by Anindita Sengupta
Arambol, Goa The smell of hashish in the air is a dancing thing. The girl’s small, curved hands are like two shells in sleep. The bartender raises his foot and brings it down on a
crab, spilling its meat onto the sand, leaving a pattern in entrails. I eat my tuna salad.
The boys on the beach turn over in their sleep and the one-eyed man in the café cups
his face thoughtfully. Such violence on gentle shores is common.
In the distance, a blue boat is a blemish I could rub away, a
transgression. The beach continues to burn in its silent, unstoppable way. The Patio This is the space of distilled things.
Sunlight filters through the jagged red edges of leaves and a Carnatic raga in the house across the street is pleasanter for being remote and beyond my control. Still further, the faint sounds of delighted shouts over something surprisingly found. Pale-headed Anthurium speckle the green. Pure. Spatulate. Each tentatively nodding flower holed with little flecks of emptiness where body should have shone. The snails have been at it again. Oil lamps in bright pink, gold and green, now extinguished, are calm as a row of Kathakali dancers at rest, their masks off, hands still. The night’s festivities are over, they seem to say, and it is time to seek the darknesses.
I gulp the cool, clear rustle of air. Its sharpness on my tongue is the memory of unripe berries, peppermint, orgasm. I curl my toes into moist soil hear the earth cake between them. I will walk to the store this way barefoot, earth-smudged, sated. |