Sambhu Ramachandran

She remembers the night

of stepfather’s drunken romance

when she ran away from home,

and slipped into a run-down cinema hall.

Popcorn cups squeaked under the wet soles

of her espadrilles as she swished through the aisle

in purple kurti and disbelief

at her own courage.

She took a seat in the back

and sweated through the first thirty minutes

of a Bollywood movie with her eyes

peeled to the entrance in the luminous dark.

She fell asleep during a song sequence

and woke only when she felt the warmth

and compactness of an elbow propped up

against hers. From the corner of her eyes,

she vaguely saw her neighbour’s stubbly face

softened by the blind heroine’s travails.

She thought of her elbow

spangled with cigarette burns,

sharing the armrest with the stranger’s

and felt an uncontrollable desire

to be an asexual elbow

in the world’s dark, forbidding theatre.

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