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On days like this she’ll visit the Wai Kika Moo Cow café, drink mug after mug of hot chocolate, feel the sugar and caffeine sweeten her mouth, startle her veins. She’ll walk to the beach at sunset, as the gulls and starlings flock to the ghost pier’s skeleton, circle it like recurring thoughts in a pink meditation of sky. She’ll watch the orange sun make tracks beyond the horizon— past Brighton, past Hove, like the last train of the evening, travelling home.
Friday nights, stumbling Sabbath blessings with my brothers and parents, I’d imagine a rainbow that stretched from our home to Bombay, our family tree of praying voices murmuring the seven colours radiant as peacock feathers or precious stones, its arc transcending timezones, continents, fractured partitions, climbing through dense English cloud to set in a haze of Eastern red. I didn’t know then that over it my father’s parents loomed, large as Buddhas and angry as the sun.
Tonight, shy and pacing, you practise your speech. Now you are repeating it to yourself—
held, immersed in friendship, kept safe, like a wrapped gift, the finest malt.
You are not beside me but on a sunny rooftop in Taormina,
waiting for the bride and groom to ascend the steps, the many steps,
waiting to uncork your words.
Our father Neptune banged his stave three times: the notes his throat made, long as ropes, pulled the city under—if we’d refused, we’d have been sent to try our luck on land.
By day, we squirm our emerald tails past scattered bones and tumbled cooking pots. The eyes of skulls are plankton caves. With every hour, the pillars weep more dust.
We won’t stay here by night. We know of sharks that trail a stench we’re scared to name. The city swarms with echoes. Far beyond, neon jellyfish pulse upward, searching.
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