Trousers
In middle age the rote ballet that gets
you dressed is habit and performance:
stoop, stork, point foot, thread trouser leg and rise
till upright, leg extended, off the floor,
face dark in bathroom glass from bending.
Half-sheathed in virile jeans, you now change feet,
repeat (with poise) and you’re Nureyev.
Old fathers wear their trousers sitting down.
They splay their knees, insert their feet and pull
their waistbands up, one rolled and lifted buttock
at a time. Rushed boys hurtle into shorts
and trousered women waste no private time
on balance: grace is a public virtue,
publicly performed for staring people.
Between quick boys and careful fathers, men
court equilibrium. When the level ground
of middle life starts to give, each costume
change becomes high-wire virtuosity,
and the point of standing through the business
ever more obscure. Then, gripped by second-hand
déjà vu , we sit, and settle into age.
Nostalgia, 1970
Remember Kati Patang ?
The Phenomenon's crinkled smile
and A.P.'s planetary bum?
His inch-high parting, her bouffant,
her frosted lips, his batted eyes
her pigeon lilt, his killer tilt...
By Odeon! how time just flies!
The piano scene? Remember that?
She played the fatal flame and he
the moth! Parwanas can't be fat,
but we, we didn't want him thin
because we wanted more of him:
that sloping grin, cleft double-chin...
see, this was Then; men didn't gym.
You do remember? Hold that thought,
but skip the Pancham Nite on Ten,
this circa's Hindi films must not,
on pain of death, be seen again.
Good movies bravely see off Time,
some others find new life as kitsch:
not those where Kaka played the lead
and Bindu played the bitch.
