This is a Dying Street

By Malini Bhattacharya

The trees are gone
The blotches of grass, frazzled,

The houses
Plain, resigned
Are seeing each other out.

Those houses gave comfort
(Crude but all right)
Held thronging evenings
And people who knew steady work
And made a little go a long way

This street was full of them.
They went when their homes did.

This week men levelled the Bose’s house
The Boses have lived here
Since their ancestors
Walked along the lines of the map
Quiet as the dead
With two sacks of their old lives,
Between the nine of them.

Six days’ pounding
And the house is dust
A farrago of wood bits and metal

The workmen put up a board fence
To mark off the place where
The Boses brought wives
Bred, forgot the bloated sacks
And the night-time interlopers

Air hangs cold in the interim hollow
Where it all happened.

Bio:
Malini Bhattacharya studied English Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is a digital storyteller at one of India’s biggest FMCG companies. Her work has appeared in Coldnoon Travel Poetics, Litro, Tehelka, The News Minute, The Better India, Agony Opera, among others.

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