Trisha Bora

Paper Boats

When the monsoons rolled in,
darkening and ripping apart our
skies with flashes of lightning,
deafening us with its growls,
we’d slip out of the house,
unnoticed, with our umbrellas
and newspaper-boats – the
ones that held stories for our
parents (stories that we didn’t
quite understand) about a city
in the throes of civil war, of
temples and mosques being razed
to the ground in the name of god,
and the assassination of a tyrant
prime minister, her once-starched
sari now streaked with red, lying
limp like wet cotton bales that were
left out in the rain for too long.

The rain filled the potholes in the
roads outside into great splashing
pools and turned our drain into
a gushing river, which at times
threw up a small fish, one that
we’d try to catch, even though it
was much too fast for us, and at
other times the silver scaly belly
of a dead one, its listless eye staring
accusingly back at us. We’d lower
our newspaper-boats into the river,
its white sails gathering in the gale,
and it would set sail down the
choppy muddy waters, holding
out as long as it could until its soggy
body would give up with a watery
gasp, taking starboard, mast and
the cries of a burning nation down
to the shallow bottom of the drain.

Author Bio

Trisha Bora is an editor and writer who has been away from her hometown – Assam – for many years now and currently lives in Delhi. She studied English Literature at Delhi University and started a career in publishing immediately after. Her poems have been published at Ultra Violet, nth position, Poetry Super Highway, pyrta journal, with more forthcoming in Asia Writes and Nether Magazine.