Bravado

The twilight song is a lantern’s hum
the foxy echoes have just begun
a leopard breathes in fields, unseen
crickets coo in communal whispering.


A mother, a grandmother, and a sister hold
their tongues in their sleep. The nine year old
who watches over them, drifts into a valour
Bollywoodish, in dream-scope colour,


and fights off the leopard with bare hands,
thrashes those foxes like only dhobis can,
but before he kills, the daaku sardar’s men,
the cursed night always ends.


Published first in Reading Hour, 2011.