An office by the by lane
Once upon a time
In once upon a path
There was an old house.
An old house
Double-storied
With wooden windows,
A few rooms below,
Just two above.
In the courtyard were rusting metres, faulty metres, unused wires
A few smashed tubelights, inexplicable graves of unexpected goods
A few bricks here and there
And you always wondered the whereabouts
Of the brat of this house;
On the walls were charcoal writings,
A few thick lines of oil
Such a brat he should be –
All I saw was “Down Down”.
In the drawing room where horlicks was served
When marriages were fixed
And black tea, when death was mourned,
A spectacled man sat
Matching digits, tallying lifestyles
And manning connection cuts;
Further in, in the grandmother room*,
Desks after desks were busy
Joining the arcs, spanning the geographies, drawing the territories
Of the intricacies of her bosom;
You often wondered why she was so quiet,
Why she never interrupted
In those bad translations in foreign tongues.
We had often gone that way
In summers when the evening birds were the loudest
As they mosaic-ed the gravel path from their trees
Or in monsoons
When the asbestos shed for those in waiting,
Amplified the drenched complaints.
Once upon a time
In once upon a path
There was a KSEB office;
And you wondered where the kids in their angst left
And the grandmother dried withered and powdered away
And all you had were piles of brick
That would be sold
To another house in the making.
*Shafeeq Valanchery is currently pursuing PhD in Cultural Studies in the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. He is a blogger at http://www.deadletterhouse.blogspot.com, where he tries his hand in poetry, short stories, book reviews and movie reviews. He has previously published in the Reading Hour and The Viewspaper. He is a Fellow at the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India.
Note: KSEB: Kerala State Electricity Board, is the state board for electricity in the south Indian state of Kerala. The KSEB office sites are a usual targets for various protests.