At gum-swollen 50, his are the ghost stories
that we speak in remembrance
of a past that’s ever present.
‘Take my wrinkled hand,’
he says, and I trace the veins in his body—
The blood, a proof of violence over time.

Every night, among trembling lips and the clock
striking 3, he lies in the two-story
home on the biggest river-bed of Bangladesh. Floating bodies
of fresh fish beside him. He smells in remembrance
of the soil beneath the carpets. ‘Please take this hand,
and guide me God, I’m never present

or past.’ He wishes for a future,
and shakes me (frantically) – ‘my time
is yours now, child. Will you bury this body
in satin or linen and make my life a tale
of many foxes, bears, gills – memory of the Jungle? Recall
my body. A temple, my body

is time’s vessel,’ says his corpse
wrapped in dhotis – a perfectly wrapped present.
Who we’ll talk about in therapy and forgetfulness.
But the heart attacks and the bloody body that time
gave him will never be a forgotten story.
And I will gather his life and limbs,

those tender wrinkles around his mouth,
howling silently in the night when nobody
could see or tell his story
of pain and regret. For all he represents
are hours, minutes, and seconds
of how no soul is ever forgotten.

Whether we forget or remember,
we are all just one collective memory away from hand-
ing our lives to death’s embrace. Maybe our time
isn’t ours, and the mind is a borrowed entity.
‘Death, dear child, is just a dearth 
of delight. This is what becomes of all our stories.’

In time I remembered to trace his life story
in the wall paint bleeding back home. Today
I look at my hands and they become that story. This is his body.