Midlife Crisis of the Extraordinary Specials and other poems

Pramita Ray

Jun 1, 2022

Midlife Crisis of the Extraordinary Specials

England is a woman, she’s a widow, my mother croons

to college kids on Zoom

Next room

Eng Lit grads

So were we, so were we...

But some of us are dead now.

Anyway, not pursuing that rabbit hole

and returning to the question at hand, one must suggest that

This year has been a work of fine fiction.

What kind of punk is pandemic, again?

Truth, ever the stranger/crueller twin

(Bit of a Gemini year, if you ask me)

A year of bizarre gain, vomit rain, acid pain...

A dead friend or two

A dead dream or two

A papercut on the ageing heart

(Millennials don’t take kindly to their thirties, you see)

(Especially not in a pandemic year)

A bit of a raise

Two restless feet

A restless marriage

Restless hair, diving out of roots

A millennial never sends up shoots

A frisky Instagram year.

Frisky nights in bed, anxious to be dead

Anxious to be fed — frequently

That sort of year.

Rounded off neatly to a sum of all our tantrums

And tossed in our face, a proper disgrace

So it turns out that

Our midlife crisis

Is extraordinarily special

Just like us.

Situation

Today we recalled Fleabag

Our own fleabag situation

Redirected our attentions elsewhere

Watched the sunset bruise the sky

And then stain the water gold

Just like oil spilled on a mirror

The land strewn with towering rock piles

Like crude fortresses of giants

As we head back to the city

We pass through these ancient forests

Termite mounds guard winding roads

Red earth turrets standing by

We recall that these are hideouts

Where the sages sat so still

they say the termites built mounds around them

Or so the epics say.

An idle thought flits past the windscreen

as we nestle into the seat

Are there sages still inside them?

Like the Buddha boy in the tree.

Then our phone, it buzzes briefly

Her neffoo’s face peers through the screen

Another swipe, his face is planted in a bowl

He prefers empty dabbas

to costly toys, she says

You should be grateful,

low maintenance is rare.

How tiny his little feet are —

He looks dapper in his kurta

What does he know of this, our tired world

We are fleabag aunts these days

We shall pass on bits of wisdom —

Quite like snatches of old film song

And small spoons of buttered rice

Oil massages grandmas gave us

So we pass on bits of candour

That’s all there is to it, really

Sunsets always stain the ponds

Some Kind of Mermaid

Fish hooks in, hauled tail first into the boat, I

Look around, surprised to see all the light, the clarity

Where the salty smell of amniotic fluid, the womb of my mother the sea

Has given way to a greater art form, the light

It dazzles, it shines, it glimmers on the salt waves of my dream

This, the sun

That the people of the land adore

That I abhor —

I lie on my back and consider the woodenness under me.

The nails bob up against my back

Against the grain of the boat, on the salted side

I am a shadow, a sliver of sterling fish

The waves tangle in my hair, but so do the nets

The nails scratch at my scales, catch the soft spot beneath

So where does this infamous light ripple from?

I look for the warm glow at the heart of the sea

But my stretcher of wood has drizzled the last paint song

Into the cool shimmer and slipped past to the beach

My guardians, the waves, watch aghast and bemused

As I step onto shore and draw a sarong around me

Lime

Sometimes we like to complicate matters

A nice squeeze of lime on the sea bass of this year’s story

Sometimes we like to take our issues to the sea, wade in knee deep

And then float off on the jetsam flotsam plastic ocean weaves that are now someone’s boutique bikini

Oh if our moods were quite as sustainable as this imagined sea bereft of plastic

Or this plastic bereft of sea

There‘s a conch shell somewhere hereabouts with a little tiny crab on it

The crab says mermaid you’ve got your siren song all wrong

Please leave your slippers on the sand when you hand me the keys to your charmed life

I’ll wait for you to wade off into the deep

Earth

The earth mother sky goddess

Has lifted her veils to let us in and suck on honeysuckle from the little wilderness that still remains.

The clouds grow patchy over the hills as the mist rain clears, a sign of things to come. The goddess mother says to us that the evergreens have shed their leaves

Is there anywhere left for the junipers to catch fire?

The berries have all dropped, she says, you should find a different taste. I see she has grown a mole since the last time I paid a visit. She says she has seen enough; go and get me a piece of your other song. She sits there, one leg over the other, her saree pleats flung every which way. I needed some gold, but I think I’ll let it pass. The moths have already strung their beady song, I can smell the evening wafting towards us. That'll do, child, she snaps, irate: you can do the rest tomorrow. She sends me off and turns off the radio. Her old CDs line the dusty mantel. I see that my mother’s house is falling apart.