A leaaf from a diary

I came across this short story written in blank verse!

The doorbell hums, a single lazy bee.  

I open—there stands a man of thirty-five  

or so, tall, smiling like an old refrain  

I almost know. His face is half a ghost  

of someone’s son; the eyes, perhaps, the chin—  

they tug at memory, then slip the hook.  

“Uncle,” he says, and folds his hands in greeting,  

the word a warm coin pressed into my palm.  

I stare, ashamed. These sixty years of postings—  

Ambala, Tezpur, Wellington, Surat—  

have strewn my mind with faces like confetti  

after parades long over. North, South, East,  

West: I have shaken hands in every dust  

and every rain this country owns. Somewhere  

among those thousands, surely, is his father.  

I smile the helpless smile of the forgetful,  

usher in this polite familiar stranger.  

“Sit, sit,” I say, and wave him to the sofa  

whose springs still sigh for friends who never age.  

The maid is summoned; tea will come anon.  

He sets a box upon the table—mithai,  

bright as festival, wrapped in silver hope.  

“My mother sent,” he laughs, “she still believes  

you have the sweet tooth of a twenty-five  

year captain who could finish half a kilo  

and ask for more.”  

I shake my head, rueful. “Those days are gone, beta.  

Diabetes now polices every spoon.  

Your mother’s love is lethal in the best way—  

it tries to kill me with affection.”  

He laughs, and for an instant I almost catch  

the name that dances just behind his teeth.  

Almost. The moment slips, like railway platforms  

sliding past the window of an express  

I boarded long ago and can’t get off.  

We sip the tea. He tells me of his job,  

his wife, a child who calls the fan “helicopter.”  

I nod, I smile, I say the proper things,  

while in my skull a thousand ghostly uncles  

lean forward, straining to remember him  

for me. They fail.  

At last he rises. “I must go, Uncle-ji.  

Next time I’ll bring namkeen.”  

I touch his shoulder—warm, substantial, real—  

and feel the small sharp sorrow of the old:  

to be a crowded album no one opens  

quite the right way anymore.  

He leaves. The box of sweets remains, unopened,  

a polite assassin on the table.  

I sit alone, tasting the bitter tea  

of being loved by people I’ve forgotten  

and forgetting those who still remember me.