Poem
The Driver Remembers Differently
A companion poem to a memoir, told from the back seat of a childhood no one else recalls the same way.
He says the rain that night was lighter than I remember,
that the hospital gate was already open,
that I slept through the part I have told for years
as though I had been awake the whole time.
I have built a childhood out of being told about it.
He built one out of driving through it,
both hands steady on a wheel
nobody in the back seat thought to thank.
Between his memory and mine there is a city
neither of us fully owns.
We drive it anyway, some nights, in words only,
arguing gently about which of us was really there.
Note: A shorter, unpublished cousin to a longer prose project on the same subject.
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- Inventory of a Locked Room — Ila Bhaduri
- Fourth Floor, No Lift — Priyanka Oberoi
- What the Embassy Keeps — Tarun Sen