Sahitya Akademi

YouthAuthor(s): Aditya ShankerSource: Indian Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1 (243) (January-February 2008), pp. 32-33Published by: Sahitya AkademiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347512 .

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you go there driving a truck, along with your mother

and on your way, stop by a cemetery to kneel in front of the grave of a stranger and pray as intensely as his son or wife

Let me tell you that

sometimes when we meet

for coffee or cinema or

for peanuts and silence on the park bench,

I am both the second and the third person,

where I use a smaller eye to look at you and the bigger third eye to look at myself with the excited shyness of a voyeur.

Youth*

Happy youth are not interesting

Inside the bathroom, on the balcony parapet, or

the top end of the window sill —

Standing in front of mirrors

that you find hanging at different heights in all houses that have men,

they pass the big moment of miscue

while cutting a moustache without regrets

They walk in late to offices, break the costliest jar at a friend's place,

forget to go for a date with the hottest chick in college and still remain calm

Dedicated to JM Coetzee

32 / Indian Literature : 243

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While travelling with them

carrying my small worries and anguishes,

happiness and jealousy, victories and meanness,

I become totally out of place and

dream of a city twenty seven** centuries

down the line when

From a jail in a far off island, boats would come for people who fail to laugh even once a day

the last train out of the dooming world

is at the station and you wake up late to miss

Happy people are not interesting

With a small sandal,

they end the secret game of hide and seek

I have with an introverted insect in the toilet.

** Astrologically perfect number

Aditya Shanker / 33

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