Moon at Half Past Noon

(for the soldier’s wife, nicknamed Moyna by the slum – wild rainbird – though she whispers Maya to herself, the old village taunt for a girl who loved too easily)

Ghosted

His last word was amar shona,
before he disappeared.
Now, he is a page, better than trash.
Filed neatly into a folder named, AWOL –
Absent Without Official Love.

Living as a suspected ghost, he infests the airwaves –
occasionally mentioned, mostly they forget.

18 Months Long Vigil

The cooker misses the whistles,
Three off-key notes of Rabindra-sangeet.

Moyna –no, Maya – counts her losses:
one husband, two in-laws, and four gold bangles.
Three, traded for a shoe box in Seelampur,
where she now lives, or she waits.

(The fourth, hidden in her waistband,
burns like a bullet, lodged in her heart.
A memento to immortalise, an unlikely return.)

Seelampur Sedatives

The slum baptizes her in gutter syllables –
Infiltrator – Bideshi.
A medal bestowed generously upon
the sundry Karens in every country of the world.

She contorts her tongue between
New Delhi’s dirty teeth –
sharpening her hain to hanh;
lets aami atrophy to a main.

Her daughter calls her Ma, not Maa-go,
one vowel erasing Hooghly’s curve.
At night, Maya dreams in fish scales:
his uniform dissolving into Padma’s silt,
insignia floating like precious ilish bones.

Feeding the Ghost

She had cried at first, begged and prostrated,
at the feet of the martial deities and cops.
In three months, her bare feet echoed
like wooden sandals on a marble floor.
The system works more efficiently when idle.
Officers said ‘check next month‘, and ‘we don’t know‘.

Heavenly gates only opens for polished shoes and souls.
Her folded hands, caked with Seelampur’s mud,
only left question marks on starched paperwork.

A year into the city, a clerk mutters grass widow –
word for rootless women fed on absence.
She spits paan-red on his steps, a stain like
the map of Bengal she won’t admit she misses.

Starving the Ghost

Pujo comes.
The slum’s clay goddess sheds paint
by noon, straw limbs sagging under monsoon.

Maya doesn’t weep anymore.
She’s memorises love’s decay:
first sandesh-sweet marriage, then tetul-sour waiting,
now this – scrubbing floors and washing clothes
while her daughter chews stale rosogolla from the trash.

The widow whispers:
Even Durga leaves home ten days a year.
Maya laughs, cracks betel nut with her teeth.

Some nights, she hums Phule phule to the lone cockroach,
its antennae twitching like a tuning fork.
No one told her love would be this:
not a husband’s hand, but her daughter’s hair
smelling of kerosene and stolen shampoo;
not a country’s gratitude,
but a sadhu trading blessings for her last ounce of salt and grief.

The Hooghly ends here, in aluminum pot maachher jhol,
the fish smaller each year, bones like unanswered letters.
She feeds the tail to her daughter, sucks the head herself –
village wedding habit, when hunger meant desire.
Baba kobe asbe, the child asks – when will he come back?
Maya counts months, stops at twelve.
Soon, she lies, scraping the pot clean,
letting it thicken like tamarind.

A Soldier, Deserter, or a Monk?

The city has no songs left in its heart to sing,
only headlines – Martyr. Militant. Missing.
She stitches her own: O amar Moyna,
You are a rain without land,
a ration card with no photo.
Her daughter sings it back, off-key,
while the sadhu taps his tin cup like a war drum.

He stands at dawn, robe rusted like a flag after parade.
Moyna, he calls, though no one knows that name here.
You still wear his memory in your hair, he says, pointing
to the white streak she dyes with tea leaves.
Why feed a ghost when your daughter starves for living love?

The baby cries – wet wood splitting.
She scrapes burnt rice (the part she eats) into his bowl:
my imperfect, impure offering.
His eyes flash like her husband’s
when she had refused a kiss in rain.
As he leaves, his robe brushes her arm –
gunpowder and jasmine clinging to her skin.