NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

A series of poems set at different stages of the poet's life, whether her privileged early life in India or later sojourns in England and the US, but always harking back, or returning to India. Here is a sample from a prose poem, HOVER, evocatively and lovingly detailing her Indian childhood:

Rain turns the lawns to pools of mud. We watch the river rise, the paper folding sound not registered till my sister says look, oh look; then it is the rustle of silk saris at a wedding. The sky turns green as the parrots fly by, so close we can see claws tucked up against white-feathered bellies.

	And you found me hovering
	on your shoulder
	when I was three, blue sleeves
	of my best party dress wings
	in the breeze.

	I too have dwelled
	in sad places. The old banyan tree
	at school that made the dark
	look brown. I could hardly bear
	to look at it, the fingers
	rooted everywhere, the holes
	in its trunk where things lived.
	Its immense shade.

	When he arrives it is 5.20 p.m.:
	Manhattan's skyline stacked in shades of sunset.
	His suitcase circles a whining carousel.

	Even my parents forgot I hadn't always been
	a part of the other family.

	She sets each night
	on your pillow, Mom —
	the girl who wants to run away
	while you fidget
	with toothbrush and soap
	in the new bathroom.

	Dust here is
	a disease   It returns
	like a cloud through windows
	coats the bed posts   a feathered thing
	on the back of chairs

	a boy             hill smoke
	or a wisp of grey from ashtray to mirror
	you say I leave
	things behind            your eyes by the window
	nickel coins on a child's loin
	strung on a thin black thread

	Laughing, trying to find breath again,
	we meander through groups of pedestrians,
	cyclists, rickshaw-pullers, taxis,
	blind with memory.