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B OWL '

(for Manisha Bhattacharya) Sudeep Sen
The cracked bowl that I mean to repair everyday keeps getting neglected by my secret awe for bone china and its story of unbreaking.
There were happier times when it stood perfect in its shape, its porcelain clay-fluted nape elegant as a swan's neck.
I found it in a heap of beautiful pottery, one among many, that its maker carefully crafted in her tropical rooftop studio.
To me it was new even after it accidentally slipped from my hands as I tried to wipe the Delhi dust
that clung to us like camel-brown film, like innocuous powder — transparent and deceptive like make-up.
There are scenes I painted on its milk-white skin, words I wrote, lines etched in, fragments of poems left unfinished, hieroglyphic
encoded secrets
that only I knew and understood, impervious to gossip's glare and jealous chatter.
Today, I shall bring out Super Glue and try to make repairs.
Maybe I will splurge
on a rare metal —
silver or even gold, to seal the cracks and fill them with molten healing.
Anointing it with gold, memory, love and desire, is better than the perfection
of its prior shape. Unbroken, poised as it was, unhurt love is not necessarily purer than love that is flawed.
Kintsukuroi — a gift 1 have been granted.
My bowl deserves the lacquer touch of a silver-wish and the purest of rare gold.
* Kintsukuroi (n.) (v. phr.) “to repair with gold";
the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.