A Winter Odyssey
My family fled India when Gandhi was shot
India — you were a tea stain
on a map when I first met you
yet you listed in my blood
like that ship they took via Suez.
Can you tell me what you are
for your phantom seeped through
childhood, only hints, rarely spoken?
When will someone dissect diaspora
& gather all that shock in one place?
It’s atomic & no doubt useful.
Clearly they were broken, roots ripped out
— the priest in the hill station
chapel, his wife preparing tiffin
by the lake in Nainital & my mother
only seven when Nathuram Godse
took the old man out. Those white cliffs
must have appeared like an iceberg
to those who came home to a home
they didn’t know was home, fleeing.
On the mantlepiece, a scrimshaw buddha
an old board game whose name I can’t remember.
They said they were at school in the Himalayas
nine months of the year. Was it the cold
that stopped them speaking about that hot
day in Bombay & the cool of the ship’s awning?
A sudden goodbye amid the riots to new life.
I was born in Northampton 14 years later.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
