Reconstruction

It’s a year on. On my way to work, the city looks normal. As it should be. I don’t know if I’d prefer to see everyone dressed in black (as I am, today), looking slightly sad and mournful (check). But it shocked me to see people laughing (as I am sure I will in the course of the day) and chatting and going about their daily work. Can we stop? All of us? For five minutes. And consider the fact that nothing has really changed. If tonight, god forbid, more terrorists get off boats and run into, say, Colaba or maybe Bandra, for a change, I really, really doubt that the response will be any different from last year. Maybe the Force One commandos will do something but will anything else really change? No. And there lies the tragedy of it.

Last year, I posted a verse by Eliot. This year, here’s a poem by Zoë Skoulding. Reconstruction captures, in the way that only good poetry can, the manner in which we rebuilt and forgot what it was that existed before this did.

These days you forget how the bricks
were piled up all over again,
their edges just where they were before
as if nothing had happened.

As if nothing had happened
they hold the shop-fronts up, the bricks
under stucco and paint again
making a surface as they did before
the words fell down.

The words fell down
and nobody knew what had happened
to the places that bricks
were not the edges of. Making them again
meant bricking up the way things were before,
so that nothing could ever be different.

Although it is different
you forget it, looking down
the street where if you happened
not to know you’d never see where new bricks
are mortared to the old. The walls are here again
but the air between them changed before
it could be sealed inside a memory,

for if you build around a memory
words come first and walls follow. It’s no different
from how it was, the plaster smoothed down
over the gap of what might never have happened.
The sky glows on an outline of bricks.
You open the window wordlessly. You shut it. Again
the room shifts another breath from what it was before
whatever it was that these days you forget.