Cold Rice (In Memoriam)

She always had an air of sadness,
a shrug of the shoulders way about her,
that weak smile born of the warmth somewhere inside,
the kindliness able still to rise through the layers
of whatever life throws at you.

She would have been carefree once, that same
smile showing then how she embraced the world
and looked forward to all the encounters that might
come her way. How she caught your eye fleetingly
and in those seconds asked of you:

can you now take me away from this?
The husband of thirty years or so whose daughter
and niece never trusted him enough
to go alone into his room whenever he called.
Whose metier as a mechanic meant 

the whole underneath of the house was
given over to rust: the spare parts,
welding torches, tyres, bonnets, trunk hoods in
an incalculable chaos of production-line detritus.
She would mop the stairwell clean of the oil

his boots left behind whenever he
took a break for lunch. And they would sit
through the dead heat of a breezeless afternoon,
without air-conditioning, eating
with their hands – cold rice, dhal

and curried wild-meat. The sound of their
swatting flies, the slaps on skin
whenever a mosquito landed,
filling the discordant silence.
He would never allow her to switch on the fan.