Aditi Bhattacharjee

Bio: Aditi Bhattacharjee is a sales specialist by profession and a poet by passion. When not at her day job, she is found cooking love poems in her head, most of them in Bombay, where she lives with her cat, Pluto, a second-hand book family, and a growing garlic garden. She is always wondering about things that no one finds worth wondering about like who invented the pillow and why even? or how much time is enough time? Did the ventilator come first or the window? Her works have appeared in The Remington Review, Ayaskala Magazine, Lunch Ticket, and The Alipore Post.

Holiday Homework

clouds float by
above the cemented half of the backyard and i wonder where algebra fits in all of this.not a leaf shakes and even the tube well
has taken a break from leaking.
it’s been four days since a coconut branch has hung limp-frail, brown and almost severed.Nani says it may fall anytime now—the tree will thrive better to redirect its energiestowards its healthier parts.
(a-b)2 = a2 + b2 - 2ab
the crepe jasmine tree beside itis no match for this tropical giant yetThe Sun skims the surface of both their canopies
it is past mid-day–the correct degree of summer for the bananas to ripen,they are secure in their gunny sacks
to keep the monkeys from reaching them,half eaten mango seeds remain strewn from one of their last visits.
Nani will be offering her daily prayers soonand as i collect the floral offerings of the day
i occasionally stop to count the hibiscus blooms, comeevening, they will droop and by morning the earthwill swallow all evidence of their existence—
that’s probably how there’s a peepal thriving out of a lychee tree and no one in the household knows howthe papaya sapling came to be in the tomato patch.
i pluck lime leaves and gather wet soil toscrub tiny bronze lunchware for Nani’s godsonce done they sparkle like the milieu of broken refrigeratorslined up against the far side of the boundary wall
gleaming under an unfettered sun as a welding machinesplits through the day, and even when I am filled withall this wonder
half memorized algebraic formulae tug me toward the grim reality of unfinished holiday homework
in the evening, Nani burns some dried coconut hairwith dhunachi to purify the air of the house
after the evening aarti she tells mealgebra lends itself to an Arabic word al-jabr which means ‘restoring of broken parts’
(a+b)2 - (a-b)2 = 4ab
the coconut branch falls on the eighth day and idrag it in from the backyard promising Nanian A+ in algebra if she shows me how toconvert the slender brown leaves’ spines into a bed-broom.

it moves me

that in July the sun sets at 9:54 pm in Dublinhalf-way across the world it's hidden in clouds, rainingwater seeps through walls and as we sleep in our musty beds, dreaming dreams of sunny mornings,it breaks down walkover bridges and work-schedules and sometimes Bombay drowns
that dolphins are the wolves of the ocean, living and hunting in packsand I yearn for a sisterhood
that dogs have a third eyeliddo they call dibs on their humans because they see clearly? and I read somewhere that dodos were not dumbthey just didn't know that there were those out there that were capable of a massacresometimes we can never know what we know now
that Spain's national anthem doesn't have any wordsand I love how a good enchilada melts in your mouthall cream and chicken and cheese!sometimes words aren’t enough and sometimes they aren't needed
that sea otters hold hands while sleeping to keep from drifting apart and I am attracted to laundry fresh from The Sun because it reminds me of mom
that it takes a photon 100,000 years to reach from the core of The Sun to its surface and only 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from The Sun's surface to The Earth
that first steps are the hardest,that the fight that you fight within is the fiercestthat most of the time you can never know enoughand sometimes enough is never enough

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