The smell of damp earth after a heavy shower

S’good to be back home, lying
in unfamiliar beds at dawn in the old
familial town, waking peacefully from sweet
dreams to the lilting tune of happy sparrows.

My clan, jing bang lot of us, buggered off
a long time ago. Westward Ho! All except for
Pinky bhai, conducting biodynamic farming
experiments in the vicinity of Outer Mongolia.

And Munni baji, who never left
and whose three blue-eyed sons sell
right-hand drive cars to overweight Sardars
and underwhelmed mondaines in the
quaint English town of Leighton Buzzard.

Every year they send her a solitary merry-merry
Christmas card with a short, impersonal message in
badly transcribed Urdu. She tapes it
to the teak-framed looking glass in her vast
mock-Tudor bathroom, keeping it for a whole year,
then torching it on a bonfire of flimsy matches
when the next one arrives. She asked if

I understood the significance of this and I,
in no mood to comfort her if she broke down,
languidly opened one lazy eye, nodded sagely,
and consummately intoned, “I do,”
before nodding off contentedly under
an undulating chuppah.

So long since I tuned in to the sound of
birds chirping. There are no birds where I live,
none that you can hear anyway. Not even
on the Sabbath, that short and very weak end
to the slavey cycle, spent productively
curled up in microscopic backland lodgings,
foetally, spatiopetally, past azaan
and through khutba, half awake and searching
for signs that the natives are
getting restless, wondering how many minor
accidents have occurred since last night.

Dear, dear God, I pray it rains all day
today, tomorrow,
the day after, and the day after that.
Rains so long my flight is cancelled
and I never
ever
go back

(minos - november 2006)