Poem
Second-City Almanac
A poem drawn from research for an essay collection on India's tier-two literary cities.
In the press that still sets Urdu by hand,
a compositor outlives three editors
and one entire language's official mourning.
In the town with the good bookshop and no bookshop chain,
a shelf marked LOCAL AUTHORS holds four books,
read, reportedly, more than the imported ones.
In the city everyone calls a stopover,
a little magazine has run, quietly, for decades,
stopping for no one, going nowhere, staying exactly put.
I did not come to these cities looking for a centre.
I came to admit there wasn't one,
and to write that down, plainly, before I forgot it again.
Note: Each stanza corresponds to a city visited during the book's research; none is named directly.
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