and you need deodorant. It is unpleasant to be around you.”
II.
I want to reach forward, tell the girl she will love
a friend with long brown curls and a kiondo
rich with books and lipstick. I want to tell her Mani
will teach her to eat wings, how to see beyond
the squares and rectangles of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie
and see the lights of New York City, neon and traffic signs pulsing.
I want to tell the girl that one day she will become woman and dream
of amethysts, her womb a sparkling geode and she will discover her true
scents of moonlit jasmine, sandalwood and ginger, when in company
with a loving friend.
Love and Loss in Ludhiana
After Gwendolyn Brooks
Glass shards jagged along the brick where
our house separates a plot of forest amid city, it’s
cuckoos chatter, song pierced by street vendors, skimming rough
edges, selling potatoes, snake gourd, squash and
back at home, a woman on haunches washes dishes, feet untended
dry skin cracking like a fault in the earth, I ride my rusty bike and
enjoy the bumps, my seat jostling a narrow path, hungry
for grandmother’s lunch with radish pickle, careful not to crush weeds
growing between man-made surfaces. Here, night jasmine grows,
its vines, creeping along the back wall, over and around a
glass glimmering in light as the girl’s
aunt waits for the signal from her lover. She looks out her window to get
a glimpse of the boy, sick
when he never arrives, tired of
being the only one in college who never gets a rose.
She does not wait like Madam Butterfly; instead I
take her hand and we tread light through the untrammeled forest wanting
nothing but to be endowed by light filtering through falsa and champa, to
be surrounded by wild crow song, go
away from the manicured garden, in-
stead peer into the trumpet flower and see the
bee nestled and buzzing, embraced in back-beyond
bliss, away from the pruned papaya tree and maybe
down
the
alley.
