Five hours until my train
so I buy some soothing cream and repelling powder
and stand smearing rubbing pouring throwing them
over my bullseye-peppered arms and chest
next to people snoring on blankets or eating
out of clay bowls with the hands they
don’t wipe their bottoms with
on a platform of Gorakhpur station. Face
a beetroot monsoon, I pick out
a few islets of “Gora” in a lake of sniggering
before the foremost shiny-toothed teenage boy
smiles, “Are you very hot, sir? Is that
why you are so reddish?”
Imran and I clip the forty hours to Bombay
discussing Shakespeare, Salman Rushdie,
the upper donation limit for lepers,
how I could have learned Urdu at school
but picked French instead, and how
Indians call Englishmen “Mister Bean”.
He asks me what Englishmen call Indians.
Stripy kurta-sleeve twist twist twist around finger
and I gaze out of the window. Children playing cricket.
Bird on a cow. “We call you Pakis,”
and I change direction, my mind
crammed with hold-me
don’t-hold-me curving hips, jammed with kiss-me
leave-me-alone vivisection-cosmetic lips. “Do you have
a girlfriend?”
Hand resting on the crossed leg of another
shiny-toothed boy, he says, “No.
Aftab is my friend.”
Twenty sleeve-twisting minutes evaporate (statue
of Gandhi, goat on a trampoline) before I ask
if it’s legal here to be homosexual.
Then I explain the word.
He’s as shocked as if I’d mentioned
sister-fucking or Tamil independence.
