Palimpsest

ROSE-ANNE CHABOT

The ride to the train station takes me along dirt roads, between mud huts to which dung patties cling, drying

like overgrown fungi in the winter sun. Children play amidst rusting piles of metal, while old men sit

on slabs of concrete, spitting at intervals into the roadway, the ground at their feet stained red

like their gums by the juice of betel leaves. A woman squats near sheets of corrugated tin, combing thin fingers

through the matted hair of a naked girl crouched on the packed earth at her feet.

. . . I wonder how many vacant gazes have rubbed against that woman’s skin,

slowly erasing the fine lines delimiting her soul.

I wonder if she would still be here if I were to return months from now, or if by then she would be no more

than a pale wisp, as insubstantial as the winter fog drifting aimlessly through the congested streets of Varanasi . . .

At the train station I pay the rickshaw driver, push my way onto the grey platform, ignore

the hundreds of eyes that cast sidelong glances at the alienness of my skin, the wide blanks

of my body I keep trying to fill in with all these stolen images, these myriad impressions that cleave to my pores

. . . camouflaging my fraying thoughts, the expanding vastness of the hole in my belly, all these fragments I cannot piece together . . .

like the multi-textured collage of candy wrappers and banana peels that shifts and mutates on this concrete platform,

waiting for the Dalit sweepers to pass by with their languid brooms and sweep it all away.