Abstract

My efforts to click the moon the other night led me back to the night I knighted the moon as my first boyfriend from beneath the pomegranate tree in our wild garden.

I had just begun my tryst with poetry and loved relishing the endless potential of words and what the mind could make an inanimate object into. Neruda was still unknown and as a sixth grader, I was still meandering through Wordsworth, Shakespeare and a handful of Indian poets.

I felt most alive during poetry classes but it dawned upon me only in retrospection. Back then I was still struggling with an identity crisis and loved to escape into an imaginary world, where the moon became a friend and then a boyfriend.

Moon was never a silver-footed woman or a chanda mama to me. He could never be a clumsy uncle in a pajama. He could never be a seductress. He was the perfect knight, elusive yet so close, delicate yet brave.

It was peaceful to look up and feel a secret bond with one who belonged to the whole world. I never vied for attention because I knew he was there for me. All I had to do was to slip out at night and lie under the pomegranate tree and reach out to him.

Over the years as I grew older, I pushed him to the back of my mind. The pomegranate shrub dried up, we changed houses and life grew too murky and complicated to hold on to an early teen fascination.

At the university, I sought him out again during long solitary walks, while sitting hunched on a rock listening to crickets deep into the night or sipping chai on a foggy early morning. He was there, dutifully making a presence.

Many moon nights have passed since then.

Somewhere along, I remember searching the nights for Poes’s menstrual moon, aghast at the comparison yet possessed with the metaphor.

I remember a poornima night at my aunt’s place in Mumbai. From a French window on Marine Drive, I witnessed one of the most perfect visions- a ripe full moon shining on seawater looking a cocktail of silver, grey and the fierce.

The last I remember was spent with my mother watching the HK skyline from a concrete bench next to a fountain. I wish I could have told mom in the most scandalous of words then that the moon reminded me of a Kalidas poem celebrating a woman’s physical beauty.

It had taken me months to understand it but when I did, I laughed at the grossness of its English translation. I remembered a line from it…the lilies of her mounds…. Watching the moon that night in a foreign sky, I remembered the lilies and the mound. For once in so many years I thought of the moon as a lily.

Times bring new perspectives and times change the thought and the gaze. Like a pining lover fulfilled, I have moved on and seek new thrills.

I look back and see nights of whispering secrets to him, I myself did not know and I looked up last night and had nothing to say but yawn about a whirlwind day.