By Rija Toko
i remember you jumping
into a pothole
the size of a baby pool
in the middle of the road,
smug smile on your face
in the thick summer rain of Itanagar
“smart city” in the making
unromantic, unkind,
pouring incessantly,
rainwater peels off-white plaster from
buildings as old as the city — ‘74
and you’ve seen how
dirt water gushes
from the steep hill roads
engorging every hollow
until the ground turns to stream,
impossible to keep your feet dry
i pulled you to the edge
as a Fortuner sped past,
splashing shit-mud water
all over our uniforms
you turned to me and grinned
“happy holi”
in morning assemblies
we stood at the back
of separate lines
divided by gender,
my uniform was pink and yours blue
but at home
we became one colour
sharing genjis and shorts
perpetually stained
from various sources
ritually we woke up
at the crack of dawn,
the sky a shade of
fountain pen ink
i splattered on your shirt
just to watch cartoons on box tv,
fighting for the remote,
knowing every channel number
by heart
in fifth grade we were separated
when parents sent me to
a boarding school
far from home,
a place with buildings
we’d seen on our box tv
where,
for the first time, i
was made conscious
of the slant of my eyes
and people found it hard
to pronounce my name,
where it didn’t rain as much
and dawn was never
the right shade of blue
i always felt like a cactus
on a tropical island
and i remember hearing about you
years later
on a call from home,
how you’d joined a group of boys
whose breaths smelled like canned beer,
nights spent drinking and driving
on empty roads,
heard about how you jumped
into a river
on a rainy summer day
and never came out
the currents pull trespassers
by the ankle,
unwilling to let go despite
the kicks and the thrashes
clouds burst open to
fill every cavity in the body
and i see you
sinking to the riverbed
i have a dream that night
where the earth is a body of water
contained
in a bottomless aquarium
inside which live creatures of every kind
waiting to be discovered
so when we all die (which we will)
wouldn’t it make more
sense for our souls
to drift downwards
towards the endless bottom
than to float up
i return to Itanagar five inches later
the rain a soft drizzle now,
falling thoughtfully on
the soil that feeds us
rice, the sticky kind
you can only find here
a dog pants, its ribs countable,
heaving at the edge of the road
until a kind lady places a
bowl next to its cracked paws.
the sound of lapping water is gospel.
water takes and it multiplies life,
always accepting plastic in return
i pass through memory lanes
of steep slopes,
drains and potholes,
buildings set in stone
that gather all moss,
the spot where we splashed
our first holi
and seeing all of it again
i think to myself
how everything looks like a miniature of itself