Dharker - Over the Moon

Even the master of symmetry knew this to be true. When Gabriel and the dove fly in, the fabric of the day wears thin and frays around the virgins face. Light folds itself over a boys head and he is shirtless, shivering, but believes the Baptist will turn from the main event before too long to tend to him. You make a kind of offering of frailty, an opening for the world to show its grace and as you point, the watchers, children, street-dogs, bottom-scratchers become your family. You are a foreigner nowhere.

The notes refuse to perch on wires but move in rhythm with the dancer round the face of the clock, through the dandelion head of time. We feel blown free, but circle back to be in love, to touch and part and meet again, spun past the face of the moon, the precise underpinning of stars. The cycle begins with one and ends with one, dha dhin dhin dha. There must be other feet in step with us, an underbeat, a voice that keeps count, not yours or mine. This music is playing us.

This was where, by chance, you met. Simon Rhys Powell and Arun Kolatkar sat on bentwood chairs and talked about the art of frying and eating Bombay Duck, how the bones were soft and melted down the throat, how it could be swallowed whole, with limba-cha-ras, just like that. The poet smacked his lips, you ate his words as if they were Welsh, both of you savoured the name itself, the taste on your tongues of Bombil, Bummalo, Bombay Duck. Two strange fish swimming in the mirrors of the caf like long-lost friends, bosom-buddies brought together by a stroke of luck. Two lives too big to be packed away in a brown paper bag like a take-away, you will stay, you will still be there on Ballard Estate when the boxwallahs have come and the boxwallahs have gone.

We may be strung out, trousers vest blouse sari skirt on this washing line but the sun is being kind to us. Better here than down there where you are passing on the Number 106, crammed into a hot window frame with your loud loneliness. We are floating here, our hearts filled with soft evening air and the sound of conversations in the rooms behind us, in love with the shape of each other and the dance we make together, waving to you, sending a sign that you would see if you were looking but you are not.

We would have looked down over the dusty trees at cars creeping along Marine Drive, round the bay to Eros Cinema and the Talk of the Town. We would have held hands in the Naz Caf over sticky rings on the table-top, knee locked on knee at the Naz Caf, while we admired the distant Stock Exchange, Taj Mahal Hotel, Sassoon Dock, Gateway. We would have nursed a drink at the Naz Caf and you would have stolen a kiss from me. We would have lingered in the Naz Cafe till the day slid off the map into the Arabian sea. I would have taken you to Bombay if its name had not slid into the sea.