This is how it is, more or less like Ramanujan,
Or I don’t know if it’s okay to think like this,
Whatever makes you comfortable, stable.

I know how it feels to be outside my body
When appachi, valyammavan and all others
Exist in minor contradictions, but you must
Realise that the pictures that run your mind
Include things as silly as our car loans.

In the slanting late-night musings that you do-
Beneath the green and white curtains of my room,
I collapse into a cupboard of my little history
And you stand as a ghost in absence. Lost.
Like a child, like how I used to be. Crying.

Have had I told you that you smell like
A jewelry shop in brand new air freshener,
Just after a midnight Medimix shower
Perhaps you could have recognized me-
The tiny girl, daughter, lover, and mother, next you.

Where did I fail? Probably in the mornings I learned
To walk, the years that taught me math lessons,
Times father reached me as phone calls,  
In college as a pair of blue jeans and love poems,
While in Chandini Chowk, inside the tiny room-
Upstairs home and all the hours before I walked
Into the college library with my roommate.