Source: Vintage Indian Clothing
In a few family albums,
the photographs are arranged in no particular order -
My parents’ first vacation by the sea stood next
to my infant father's rice ceremony -
I could say he was reborn in his marriage -
My aunt dancing kathak on her school stage,
next to me pointing to the peaks at Tiger Hill
Black and white snapshots of my grandparents’ wedding
next to the rolling green tea estates of Ooty -
The spiral-bound skull of colour-blind memories
My two-year-old cousin, in a fairy costume, looks
through the frame containing her in a Polaroid shot,
at newborn me crying in a hospital cot,
something time and reality never allowed her to see
Draped in my mother's saree, at my school farewell,
I look past the frame that cuts off my waving hand
but leaps into the sepia cheeks
of my grandmother, knitting a child's pullover -
The needles fell from the hands of time,
through these disarrayed stitches of remembrance
I come across another picture of me, beside her,
my mother's mother, whom I never saw,
the decades since her death contained
in the space between our picture frames -
Was it so easy to find happiness
in the fictional rearrangement of memories?
Isn't that what writers do?
From Madhura's new book Monsoon Arrives at the Junction Crossing (Dhauli Books, 2019)