My Yellow Carpet

By Shibumi Desai

https://youtu.be/ZIqFX-ribXE

The most recent summers of my life are encapsulated in the flowers of one tree-

The rusty shield bearer.

They’d carpet the ground;

When I left my building in the mornings,

Off to my summer internships.

When I arrived at the office building

And when I returned from work,

They’d fall before me as I walked,

Like a scene from a Bollywood movie.

At the same office I went from intern to employee

And with the people, the flowers welcomed me again.

When it was time to leave that building,

I knew it was the flowers I’d miss the most.

And as if they knew too,

I saw an abundance of them.

Unseasonally,

In different places,

As if for that one last time they were everywhere.

Somehow they’d decorated the road, the autorickshaw floor, the train floor-

That journey took me back,

To all the summers before.

The lockdown of 2020 came.

I saw them only once.

Fallen.

The yellow flowers like the summer sun,

Had shrivelled with the gloom of covid.

I chose to remember them for what they used to be,

And how they greeted me.

Memories can never wither.

How could I have hated even Monday mornings,

When the ground was carpeted yellow

And blooms fell from the sky.

By Shibumi Desai