Maroon

I haven’t been touched

in months. My mother appears in mirrors.

Her cheeks full like roses to plant

my lips against when she wakes. We huddle

under heavy razais, paisleys to our mouths. Delhi creeps

in fingers of smog through windows. My father

likes to leave open the windows. Towel

to his waist, he stares out like an inmate, saying,

You guys will  feel better when I’m gone,

on his way to office, tie floating down, You guys

will feel better when I’m gone, leaving on a Sunday. And it’s true,

he’s like our pet dog. Mother running to remind him

of food, of medicine. Mother saying, Chodo, chodo!

(Leave it, leave it!) Not the ice! as he scrapes a hand

through the freezer. She sits on the bed when he’s gone.

Towel to her head, the laptop on. I bring a table so she can lift

her head and watch properly. The movie’s

about love. Red-blue lights spilling on her lap. Smoke,

the chink of ice. Someone’s lips hovering over someone’s.

I pull away, leave her to it. Scroll

on my own bed through Facebook. Here’s my lover—

we no longer talk, or he no longer

talks to me. I still talk to him at night

under sheets. He’s looking handsome.

Dark messy hair, cropped beard. Mine

for thirteen years. I wanted nothing more than a life

of buttoning his shirts. Walking clack-clack down Khan Market

like my mother for my father, sifting through the row of tees

on Fabindia stands, the small men’s section.

Even now it’s the first direction I float to like a dead leaf

cast on rapids. The other day I walked into Gap,

tall mannequins with long pale hands

and a whole afternoon of men’s maroons—

dark maroon, blood maroon, red—I lifted a soft shirt

off the rack and took it to my own shoulders.

This will look good on you, I said. My mother in the mornings

holding the day’s shirt up to my father’s chest.