116
Poetry
The funeral of my bitterness
Bobby Pawar
I stood before a body
that was once my father.
He lay on the mortal remains
of a once proud tree.
Death stacked upon death.
Only one was grieved.
A priest chanted Shlokas
said to set a soul free.
‘Gone too soon’, whispered acquaintances,
‘dead at fifty-three’.
The one who woke up,
with him laying too still beside her, my mother,
cried in sympathy with the other
wailing weeping women.
None of whom could feel her pain,
their sadness partly feigned.
My sister, only twelve,
twisted the strands of her sorrow into a veil.
Younger than me, my brother,
distracted his heart with the mundane.
Handed out marigolds, neem leaves,
holy offerings in sorrow’s name.
Nothing was asked of me, yet. The eldest.
Alone in my unrest.
I stood amidst the whispering crowd.
The conflict in my head, loud.
I put my rage on one side of the scales.
On the other, his sourberry disappointments.
Those were our battlements.
My fathers to assail. Mine to defend.
All the things he could not, did not,
should not, were wasted not.
He stacked them on my head,
wrapped in ropes of filial responsibility,
tied with a Gordian knot.
There is something you should know about defiance,
in the face of love it bends the knee.
He said, ‘You will study engineering.’
My heart was screaming to be free
while my head nodded.
‘Why was I born? Why was he?’
In my despair I wished he would hit me.
With the same hand he blessed me.
Curse me out but let me be.
He was too kind for that,
though I thought he was too cruel.
The cane he did not wield would have been preferable,
to the barbed lash of his expectations.
I snuck out of my bedroom window,
onto the three by five ledge above the apartment below.
I smoked up, chocked up, and prayed
for the strength to give it all up.
Funny how death repudiates all that you felt in life.
I wanted him back now that our time was up.
I stood before him that was not him,
a burning branch in my hand.
Regrets clinging to my bosom like a needy child.
As I bent low, very slowly though, and lit the pyre.
The fire cleansed my understanding of why
we danced that tragic dance.
Stepped on each other’s toes, not by chance.
He who came from nothing and made something of himself,
was afraid that I would return to that nothing.
That night I did not shed a single tear.
Or the hundreds of nights that followed.
Then came the evening I won my first award.
I cried, ‘Papa, I wish you were here
to see that your son did not turn out as you feared.’
Yes, something inside me died when my father passed away.
The feeling I was not seen, not appreciated, not loved.
I will take this poem, this song of dark and glow,
print it on recycled paper for my recycled love.
I will burn it and pray that to all the Gods I know
that its embers reach you in the heavens above.