The bandh
Ram Munshi Bagh, Wazir Bagh, 2007
By Lynn Aarti Chandhok
| I see now that the plum trees are all gone and where we strayed to gather fruit, a wall rises to keep the bandh further away. The neighbours – can I call them that? – can’t trespass and I can’t sneak away for those long walks along the Jhelum, into the deepening shadows. Wazir Bagh house is gone as well – not gone |
Thin men in sleeveless undershirts and worn green army-issued trousers peer at us. We try to talk to them. One smiles, unfazed, when Dad says he grew up there – behind that wall. He lets us look, but through the tiny peephole onto the now-cemented, unused courtyard, the old facade with gingerbread-work eaves still dangling from once-grand, once-loved verandahs. Dad doesn’t look for long – just glances and explains, not quietly, not slowly either, ‘There used to be a beautiful garden there,’ before he turns away, imagining the old chinars that lined the avenue where aunts and cousins spread out lunchtime blankets and Pitaji slept through the afternoon as if those trees could keep such heat at bay. |
~ Lynn Aarti Chandhok is the author of The View from Zero Bridge, winner of the 2006 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She lives in New York.
