The evening flappers –
the crows and the hawks,
the crap-happy rodent pigeons,
the rubbernecker ducks,
and the lightning-rod bats —
they litter my terrace skies
like torn plastic liners
and brown-paper bags
relieved of the bin life.

If I could bird like them,
I would forget the earth altogether —
for why, then, must I,
grey-eyed and mysterious,
persist with the gravity of things?

—

An old poem from when I lived in a barsaati and spent my sunsets perched on the watertank — a dull, wingless thing watching those splendid things with wings doing unimaginable things in the sky. The accompanying illustration is from my book Jadav and the Tree-Place (Pratham Books, 2016).

—

Vinayak Varma, 2020