An evocative ballad about the Raj, by Prof Sanjoy, with a storyteller’s sensibility, exclusively for Different Truths.

Many tiles were missing from the imbricated roof
Like scales of a fish after the first scrape of the butcher’s knife.
On black rum the builder’s eyes were red with avarice;
He calculated forty-eight flats with a little arm-twisting of rules.
He inhaled the cigarette puff deeply and then blew out
Into the air his greedy thoughts, smell lingering.

Widower James Chester had celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday
Trembling for a glance of the twenty-first century, a year away,
Tasted the cake with his nose first and then sunk his dentures,
Cream on his weathered glasses sweetened his fading vision.
Taste of chocolate in his mouth, he turned towards his Indian wife,
Her sepia smile returned his without batting an eyelid.
Tuberoses behind added to the photograph’s depth,
Smelled of his father’s thatched cottage in Southampton.

Then, he thought of her dying of vaginal cancer,
Let the sick memories blow away like incense in the air.
Retching and cleaning his dearest possession in life,
Till he buried her with the disease. Ghost continued to haunt
The inflated medical bills her clever doctor gave with his sympathies.

Next to the photograph lay old ultra-sound reports
Kept under a pearl bracelet and silver-cross on the mantle-piece:
Tiresome reminders of agony unmoved, still. Lay next,
Group photograph taken in circa 1948 A.D at Company Gardens,
Fellow Englishmen and women, all set to return home, in hats
Wearing smiles that looked down on his brown wife.
He, an English rose, had acquired a different odour and colour
In Indian climes, kept thorns for prejudiced among his own kind.
In old age forgot that dangers could come from those whom he loved
As his children in childless innocence, bleary eyed.

Photo from the Internet