Monkey City | Indu Parvathi

In the languorous street set ablaze by sun
the afternoon puffs up, smoulders and stings.
Jagged silhouettes creep up through oily heat
to become familiar shapes of people or vehicles.

Numbed by the scorching silence and the wait,
I sit under the burnished canopy of the café,
counting moments, people, glasses, tables
and anything that catches  my eye in the ennui.

 On the wall across the road something changes,
A tail dangles like a straight line, a monkey atop;
Pondering on the afternoon street and its denizens.
Unremarkably, the tail multiplies to ten long lines,

and ten frozen langurs brooding side by side.
Silent visitors from the burning afternoon city.
A simian offers its baby to a male langur, who
hugs it ,draws it closer. No monkey play this.

The monkeys stir, the silence quivers, waits
and  shatters into shards of animated squeals.
 They swing from tree to balcony to tables inside
black langur faces  dispassionate , eyes unseeing.

The afternoon sizzles with violent monkey chatter
the heat and the street awakens from its edgy siesta.
Then the marauding monkeys glide on  swiftly
to another slumbering street and others like me.

Indu Parvathi is a writer from Mumbai.Though writing has been always a passion, she started to make attempts at publishing her creative writing only in the recent past. Her work (stories and poetry) has been published in literary magazines