Every five years the road remembers it is famous.
Men arrive in white cars that are never white by evening,
and the dust stands up to greet them like a schoolboy.
I was eighteen the first time.
My mother ironed my one good kurta
as if I were going to a wedding,
and in a way I was — a marriage
between me and a promise I had never met.
The promise was a bridge.
Then it was a hospital.
Then it was the same bridge, repainted on a banner.
At the booth, a sleepy officer inked my finger
and for one whole day I was important.
I held my hand up in every photograph,
the purple line like a small flag of a small country
called Me, population: one hopeful idiot.
By the next morning the white cars were gone.
The banners stayed until the rains
turned the candidates’ faces into soft blue ghosts
that peeled off the wall and floated down the drain.
I am thirty-four now. The road still has one lane
and seven moods. Our hospital is still a field
where a cow sleeps under a foundation stone.
And still, every five years,
I iron my good shirt myself,
I stand in line behind my old teachers,
and I give my finger to the ink —
not because I believe them,
but because I refuse to let them
be the only ones who show up.
