ON DISPOSSESSION OF CASTEThe eyes of the bear, hidden in the exodus of itsthousand black pelages, sedated – red from howthey exhume those it looks at – turning into glances ofI look at you & it’s all you become are stoppages at a stealth pace of nooninto this personal narration of the looking: A door: Single shuttered,blackwood with sharp-edged, fiery-red flowerpetalscarvings – the bear is a setting of slow withdrawal in itscoming, its coming like an idea of a room floating somewhereoutside this one, shifting the essence of all objectsto their shadows falling past the children plucking in the trackof its mane (to test its sainthood) (as its keeper, a boy,its caretaker/tamer, drags it by its chains, calling out to collect alms)now beating – how many? how many? how many?chafed by the pecking & cawing, disjunct from where it looks at them –Standing in the threshold, rising on its hind to show itself,reminding itself of their toothlessness. The direction they elope toaway from this corner the boy fastens its chain in, off-centred,crusting on the lip of a drum left to fill itself in rain – dehiscent & nameless –starting a fold to warm its end, fraying, all brown shotin dark algae green, uncoiling in slow cursives downwards,peeling by its corrective leaks in the path of its retrace –echoing in its decomposition, the last sigh of a swell strippingto worsted pleatings, deducted to a blade of scrap. Rust is our redemption.As in: we have touched, we are forsaken; chawl daughters married offafar don’t even return for their brother’s funeral –& to what is called fate is only napes, seldom skies& on the either side the long, two-point ladder of the look:Star Depot Soap, Gulshan Diaries, Desire Leather Boutique,Al-Rehmaniya Repair, Ravina over her phone pressed hot around them,& then another kothi in the adjacent light, & another.Arriving in white flocks. Curses, slights like cheap marigold blossoms torn apart.Now gilded embroidery –WHITE CROWSWe could tell you only by your summercall, late June, white antshaving eaten the words on notesare instances of leaping in Utopia,that released in your departure,we have caught it in net like Black Pomfret,lavender, husk, synthetic –making days anew,these random sequencing of adjoints,sinewy & tucked:each row of swathe, blurring lines within linesis an assemblage of dispossession,dissolving tenses, hymnalthrough the golden pane of 181 busa regular from Kalina to Pila Bungla –the mechanism of black wireswinding in a slow, black heat thickening depthat its iris & from where I squat,this loam before it’s even thought ofis dispersed, yielding,misaligned from what resides in the midstof layers clasped into folds;backtracking to confront the thingat the interstice that stands for outcasteis constituted in thishandicraft of amounting; fats,cement slabs, leftovers, silage,dreadlocks, the run-down assortments& other sorts of drawing into keep unmutilated the volume of your plumage.It takes rain finally to precipitatethe bulwark. Melting.This waiting, the chorus of us,stretched & prolonged,look, hours pressed into another day,the dark-bluish kohl of sky to loosen the bind.Competing Interests