As We Stay Marooned Inside Our Respective Teapots

As We Stay Marooned Inside Our Respective Teapots Nandini Dhar (bio) Soon enough, the pigeons will gather on the windowsillsof the high-rises. Their beaks will shatter the glass windows apart. A boisterous parting, a riot alternatingbetween the scarlet and the blanched,the ravishing alluring chant, forever hinging on the radiant, has just been unwritten. A parting is an abandonment, after all. And,it is only in abandonment that we burst open the alabaster replica. Yet, commemorate. The legend that would narrate in painstakingdetail, what happened to the girlwho said no to the family car, is yet to exist. An elbowing of my way into the secludedhistory of brotherhood, is, first and foremost, a never-discussed pedagogy. I trip at the threshold, bump my nailagainst the door. You laugh—almostin the same way children laugh at the sound of a falling human being. Because I have shut the door to dainty elegance,I know compassion, too, would never be mine. [End Page 90] Yet, because the refusal of tragedy yields unpredictable results,I will come by your house, drag you out into the street by your hand. Beware. I will have nothingfor you other than broken bones, mangled maps and memories of cataclysmic failures. [End Page 91] Nandini Dhar nandini dhar is the author of the book Historians of Redundant Moments (Agape Editions, 2017). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Jellybucket, Cincinnati Review, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets and elsewhere. She teaches literature and gender studies at OP Jindal Global University, India, edits the bilingual journal Aainanagar, and divides her time between Delhi, the national capital of India and Kolkata, her hometown.