TWO POEMS

HISTORIAN

I said wounds
heal with time.
She said time
needs our wounds
to heal.

PRESIDENCY COLLEGE

This portico's a maternity ward,
every poster a world
born anew.

You ignore me and
the 30 years since I sat there.
You commune with the dog
that limped out to greet us,
its broken fourth leg
suspended in time.

We hobble after you to
the café
in College Street
where everyone meets
punctually in the evening
for street signs missed
from being to becoming.

At the gate six urchins
meet you in ritual dance.
"Didi, poisha," they sing
while your smile searches for coins.
The phone falls from your hands
and bounces on the street.
You pick it up to caress
while looking for more small change.
I ask why no anger crosses
those lips of yours.
Those who take their meals for
granted, you say,
have time for precious things.
Those who beg have no time left
for others' belongings.
Being's mishaps mean little
to those not becoming.

That is what you'll spend
a long life examining.
Not in this café, though,
where, as Bengal lies burning,
its intellectuals keep debating
how many Lenins
can dance on the head
of a post-Structuralist pin
from a factory in Beijing.
The well-fed deliberate
while served by the uniformed poor
who, if they snatched but a word
from the epistemic armoury around them,
would be shown starvation's door.

Look, a bourgeois peace I can bear,
violence understand,
but not this metaphysical whining
in the midst of semi-fine dining
by these tenants of a house of glass –
the stupid, useless middle class.

The dog's still waiting
on the street.
Come, I'll lift it off
its three remaining feet.

Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times, Singapore. He graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College, Kolkata, and read History for his Master of Letters degree at Cambridge, where he was a Chevening Scholar. He was a Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Centre, Honolulu, and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard. Among his books is Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey (Singapore, 2012).