How To Tell Seasons
Mother, my book is all wrong.
It says there are only five seasons!
How can that be? What about
The season when the storms
knock on the windows? What about
the season when the doves
bicker louder than the bulbuls?
And the one when the crows disappear?
There’s that season when
the mango buds come on the tree;
The one when they turn yellow;
And when they grow fat and fall down
Of course there’s the season when
I pick up a basket of shiuli in the morning;
Then the one when Grandma has
no flower from the garden for puja.
They completely missed that season
when baba brings home the syrupy jaggery
which you and grandma turn
into pithe and puli and payesh.
That’s when the one when little
shops plop up in corners selling
sweets and chikis and lumps of dogs
are curled up in corners instead of
lying flat with their tongues out.
What about lichi season and jackfruit season
And the one when baba’s bazaar must
have a bag of guavas? They didn’t
even count the one when cuckoos
call non-stop and I can never find
where they are hiding. They’ve
only written about when the stairs
turn into a pond and baba puts
bricks for us to step on. This book
is a bore. It can’t tell seasons at all.
Why, they missed about twenty more!
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