NOT SO FINE OR FAIR

Everything happens

Without predestination

Pain is a white and grey mushroom

Raising its head

From dead wood.

You can’t have this,

She might have told

You can

And I cannot

Or the other way round

Fairness is color-blind

And the shadow of fineness

Lurks alongside in a bloodied red

Said Peter

Some days before the warden threw him out

And locked my room while I was elsewhere.

When I reached there

I kicked at the locked door in horror

There were not many places I could go

And the tryst between me and money

Had seldom been made

One had to thrive in this fair world

Where every other soul

Was a brigand from hell.

I didn’t pray that time

And knew that the doubt that an African bred

Being in a student’s room

In the citadels of good sense

Was just criminal

And from that moment

The hostel to me reeked of fairness

And I could see a shining boot

Stepping on my friends toe.

Life was tough to live

Even without

That trouble.

Peter telling me about giraffes

And Kenyan parables

Peter who was the hard rock of faith

He had built spaces for me

With a few words

By disclaiming his ever  being fine or fair

Even if it suited somebody else.

I thought of the predicament of fine- art

And of the white cubes

To which I was also somehow tied up

And knew that Peter meant what he said

A black crystalline truth refracting the lightness

Of being.

I call you again, Peter

Man, where have you been?