I’ve always been a thief-

Tamarind with jumps, mangoes with pebbles,

Muskmelons off docked canoes floating on God’s own backwaters,

Secrets from deep carapace maws, and history

from skins reciting the pigments of forefathers-

but something that smells like the forty-year-old me,

declares that I will never be a part of the bands of bigoted businessmen,

nor one of the raucous hands of extortion at Mukai Chowk

or the arson avengers of nuptial perfidies.

It tells me, in an unarticulated tongue, shows me, in a wraithlike prophecy-

the fate of the prosaic promenader-

halting, in the same torn clothes of the vision,

which bears a striking semblance to the inscrutable authors

of those so-thin chapbooks which fell right through the library-almirah-doorgaps

straight into the sand-dollar-soul of a child with thievish intentions.