I drop to my knees by its weighty flopped handles.
The leather bag glistens like his shoes. Business-ready.
Always distant.
There is a scent of Kailash when it irrupts
open with a gasp, my brother
and I are posing in a faded photograph, our backs
held by a granite façade—
I smell coconut oil, hear a booming voice “Don’t slouch”,
then argue about the price of a vendor’s wares.
 
I turn the bag toward the morning sun as if it were a prism,
in the dispersed light emerge my childhood red
typewriter, cricket bat, roller skates and even
dhuk-dhuk, dhuk-dhuk of annual family trips on narrow
gauge train tracks, click clack of half-shut glass windows
rattle of heavy doors, past railway 
stations whose names are covered in soot.
I am always traveling in a train over a long bridge.
To distant thunder, my father turns his head to listen,           
 
reaches out, and I grab the bag handles tight.
                        

To have bathed a baby elephant in the Kabini river, its rough
playful trunk in your hands, that memory wrapped in each droplet.
 
To be twelve, visiting your friend. Pick a double-barreled gun,
hold its wooden belly, load an empty red shell. Fat as a man’s thumb. 
 
To singe your ear against sun baked train tracks on a wooden bridge. 
To wait. To wait for any train, then place coins on the tracks.
 
To run barefoot in a bamboo forest, past cows in deep puddles resigned
to widening leeches on their bellies, past tombstones with English names.
 
To bring down a chandelier crashing with a catapult,
slice a lychee seed, spin it like a top, like a wheel turning all days.
 
To wonder if memory reacts to remembering, count bands on a fish’s 
otolith, or growth rings of a Banyan, recalling who you were. 
 
To ride the hippocampus through some narrow gap,
past the dailiness of life. To straddle 
 
an elephant like an expert mahout, become one
with its larger mysteries as it disappears into some tall grass.