We do not try to overtake three young bikers
at Rong Tong, a sleepy village with a deep sense
of inadequacy smudged all over
and a tiny railway station. They speed past our car
waving hands at Tindharia, a hamlet
of earliest mechanics and train drivers in the Himalayas,
now dead or retired.
Ahead of the DHR workshop, we stop and park the car
by a roadside shack with a green bamboo deck,
freshly painted and wide. On the table:
a white orchid
in a blue bottle, fresh oranges and an ashtray,
brimming with old stubs and invisible smoke.
It is a still life by Caravaggio in the afterlife.
We order Momo dumplings and orthodox tea,
and watch the rolling hills, green,
just after the monsoon rain and listen to the monastic lull
everywhere.
We talk to the shop-woman; she has perfect eyebrows
and a sad hollowness just under. We sip tea, look
at the silent hills, and find fresh landslide
spots scooped up by the intermittent rainfall.
We change the topic
and start talking about beauty and loss, and click selfies
with hills, the shop-woman and Caravaggio’s
misplaced masterpiece.
Now, we have learnt to be slow and wise and allow others
to overtake us so that they can find
for themselves another elegiac tea shack with a still life
somewhere in the hills.
Sekhar Banerjee is a Pushcart Award and Best of the Net Award nominated poet. The Fern-gatherers’ Association (Red River) is his latest collection of poems. He has been published in Stand Magazine, Indian Literature, Arkana, The Bitter Oleander, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Thimble, Better Than Starbucks, Outlook, The Wire, The Bangalore Review, The Tiger Moth Review and elsewhere. He lives in Kolkata, India.