Mahua Sen

Grandfather’s Chair

My grandfather’s senile chair 
bends my memory into
a tensile splinter of time. 
Once, it bore the weight of my grandpa’s prostration.
Yet, stood resolved, 
offering a soothing recline to grandpa.
Sometimes, overburdened, it stooped, 
and screeched - 
reticent yet resilient,
stoic just like my grandpa. 

His old hands would rest on his tired knees
after a long day in the hospital. 
The phalanges of the chair gave support to 
his arms every now and then.
 
Now, grandpa dwells in another realm.
The chair is empty! 
Even after a decade of his passing,
we call it “Grandpa’s chair”. 
His smile laced up snuggly, sits 
on this rocking-chair even today!
The residual pellicle of his memory 
emanates a nonenal smell -
A smell that smells like him!
 
Whenever I visit home,
I sit in the cosy lap of that chair, 
rocking like a baby on her mother’s lap, fluttering 
to the whimsical wind. 
It gifts me a nectareous calm
of childhood days. 
For, I immerse into an oneiric filigree. 
My breaths split between Then and Now,
loses in the frothy fronds of memory’s verbosity! 
 
I sit there, rocking!
Abrogating the arrival of tears.
Those long, lost days appear to pay me alms. 
Those spendthrift evenings  
visit me,
to fan my moistened eyes. 
I feel the presence of 
my grandpa and his Murphy radio. 
The symphony of Rabindrasangeet, 
and the smell of kerosene lamp. 
I sigh with a sempiternal ache!
The burgeoning silence gets punctured. 
For the chair sings a chorale of 
Presence
in the Absence!

---

---

---