He sits like a small liturgy—bowed over an almost-finished sole,
The vest clings to his chest with the city’s secret stains.
The sun’s impatient priesthood slices
The shanty between a holy glare on leather,
And a slow cathedral of shadows
Where the day’s receipts survive on cannabis.
Callus and knife speak in a private dialect—
Blades unstitch, the thumb reads grain,
Here shoes are like bodies returning
From work to tea-stalls of late gossip.
The bright accidental commerce of flip-flops—
Pink, azure, disposable helium—
Remind that repairs are arguments with throwaway time
The choreography of hammer, twine, spool,
A rag folded into usefulness,
Economized by habit, work and rest
Braid like ropes and slow, precise thrift.
The language of margins and mending;
Clients with pockets thin as prayer flags,
Bargain with hands that know how
To make things last and tether pride to pittance.
Sharp metal, solvent fumes, the bend of the back—
The light finds the same veins
The rickshaw bells, the river’s distant ledger,
Amid homesick steam and shrill vendors—
But here the city contracts into a palm, a tool,
A shoe returned to walking
If history is a footpath, it passes through
This threshold: the debris of empires,
The quiet immortality of amendments,
The rasp of leather, the hiss of glue,
And streets that cradle these long catalogues
Into another day accounted for.
Image Courtesy: Subhro Paul, Pixabay.
Arup K. Chatterjee 