When into that city ravaged to shreds by combat which recently raged there, we walked hand in hand,

I said to Radhika: “This tractor factory is where we held out for weeks, grim jawed but feeling tender towards fellow patriots, feeding on grubs, frostbitten fingers on triggers, waiting for the ambush.”

I said, “This is where, when spring came, and I saw a straggling tulip raise its blood red finger tentatively at one of those shattered windows, that I was taken back to that room of my youth, which was always aslant with

afternoon sunlight, and where I twirled the air as a fugue unspooled from the gramophone, wishing for a multiplication of radiance, such as that of now as I promenade through these ruins holding on to your slender palm.”

“Radhika," I said, “welcome to my firebombed city, still blazing like your dark lord in the steppe. Welcome to its (and so my) insufficient heart.”

In a sun-battened oak grove,

bare because it is winter, and in America because this is where dreams travel to, in the holds of ghostly slavers every night,

Radhika re-plants herself again in the cold red clay, an Ancient World cutting - let's say that of tulasi - sowed in the soil of this New World,

her thin arms tentatively branching upwards into the light, uncertain if she will stay alive, will give birth, will be heard by the dark hued lord

of the world, who is so far away from Birmingham, Alabama, or Delhi, Iowa, perhaps busy in play in the moonlit groves of Vrindavan, perhaps forgetful

of all the worlds once glimpsed entire in his throat, even this one, where Radhika will perfect her art of waiting, and also wanting.

Notes: Location: The Cave, Atlanta Time: A Sunday winter morning, January 2008 Background music: Ustad Rashid Khan's pyrotechnic Raga Bhirav from his album The Song of Shiva