Maroon
By Kuhu Joshi
I haven’t been touched
in months. My mother appears in mirrors.
Her cheeks full like roses to plant
my lips against when she wakes. We huddle
under heavy razais, paisleys to our mouths. Delhi creeps
in fingers of smog through windows. My father
likes to leave open the windows. Towel
to his waist, he stares out like an inmate, saying,
You guys will feel better when I’m gone,
on his way to office, tie floating down, You guys
will feel better when I’m gone, leaving on a Sunday. And it’s true,
he’s like our pet dog. Mother running to remind him
of food, of medicine. Mother saying, Chodo, chodo!
(Leave it, leave it!) Not the ice! as he scrapes a hand
through the freezer. She sits on the bed when he’s gone.
Towel to her head, the laptop on. I bring a table so she can lift
her head and watch properly. The movie’s
about love. Red-blue lights spilling on her lap. Smoke,
the chink of ice. Someone’s lips hovering over someone’s.
I pull away, leave her to it. Scroll
on my own bed through Facebook. Here’s my lover—
we no longer talk, or he no longer
talks to me. I still talk to him at night
under sheets. He’s looking handsome.
Dark messy hair, cropped beard. Mine
for thirteen years. I wanted nothing more than a life
of buttoning his shirts. Walking clack-clack down Khan Market
like my mother for my father, sifting through the row of tees
on Fabindia stands, the small men’s section.
Even now it’s the first direction I float to like a dead leaf
cast on rapids. The other day I walked into Gap,
tall mannequins with long pale hands
and a whole afternoon of men’s maroons—
dark maroon, blood maroon, red—I lifted a soft shirt
off the rack and took it to my own shoulders.
This will look good on you, I said. My mother in the mornings
holding the day’s shirt up to my father’s chest.