before the rains, 5

now,
i can drive you to connaught place at midnight, drink with you till morning, tell you what buttons to press when you’re necking.

but i wouldn’t know what to do with love.

if you’re looking for that kind of thing, you’d look for someone smooth, an older guy, someone good with words. someone into such things

as feelings.

not me.

definitely not me.

before the rains, 4

must have been the rains. or he was scared for her? or because
he still cared for her?

perhaps he thought
if i told her
he was fine, she’d get back her old laughter.

i don’t know why, but he smiles at me, pulls out a white temple-flower from his pocket and sticks it into mine.

and says – you’re a good boy.

before the rains, 3

so we sit on the park bench. he glares at the clouds, i watch the young girls jog by.
suddenly he says, you know,
even a young man grows sad before the rains, even if he has a woman by his side, if she’s making him warm, even then.
and i don’t have my woman, and i am not even young. and if i feel a little sad today, it’s ok I think.

i say yes,
it’s ok
because i can see him trying to hold down his mess
in his eyes.

before the rains, 2

and there - between the park and the flat with no number, he was many months drifted. you could tell by the hunger in his eyes, by the way his hands held. or his fingers felt,
where once there was something.
a ring, perhaps.

it was an evening in july, and the sky had come down upon the rooftops like a hundred black helicopters.

before the rains, 1

this man i know lives in a flat like mine, across the park with the white temple-flower trees and the water-pump station. he's got the place on a one-year lease,
he says. he says he'd messed up something - back in the old days when he still had a woman - a home - and was not quite so alone. in delhi