Graduation Blues

by Nina Bhatt

We received our dosas like horoscopes
An atlas of adventures to come
Not Café Canara, old city 
It was a shack in a port-town 
A place like Lisbon, Tahiti or Calicut
A city from a country that was;
The voices were shades, the laughter belonged
To persons from pages
Pages like portholes we’d looked beyond,
Strangers at their tables mapping a meal
A child with her treat of sherbet
The clerk, his face a ledger,
A young bride, in-laws, husband
There was Marquez, Kipling, and Pessoa,
There were others.

Nina writes, paints, and makes leaf compost as garden produce from her home in Baroda, where she lives and works. Her published writings include poems in Kavya Bharati, The Caravan Magazine, Reading Hour, Wasafiri, an essay in Indian birds.