World Poetry Day 2019: Karthika Naïr reads from Line 1 | Somewhere after midnight

Sleep – and all intents – undone (all, whether earnest, bow-tied ones or those with crumpled skirts, collars askew) by a steeplechase at Nation: down corridors, up stairs, over glowering, illegal puddles, past the maze of entranceways to Lines Two, Six and more, sidestepping parents with toddlers in tandem buggies glazed to vernal sunrise – tongue deploying pardon pardon pardon to cover the silent, unkind epithet and amazed question jiving behind (why in fuckin’ hell are these fuckin’ kids up and out this fuckin’ late?) – then leapfrogging busker ensembles complete with pullulating scores plus cello and violin cases in fresh delta formations, to make that one last breathless dash into the closing arms of Line One as it speeds away towards Franklin D. Roosevelt and a hodiernal future, metrical if imperfect. [imgcenter]

[/imgcenter] Both tote and heart – lagging by three beats and a bit – snag on mindless steel, and hang halfoutside till Reuilly-Diderot when doors and hope spill open to ease the grip on cloth and breath, which – rips and slits notwithstanding – resume roles and functions before Bastille and its irruption of joyous, sparkling melomaniacs, all disgorged – while no rodents of Cinderella – by midnight from Carlos Ott’s opera. One, as French or foreign as you, a specimen courteous to a fault, sets to enlighten his older companion on Ott: another immigrant they invited to build and storm Paris, though one with the rare sense to leave when his job was done.
You flinch in the crossfire of their smiles, as ire at finding a stray target supplants the amity, the mirth in both sets of eyes. — Illustration courtesy Roshni Vyam — Excerpted with permission from Over and Underground in Paris and Mumbai by Karthika Naïr and Sampurna Chattarji, published by Context, October 2018 Also read: Arundhati Subramaniam’s Song For Catabolic Women Kala Krishnan Ramesh’s What the Peacock said to Ganesha about his Brother’s Lovesickness Sampurna Chattarji’s Ghatkopar to Versova and Back