Pakhi's piece thinks back wonderingly to a home in Goa as well as her growing self that has both known it and has passed it through her mind. But not only does the Old Pereira House shift colours and shape across her two images- so do the surrounding forests depicted with care and precision yet left largely unremarked upon. In my response piece I shall begin with such uncertain spaces that lie between home and the unknown - lush vegetation, unweeded gardens, rubble, ant-hills. How do we remember those which we have neither made nor disowned? Over which our claims are far more fluid? What part of memory do we apportion to them? And do they ever startle us by not resting content with the speech bubbles we trap them inside?
-
I
one’s memories so often slowfloat
transparent beneath
the rising floods of voices
(noisy as water is, and just as ancient blue)
songs replayed in deepening furrows of hurt
conversations swinging
to absurd operatic reaches
a remembered home is hung
with giant fateful festoons such as these
II
your verandah is a flat fluorescent blue
its billowing curtains of grass
(each orangetipped filament
worrying the air in vertical play)
set the scene for a vanishing act:
what colours does the house dream in
when it lies emptied of people’s walks and pauses?
remember (as you often do)
there is still the grass
the overwhelming forestlife
leaning into its memory
like a long expected letter
arrived at last and held close
III
whether one likes it or not
there surround our houses
things halfowned
(and no less strangers for that reason)
living within comes with its own
paraphernalia, the wilderness changes shape
your casements in cities
overlook empty rubble and beside them
sleeping forms that line pavements in anticipation
anthills in the backyard
thickening against the plastic legs
of your father’s chair
or those moving queues of women watched sleepyeyed
walking through early morning mist
trespassing on your campus land
with their trade cries of pumpkin blossoms-
IV
they watch over all sorts of
dreamstuffed houses
with the knowing air of weeds
growing past your mossveined calves
waiting to be pulled up
(but no less settled for that reason)
they know there are memories
and desires and fantasies of perfection
had within shut doors
arbiters of their uncanny lives
they know where to hold fast
and how much to let go
‘what they are to do
with all this living’
the question
is do you?
(with thanks to D, and Philip Schaefer’s “Suture”)