by Shikhandin
Did Marie Antoinette offer cake
to her peasants
or was it another slogan
making history?
True or not, history has its necessities,
dire ones. History has to be fed.
Not unlike the way I feed you
bits of my history.
Is this the sum of our history then?
One the feeder and the other the fed?
I did not crave Champagne when we wed,
because I did not know what it would taste like
when taken from your mouth.
Perhaps I was too diffident. Perhaps
I did not understand the nuances of mingled history,
the piquancy of entwined moods.
Even so, the scent of your love lingered on.
Until a day came when you sat up and desired
cake! And that too, plum in the middle
of a food and love induced soporific afternoon.
The crumbs were brushed off later
and digested by a platoon of ants. And we
both agreed that past indiscretions are best
forgotten, though not entirely forgiven.
History, as you know, has a habit
of being repetitious
in a myriad unhistorical ways.
Like domestic chores. But we knew that already,
didn’t we? So we merely looked
the other way. We ignored
the cherry stone that had rolled
off somewhere, hugging hard
to its bosom, its stony secrets.
And we are doing that still. We are
repeating ourselves.
Just the way your head is tilted now,
seemingly lost in thought,
when both of us know that you are watching
me serve cake and tea
as we sit here together,
claiming the steam
of fragrant Darjeeling…
with the cake crumbling,
ever so gently
breaking
apart
in the silence of our lips.
Shikhandin is an Indian writer whose fiction and poetry have been widely published worldwide. Earlier this year, Immoderate Men: Stories, a collection of short stories by Shikhandin was published by Speaking Tiger Books, India.