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Transporters

by Indu Parvathi

When people move out of India to live abroad, they unconsciously carry their motherland as memories and wear their Indian-ness like an outer skin, points out Indu Parvathi through her poem that touches upon transporters – the people who carry their motherland abroad and try to recreate it in foreign locales.

Baggage carousals in airports carry more than travel cases:
Fragrant clumps of earth, soaked with season’s first shower
Whispering country streams and sprightly small towns
Smoky wood fire and rotis laced with ringing laughter …

and much more, hiding within pickle bottles and the like.
Once upon a time lands, distance and then memory dust.
But at times, the sparkling specks become water beads,
squishy jelly bits, plastic reminders of a heaving country.

The frosted dome of a temple brooding amidst spires,
Crimson rivulets of flavours charging along bland planes,
Typhoons of bhangra dancers swirling through bemused lanes,
Yoga, bejeweled bindis, beseeching ghazal showers…

Choices. To engage, to disengage, to drape, to undrape.
A country that’s a chain and a garb. In each transporter,
lies buried a tedious land that bloats, a numb black hole.
And they know – in an almost heaven, rulebooks are a must.

Pic: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rambonp_npsingh/

Indu Parvathi lives in Mumbai with her family and works as a Section Head in an International School. Though writing has always been a passion, she started to indulge in creative writing only in the recent past. She completed her first novel recently and has been writing poems in her free time.
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