Source: EasternEye
The motorcycles of the Enfielders who stopped for butter tea
held the Stok Kangri in their rear-view mirrors -
magnifying glasses discovering the heart of the Himalayas
beneath the yak skin bosom of Leh Market
I noticed how they always stopped at crossroads,
leather jackets stitched with the promise of a beauty
that comes with confusion, the uniformity
of chaotic knots of roads running into each other
Upon the four-way intersection, a new reed
was rising over the harmonium of the Ladakh skyline,
a sudden accidental, squeezed between the semitones of pashmina shops,
a different chant from the folk verses played by sunsets on rooftops
Before descending into the Market,
there is a halt of inevitable traffic
on the road that takes you away from Leh -
like a measuring tape that the slope stumbles on
From here, it takes you twenty-one hours on a bus,
Two years down the amorphous bylanes of memory,
Half a heartbeat, if you looked past the unattached window frame
of the half-built Gulshan Books, to find yourself in Srinagar again
I remember reading about the floods in the paper -
Ruptured veins of the mountains threatening to drown
volumes of yellowed, hard-bound history;
I never saw them again, but I heard they were well now,
With some unwritten pages settling in this new valley -
The bookstore stood, like the reassuring face of an old lover
in a sudden encounter beyond our stanzas of wishful thinking -
Your heart must be full and well-furnished by now, shouldn't it?
From Madhura's new book Monsoon Arrives at the Junction Crossing (Dhauli Books, 2019)