By: Adreyo Sen

The little Indian woman entering the pub
turned to me and said Hello.
And in the dusk,
her lined face was transformed to a dusky beauty,
by tiredness.

Weariness had worn her down
to a worn elegance
as classy as the whiteness of her cheap shirt
and frill-free handbag.

She exited soon,
takeaway in her hand,
a taciturn male given to an expansion of flesh,
that opposed her sculpting by attrition,
waiting in the car for her.

Why had she waved at me, I wondered,
sipping slowly at my beer.
Perhaps I’d reminded her of a son
in some land distant,
endlessly inventive with reasons not to show up
with a crisp new white t-shirt and a handbag.

Or maybe the surliness in the car had once been her son
and I reminded her, in my bovine partaking of beer,
of a time when his eyes had been cud-soft with potential
and he had danced all evening around his new Lego set.

Or maybe, in the tired lustrousness of her eyes, I was her son,
my stillness, my countervailing to the door, a monument of flesh,
a reminder of some reckoning in some dim home thereafter,
a nagging chipping away at a comfortable obstinacy
that would finally rain down on the beauty in her eyes.