Saranya Subramanian
These Days
These days Atul simply stares out the window
at the falling flowers.
The grumpy trees shudder off Gulmohars
every morning when the sun arrives sooner than expected.
Gulmohars fall to the ground
to inform the ants that summer has arrived.
On other, older days, Atul would be Poseidon
and his broom would be a Trident, and the
sheets of dust layered over concrete roads
would be waves under his command. His
Trident would pull dusty sheets back and
forth—waves running and retreating, crashing
against each other and dissolving—dragging
Gulmohars with them along their way.
Then, Atul would tie up green bags of
broken bottles and torn skullcaps, melting
plastic combs and fraying phone chargers, and
knit them shut with all the fallen Gulmohars.
All, but one.
Just one Gulmohar, the yellowest of the lot,
Atul would tuck inside his left breast
pocket, hiding it behind the saffron
logo stitched upon khaki cloth.
Atul would give that to Susheela later.
But these days, Atul simply stares out
the window at the falling flowers. He watches
them dance off branches and pirouette
to the ground. He watches them fall and get
stuck to the sweat that poured out of his body
for twenty years and covered the road
like cling-wrap. In the years when monsoon
refused to arrive, Atul’s sweat was mixed
with concrete, smoothening the mould
and stretching the road forward. These days,
he watches the flowers graze softly over
the cat’s tail, now too heavy for her body. The
Gulmohars lay themselves in sacrifice
before Tommy and Sheru, his lunch buddies
who feel betrayed by his absence. Atul watches
the flowers shower over police vans, whose
shrill sirens celebrate through silenced
roads after finally having caught the
UrbanNaxalTerroristAntiNationals. He watches
the flowers fall over hospitals and doctors,
gutters and their cleaners, in hope that yellow
petals can stretch wide enough to become face-
covering masks, or body-covering suits;
only to end up covering the overworked bodies
that collapse to the ground.
These days, Atul watches the Gulmohars
shroud over bodies, decorating broken limbs
splayed on kachha roads and forgiving the
broken promises that would have been fulfilled
if only they’d walked 100 km more
if only they had left sooner
if only they remained in their foreign villages tucked inside foreign towns and kept their foreign words imprisoned inside their foreign bodies.
Now, Atul watches the Gulmohars rain down
every morning, clogging up roads and painting
over grey with bright yellow. He then shuts
the window and retreats inside his home. He
smiles at Susheela, now wearing shrivelled-up,
crispy brown Gulmohars in her hair, holding on
to the little scent they still have to give.
Atul and Susheela wait together for better
days, when they too will collapse to the
ground, when they will dissolve into brown
and pink pulpy matter—compost—with
the earth, so Gulmohars can fall over them
and whole trees can spring up. Branches can
then grow freely, manically criss-cross over
rusted fences and wrap themselves around
dilapidating buildings, push themselves
inside forgotten parked cars and poke right
through flags, tiptoe across ceasefires and
shoot up wildly to stare at the moon.
But better days seem far away.
These days Atul simply stares out the window
at the falling flowers.
There is little else for him to do.
—Submitted on 05/20/2020
Saranya Subramanian is a 22 year old writer and theatre practitioner in Mumbai. Currently working at Radio Mirchi, she entering the MFA program in creative writing at the University of San Francisco in the fall. She spends her time reading Mahesh Dattani’s plays and watching Madhubala’s movies.
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