Moon at Half Past Noon

The same black frame, for twenty-five years,
a silhouette against the flaking wall of our Kotdwar home.
Its carrier, a stretched hammock of steel,
that held sacks of grain, my school bag, Didi’s laugh.
Its chain sang a dry, rhythmic click,
the soundtrack of Appa’s—my Bauji’s—kingdom.

I, Chotu, perched on the bar, my head a listening shell
against his chest, feeling the engine of his breath.
I grew. The mountains became mere landmarks.
Bauji’s world, seen through his taped spectacles,
stayed fixed: the price of dal, the loyalty of iron.

I, Rohan, learned a new arithmetic—EMI, interest, down-payment.
I brought home a white Swift, its showroom scent
a sharp foreigner in our courtyard of neem and old sweat.
Bauji circled it. A silent orbit of assessment.
His hand, on the glossy roof, did not bless.
“So, Rohan,” he said, my new name a stone in his mouth,
“You have bought a tomorrow on today’s debt.
This box of borrowed wind.”

He tapped the windshield. “My cycle asks for nothing but my sweat.
It owes the world nothing.” He turned away,
the chasm between us no longer just years, but faith.
Tonight, the power is dead. The Kotdwar sky
is a black wool blanket. In the stark glare of my headlights,
I see the cycle—a stark, angular cage of shadows.
And I finally understand.

I see the young man, my Bauji, walking home from the timber yard,
his shoulders a slow curve under the weight of a promise:
Never kneel. Never ask.
His life measured not in rupees, but in the distance
he could travel on the strength of his own legs.
His argument was never with the car, but with the scent
of a helplessness he starved to keep from our lungs.

The cycle looms so large, not as a cage, but as a fortress
built from every rupee he never had to borrow.
It carried our world on a foundation of outright ownership.
And in its stubborn, rust-speckled silence,
lies a love that speaks the only language he trusts:
the grammar of things fully paid for.
He wore those broken glasses so I might never
have to see my own reflection in a banker’s polished shoe.