My father never speaks about his losses.
He bottles up sorrows and sprays them on his plants.
They grow messily -- tangle with each other like dreams,
crash on balcony rails like tidal waves,
and branch off abruptly.
When my father runs out of bottles he stores them in myriad shaped containers--
glass, fibre, plastic and earthen.
Unlike spray cans these are emptied out by their necks.
The unruly greenlings grow brutally during the rains,
pierce planters and sabotage all attempts at pruning.
The plants at ours never run out of excuses to remind us that bottled liquids
sometimes undergo chemical reactions.
They decay and rot and smell like carcass till the bottles crack.
But we wait patiently for that.
When cracks appear, we wait to see colourless fluids
Leaking, spilling on tiled floors
Making an eternal journey towards the balcony where a couple of green veins
sit like addicts.
Sunandini Mukherjee is, by profession, an instructional designer. However, her interests include the literary and the arts. Her academic interests include Partition Studies and Memory Studies. Having grown up on Bangla and English literature, she writes in both languages, and is fond of translating from Bangla to English. Her poetry has been published in two online magazines, and one of her translations came out this year, in an anthology of translated stories. When not working, Sunandini likes to read, cook and occasionally, sing. She lives in West Bengal, India.
